[indigofan]

I have an Onyx2 I bought form some sort of investment bank in NY.  It came with the original shipping crate, a 24" monitor, and all the cables.  They didn't really know much about it.  I asked why they had it, they said the owners bought it in the late 90s and it sat in the lobby behind glass and ran some graphics demo.  It's job was to basically look cool.  The demo it ran could probably have been handled by a desktop PC.  They said the price was something like $700,000.  Sounded like morons to me but I'm guessing their bank accounts are bigger than mine.

Interesting, back in the day I bought SGI gear for the company that I worked for because (not only the cool factor) but they were much more reliable than PCs, indeed to run full motion, full screen high end videos or graphics, a fully loaded PC would of been about 15K-20K back in the mid-90's. My High Impact Indigo R10K with Power Animator, Photoshop, Illustrator and a few other programs was $135,000 and change. The two 24 Bit R5K Indy's that I used for high end video displays were something like 20K a pop each, with Maintenance contracts. We used one in the lobby of the building running some cool animations that I did. It was super eye-candy for those coming into the office.

[Origin3k]

My 2 Origin 2000 comming from Landrover which was a subdivision from Ford in that time and was used for airbag crash analyses. Software was installed on the system disk which i put in storage.... somewhere in 2004.

The Origin 3000 comes from BMW and IIRC without a boot disk and i bought 146GB FC HDD in 2008?

The countless Indy systems a from my former employer which used for CAD/CAM and the software was named "ICEM DDN" together with the "ICEM Steel" AddOn. We use also Ansys on Indigo2 and entry level Octanes.

Regards,
Joerg

[flexion]

interesting thread SGI machines were involved in many things in our everyday life, which we are not aware of.

one of my Indigo2 was used in the late 90s to design parts of the Audi TT engine/drivetrain (and others). Calculations of airflow, temperature distribution, noise emission etc.

[twix]

The company that I worked for some 15 years ago at some point got rid of all their old Indigo2, Indy's and O2's, so I took a 300Mhz O2 home. These machines were used for car crash simulations, and visualizations of the results. We used almost all SGI machines starting with the 4D up the Fuel.

[DBJ974]

My Onyx were used in Tasmania for heartquake and seaquake simulation (prediction?)
In this page http://www.sgistuff.net/mirrors/sgi/Onyx...0onyx%20IR they are talking about these Onyx

My Orign 3000 was used in Heidelberg University

My Challenge L was used in Oxford University dept. of materials

My first Indy was used in a power plant in Italy

My Onyx2 was used in a factory to design steel components

My Crimson was used for 3D render in a design studio in Milan (Italy)

My last acquired O2 was used for video editing by a funny creative guy

My transparent O2 bought from Hap Plain was one of few prototypes used for studying the heat dissipation before production.

Nice for a piece of "electronics" to have a story to tell ....

[ThePrisoner]

My Indigo2 R10000 Maximum Impact (3 board video card) was used as a DataBase server (Oracle I think) at an accounting firm. I got it for a song.

[CyberMonkey]

This is a very interesting thread.   Our SGIs certainly do have a lot of history and have had significance in many areas of day-to-day life!

I have no idea what my SGIs could have been previously used for as I acquired both of them from private sellers with erased HDDs and no ownership history. 

From those who purchased them second hand directly from the initial owner, did the HDDs come erased or were there any interesting "leftovers" you found?

[arhiman57]

It seems that my 4D/20 was used with a XVR400 spectrometer somewhere in germany during as long as 1999

One of my Indy was used as a web proxy in a french entreprise.

Can't say more about all my other system, maybe I need to check on some older email....