A purple Silicon Graphics workstation cube that's a lot bigger than I thought it would be.
Most of Hollywood's '90s CGI special effects were created on SGI machines like this...
On display at https://acms.org.au/
#SiliconGraphics #SGI #computerhistory #retrocomputing #retrocomputer
Silicon Graphics defined high-performance computing for visual effects and 3D graphics in the 90s. Their workstations powered CGI in Jurassic Park and Terminator 2, and they helped pioneer OpenGL, still a standard in graphics today.
Now barely a memory, only its website survives; 1 in a Trillion on the #WaybackMachine ⤵️
https://web.archive.org/web/19970601000000*/http://www.sgi.com/
#WaybackMachine #SiliconGraphics #CGI #TechHistory #3DGraphics
@PeterLudemann @not2b Excellent work. I applaud efforts to improve OS/370 (though I myself never had to work with it very much relatively, in contrast with OS/360 on the UCLA 360/91 with which I was intimately acquainted). When I was at RAND the 370 was on the main floor and my basement computer room had the PDP-11s and IMPs and TIPs and such that were my domain. Though I did one day impact that 370 in a big way. That was the day smoke filled my computer room from (we learned later) a failing PDP-11 power supply, and (for the one time in my life) I pushed the "Big Red Button That Though Shalt Never Push" under the glass shield just inside the door. There's serious friction in your head (just for a few seconds though) about pushing that button, I'll tell ya'! That killed the power to everything in my computer room -- 11s, all the ARPANET equipment, but ALSO instantly killed all the power to some disk drives for the 370 which were also in the basement in a nearby room. Quite a day. Management was pleased though, it turned out the halon was about to fire and that aborted when I pushed the button, and that saved them a bunch of money on recharging.
I've told the story of when the DEC CE showed up and found the molten power supply, I wanted to get the RAND photographer to get a picture of it but the CE hid it under his jacket and ran out to his car with it.
@lauren @PeterLudemann @not2b I used to joke about how without fail every other generation (Challenge-Origin server and Indigo-O2 desktop era) of Silicon Graphics machines - the power supplies would either just die (no blinking lights) or catch on fire (literal flames shooting out). #sgi #silicongraphics A smart software engineer whose deskside machine caught on fire in his office calmly rolled it outside, removed the disks to save their work, THEN used an extinguisher on it.
I figured it couldn’t hurt to drop in to HARD OFF on my walk back from the mall.
Wandering through the Junk PC aisle, a double-take, what is that teal beauty on the bottom shelf?
A SiliconGraphics O2? In MY rural Japanese city? How did that get here? The tag showed it had been there for over a week. At $60 I had to give it a home!
Lugging it home in the 31+C heat, squeezing in on the tram and dashing through the rain was a slog but it made it home!
A SiliconGraphics O2 in a thin HARD OFF plastic bag stood next to tram tracks with some smattering of rain on it
Shelves of old PCs of dubious value.
In the middle is a SiliconGraphics O2