[ad_1]
My Silicon Graphics Indigo2 workstation running sgiDOOM
[ad_2]
View Reddit by wowbobwow – View Source
[ad_1]
My Silicon Graphics Indigo2 workstation running sgiDOOM
[ad_2]
View Reddit by wowbobwow – View Source
My SGI Indigo2 system has an interesting history. It was originally purchased around 1995 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who used it to administer their campus network. It was then sold to the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, where it was used in nuclear research, before I bought it at a surplus sale when I was living in Albuquerque back in 2006.
My Indigo2 is a cutting-edge desktop machine for its time. It has a MIPS R10000 CPU running at 195MHz, 256MB of high-speed RAM, and a 2GB SCSI hard drive. Furthermore, my machine has a “High IMPACT” graphics array capable of doing realtime rendering of high-polygon-count 3D models with texture-mapped surfaces – an *extremely* powerful system in the mid-1990’s. Of course, powerful hardware is nothing without powerful software, and so SGI equipped these machines with their Unix-based “IRIX” operating system. I’m no Unix guru, but I know what I like, and I *love* IRIX – it’s beautiful, intuitive, extremely stable, and it still feels really pleasant to use all these decades later.
I don’t have precise documentation to verify this detail, but the researcher who used this machine at Los Alamos Labs later told me that he believed that this machine was purchased by MIT for around $80,000 – a then-reasonable price for such incredible performance in a small desktop workstation. I think I paid about $100 for it, or roughly 1/800th of its original sale price!
SGI also had a special relationship with Nintendo in the 1990’s, with the two companies joining forces to develop the hardware and software which eventually became the Nintendo 64 console. In fact, my Indigo2 has several graphics demos on its hard drive (“ButtonFly,” “Ripple,” “Stretch,” etc.) which were later incorporated into Nintendo games like Super Mario 64 – it feels almost eerie to play with them, almost like seeing a pre-alpha version of the Mario 64 interface!
As you can see in my pic, my Indigo2 is running SGI’s IRIX Unix-based OS, onto which was able to install sgiDOOM. I’m a total novice with Unix and IRIX, so this was quite a challenge for me – I’m glad I got it working! Now I just have to figure out how to apply the “-2” flag that should make the Doom window run twice as large…
Have you played the remastered version?
Seeing this made me feel at home.
Damn I want to dig my o2 out now
Want to upvote this but I can’t because 64 upvotes and that seems too perfect to change 🫡
I was building models for commercial flight simulators on these in the 90’s. We had Indigo’s and Onyx’s at our place. The size of the graphics pipeline was huge in terms of data throughput. Fully custom hardware. Fantastic machines back in the day.
Is this the same machine used for Jurassic Park and Toy Story?
I thought these were only used for SFX making shows like Reboot and stuff i had no idea they were bought for other reasons.
Back in the 90’s these were mythical computers, amazing!
I worked for a computer company in Boulder Colorado and I accidentally killed the motherboard in a SGI computer. Was $20,000 to fix.