I had the fun of using this system when I was doing my undergraduate thesis. I had done some protein modelling work and ran straight into the problem that there was no way to get the beautiful models into my thesis - we had no printer.
I came up with what I thought was the genius idea of photographing the monitor, the problem was the CRT screen was so curved my models were all distorted. I ended up wheeling the whole SGI computer out into the hall and setting my camera up with a 500mm lens (borrowed from the graphics unit) at the other end of the hall (maybe 50m away). Worked great.
These early SGI machines did not have good support for printing. Even if you did have a printer, the only way to print was to take a screenshot, which had much lower resolution than laser printers and did not look good.
My first paid job - this was after the 10th grade in high school - was writing a kind of printer driver for one of these machines. One of the researchers at a local university had the same problem you did, and heard about this kid who was supposed to be good with computers :)
The SGI GL manuals (this was before it became OpenGL) included all the mathematical formulas they used to display the graphics - the rotation and perspective matrices to transform the coordinates, the vector cross products to calculate shading, and so on. I took these and implemented a subset of GL which outputted PostScript commands to a text file. This was then sent straight to a laser printer (Apple, I think). I didn't implement everything that SGI did, of course - no smooth shading and I think I could handle only the simplest types of occlusion. But it was good enough to handle the models that the researchers needed to print.
I still remember the SGI manuals in big 3 ring binders. This is what I learned linear algebra from - thanks guys.
I haven't thought about the binders in ages. There was nobody in my department who knew much about the SGI machines and my only tutor was those binders. Looking back I wonder how I accomplished anything at all.
I spent a week at SGI UK in 1994. Everyone had at least an Indy workstation as their machine, even for secretarial purposes. But still there were a couple of 486 PCs acting as print servers.
I worked at a remote office for SGI in 1992. I called my boss at the home office complaining I didn't have a computer to test software with. He apologized for having dropped the ball and immediately ordered a 16 processor system for me.
I don't remember which model that was but I do remember almost falling out of my chair as it was the top of the line system at the time.
The Silicon Graphics crew did like their case mods. Adding to the list: a demo team had a deskside O2K with a top air-intake and side exhaust pipes like a dragster engine.
Let's please stop doing that to interesting vintage computers. Well, at least to working (or fixable) ones.
I cringe every time someone shows off that sort of project.
I used these in the computer lab at RPI back in the 90s to do 3D animation. It’s crazy to think how much smaller and faster today’s tech is compared to these behemoths.
I'm shocked by how crazy the graphics were for back then...I mean seeing the metal logo, I couldn't quite believe that this was possible in 1993. I still have the CGW magazine from this era.
Fun times. Could have been the envy of all your engineer buddies with one of those bad boys all to yourself. What a difference 25 years makes.
Personally I find that learning about these machines is a good way to better understand computer architecture because each one was, during its reign, some really smart bunch of peoples idea of what was state of the art. You can see the evolution of ideas that way.
What I think is quite interesting about these era of machines is where the power goes. First off, there aren't actually many heatsinks in the machine, and those few that are used, are really tiny. This means that the power used must be distributed rather evenly among all components, even on the CPU boards. The CPUs can at most pull 10-15 W with those heatsinks, meanwhile the big ASICs spread around everywhere can probably sink perhaps 3-5 W with no extra heatsink. Compare this to modern systems, where the (single chip) chipset has a TDP of ~5 W, while the CPU(s) run anywhere from 50 to 100+ W.
So the gap between high-power and low-power components was way, way smaller back then, and I'd wager that a huge chunk of power in these SGI machines went into their high-speed bus systems.
Another big difference is how the power system was laid out. Here are the specs of a SGI Onyx 2 PSU [1]:
1750 W @ 230 V
3.45 V, 375 A
5 V, 85 A
12 V, 22 A
5 V, 1 A (probably standby power?)
In that day and age, most of everything in there would've run off 3.3 V. So the PSU directly, centrally provides that voltage and due to the large currents droop and such will have to be considered carefully in the entire system design (and it almost certainly uses remote sensing at the backplane, perhaps even sampling various points in the system). This makes sense, because there are many components and the difference in power between them is kinda small.
Nowadays, a computer PSU provides essentially two voltages: 12 V and 5 V standby. It still provides "legacy" power, like 5 V and 3.3 V rails, but these are derived with simple buck-converters from the 12 V rail(s) in modern designs. Because a modern computer has few components requiring a lot of power, each of them has their own local converter sourced by 12 V to reduce losses.
When Intel released the Pentium with mandatory active heatsinks that was called a big scandal by the industry magazines. Now of course we have smaller CPUs drawing 150W or more.
I had the pleasure to work with various SGI machines back then (video and animation). Being around Onyx was always a special feeling, even though I prefered thw look of older Crimson chassis. SGI made a poster calendar even, which was set like 40 odd years into the future or something, taking advanfage of periodicity of calendar years. Nice gimmick, nice poster which I lost, sadly.
I am Dodoid, the creator of this video. Created an account here to ask you this. Where did I make that mistake? I'm fully aware that there was a world-wide-web in 1993, and if I made the mistake of saying that there was not, I have a post-release correction system and can add a correction to the video.
When I was younger I was really into CGI, I remember thinking man, If I ever get to work on one of those to do some 3d rendering, that will be something.
Always loved the IRIX Motif and 4dwm aesthetics, and was lucky to have had access to some Indigo machine in school.
Was really impressed by how responsive the file manager was wrt. the immediate appearance of icons for files created from terminal. It also kept track of which folders were open in other windows, giving them different appearance - felt like one was interacting with actual objects.
Tried numerous times to get the same feel on Linux; there used to be a project called 5dwm to recreate the Indigo Magic Desktop experience, I should check if it is still around for additional kick of nostalgia...
At one point our lab bought an O2 and an Indigo. Mostly these were fashion statements as we didn't do much graphics work. I can't remember them being remarkable performance wise for normal workloads compared to the Sun machines that where our staple.
The machines most certainly stood out in a time where the only options you got for an exterior finish were beige and beige.
I was very fortunate. This is the machine on which I originally learned OpenGL. It was an undergrad lab job where I was paid $5/hour to eventually write http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/marchingsource.cpp But, in order to do that I had to learn how to 3D at all.
The most fun I had with the machine was playing GlQuake 1 at 1280x1024 on a T1 line and bragging about it on the chat where everyone thought I was lying. Of course, a year later the 3DFX Voodoo 1 would come out and deliver approximately 1/4 the fill rate for 1/1000 the price.
Besides that, it was a fine machine. Lots of cores that I didn’t know how to utilize. Occasional bugs in the OpenGL implementation that might have been me accidentally triggering edge cases. Command line compiles, gdb, lots of core dumps.
SGI really lost it’s way after this. Years later they would be showing at SIGGRAPH with multi-wall-sized displays, but without the programmable shading that would be all the rage not just right then, but for the next two decades... They went so far as to publish papers showing that with hundreds of passes and temporary buffers using fixed-function shading, you could eventually get mostly the same results as the new-fangled programmable BS...
The brilliant engineers of SGI soon moved on to become founding members of Nvidia, ATI, Imagination and other graphics tech companies.
We had one of these in Bryan Jones' laboratory in the Chemistry Department at the University of Toronto. We also had the 3D polarized shutter-based glasses as well - it was cool to see small molecules docking into active sites of enzymes right in front of your face. Of course, none of that stuff amounted to anything, and in hindsight it was a gigantic waste of money.
In my lab, we only had one of the SGI Indy machines - it was fun surfing the web on the original NCSA Mosaic browser on that pizza box machine.
I remember how convinced some people were that VRML was going to be the future of the Web. 3D graphics in your browser, all coded with a simple markup language! How could it fail?
Ultimately it was just too complicated for the average web surfer to navigate, especially in the '90s. For a while, though, it really looked like the visions of virtual worlds that cyberpunk fiction loved might show up in your Netscape browser.
I also have fond memories of marveling at VRML scenes on TV when my computer and dialup internet connection weren't really ready to experience it.
Thanks for the link to A-Frame though! This looks great - I am loving the declarative nature of it, and the scene-inspector seems like a really useful tool.
Virtual Reality is so weird. It's a future that never really got here. Even now that the tech has caught up, it still just doesn't get a lot of enthusiasm from the market.
Well, if you look at any form of interactive 3D multiplayer game, it really is here, it's just that there's so much to pull apart, in terms of the nuance of online interaction with humans, that we're reluctant to move beyond the cartoonish worlds of video gaming.
We have tons of really popular game titles, and millions of people playing or watching or chatting, as tournaments unfold. We fill convention centers with people playing games, and stream a webcam feed of people at conventions playing the games. But it's all still games, world of warcraft, fortnite, minecraft, eve online.
So, what if it wasn't a game? What if it was more than video conferencing? What if there was more going on, and an immersive system of interaction closer to first person gaming engine was as relevant, in social terms as facebook, twitter, bitcoin, uber, amazon, google, github, along with email, chat, and file sharing, all as a single service?
What if all your home automation and mobile devices were integrated? What if it gave your GPS location to the world, and authenticated you selectively as context sensitive pseudonyms, or conversely your authentic legal identity, securely and as preferred?
How much of that is possible? And how much of it do we actually want? But most of all, if corporations collaborating with governments, or an open community of enthusiasts, put this in your hands, would you trust it? Would you put all your eggs in one basket like that?
How many IP addresses would a system like this require, to keep each context secure from another, to preserve pseudonyms, and not leak GPS location information? What about background audio, and geolocation by timing attacks? Plus the basics of platform security, knowing what we see every day in terms of zero days getting dropped, and leaving people out in the open?
It's cool to think about, but our technology as it exists, is a drafty outhouse, compared to the brick shithouse we really need.
Part of it is that interfaces that require "walking" through a space or looking around for things in a 3D space are terrible if there's no inherent justification for the movement (as there is in a game of exploration).
I don't want to have to navigate a space in order to find something. Navigating space is a limitation of physical objects; replicating it in an online environment is an error. It's like if automobiles were designed so that steering and speed were controlled with reins.
>it really looked like the visions of virtual worlds that cyberpunk fiction loved might show up in your Netscape browser.
It was exactly that.
I participated on one SGI demo around 1995. It included tehnology demo and the grand vision from some guy I don't remember.
They had few the these bad boys (bigger refrigerator sized models) and very fast internet running Netscape browser. They wanted us to start to develope for this to this new thing called Java that would allow code run everywhere.
They demoed what they thought internet would look like after 3-5 years:
* 3d browsers with VRML. HTML is replaced with 3d virtual rooms with 3d surround audio.
* you can attach pieces of Java code to the VRML and freely interact with objects
* people would buy stuff in the internet using micropayments possibly using new fancy new digital currencies like DigiCash (this was still hand waving). There was also this thing called E-gold few years later.
* the demo included virtual kitchen design app, virtual rooms with water fountains and java controlled robots, and fish that responded to their environment.
It was all mindblowing technologically, but none of the ideas were new to me because I had been reading Snow Crash (1992) and others. Jaron Lanier and VPL Research were also known to work with these things.
In fact, it looks like we are repeatedly trying to bring the same vision alive. Every wave of attempts is getting us little bit closer but always falling short little bit.
In the current wave Nvidia has replaced Silicon Graphics and there are new technologies doing the same things in VR and AR. Now we have cryptocurrencies, javascript, Wasm, WebGL, mobile GPU's, 5G. Most of the current bleeding edge will crash when the next recession hits around 2020 or so and some of it will survive. I'm looking forward to the next generation of technology emerging around 2025 ...
VRML! I wrote a modest amount of VRML by hand in the early '00s. One project was a 3D model of a castle, which i worked on in large part because it was something i could do together with my then-girlfriend - she would describe how the castle should look, and i would code it up. I learned a lot about how to use parametric prototypes, so i had a kit of parts i could rapidly use, to speed up the feedback loop.
I wrote a code called genvrml which converted molecular models from any format (using Babel at the time for conversion) to VRML for display. I converted a bunch of my models for this. I still have them here. And if I dig around, I might even have genvrml as well.
I did believe that this was fairly game changing tech. I showed my 3D models sticking 2m out from a rear projected Reality Wall powered by an IR engine in the Detroit office.
But SGI was beset with inane leadership, and we began our terminal decline mere weeks after I was hired ABD from grad school. I finished up my thesis and developed an autoinstaller code for Irix at the same time. Writing the manuals in LaTeX.
When I was much younger my dad (who has a print business) was tasked with printing panels for F16 jet fighter pilot cockpit to be used in a simulator of the aircraft. The simulator was developed by a private company. One Saturday he took me to their office. They had one of these and gave me a demo of it. Until then all I knew was of standard consumer computers (commodore, pc, macs etc) . In another pretty big room they had a lot of amiga computers used to make the 3d models.
I then had a go at the simulator. 180 degree screen, a real cockpit, and pretty amazing 3d graphics.for the time. Flew my jet through a mountain tunnel.
I think the only thing that impressed me as much as the simulator itself was the sgi. I've never experienced that kind of futuristic computing power.
I was the systems engineer for SGI mainly to McDonnell-Douglas in St. Louis in 1992 for their flight simulators. If you think what you saw was something ...
I'm sure my early teen eyes saw only a glimpse. The one I was shown was designed for the Israeli air force. This was the closest I got to sit in an F-16 cockpit, and the closest I got to super computing power even films couldn't show me at the time. I do however remember them totting the 250K price tag.
I remember seeing Boeing's simulator at their factory in the early 2000's that was powered by a room filled with SGI machines running the graphics, controlling the hydraulics, and lying to the avionics. It totally blew me away.
Also around 1993, Onyx with RE II was used by Nameco and a company called Magic Edge to build actuated flight sim pods [1]. Coincidentally also in 1993, NASA published a guide [2] to their Vertical Motion Simulator [3]. At the time, the VMS used several SGI IRIS machines as auxiliary display processors, but custom machines for primary.
One day, the din of the machinery paled and withered under a thunderous earth-shaking draconian roar - whiplashing my head out of the rack toward the windows - an F/A-18 tilted sideways at the edge of ground effect ripping a minimum radius turn back to from whence it came ... without ever leaving the airfield. Sigh. There is no simulator for That.
Not one for nostalgia but I have found myself cooing over old computers the way most react to babies. A BBC B can bring a tear to the eye. If you are in the UK then http://www.tnmoc.org/ is well worth a visit. Its like a themepark for nerds.
Working at one of those noisy brutes must have been harsh. It brings back flashbacks of years spent in server rooms. Kids with their cloud computing don't know what they missed!
I remember seeing Quake ported to the CAVE environment and demonstrated on an Onyx (well actually an Origin with reality engines) with a 3-wall and floor projection room...
Near Y2K, as development slowed, several of the hands-on QA teams were found to be astonishingly good at Quake. Later, as labs high and low were decommissioned, a couple of sysadmins consolidated equipment and absolutely dominated the SETI at Home rankings for many months, and likely the PG&E [1] rankings as well.
[1] Pacific Gas and Electric, a California utility company
Years ago, Weird Stuff Warehouse (R.I.P.) had a shell of the larger closet-sized Onyx system sitting in the back, and I always thought it would be fun to do something with it, but couldn't think of anything. With a shell of a Cray, you could at least make a couch out of it...
Oh, who could forget the "not PS/2 connectors". I also vividly remember the sysadmin telling me to never ever disconnect they keyboard while the machine is running, or something inside might blow. Not sure if he was just paranoid, but I also never tried... I also remember one German shop buying a slightly used Onyx for half a million Deutsche Mark, and realizing they did not have the key for turning it on, so they had to short the thing. And it was so loud you had to wear earplugs...
Early Macs didn't have hot-pluggable keyboards and mice either. It was one of those things where it would usually work, until one time some fluctuation would just brick the controller chip.
Man, this brings back memories. I still have an O2 and an Octane system in storage. Been meaning to take them out and set them up again at some point.
My father was generous enough to give me an O2 in the late 90s so I could learn 3D graphics, since I was interested in making special effects for movies. We didn’t have any software then but found this thing called Blender which was available for free and worked on IRIX. Still have a bunch of blender books and manuals from back then. Good times!
145 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadI came up with what I thought was the genius idea of photographing the monitor, the problem was the CRT screen was so curved my models were all distorted. I ended up wheeling the whole SGI computer out into the hall and setting my camera up with a 500mm lens (borrowed from the graphics unit) at the other end of the hall (maybe 50m away). Worked great.
My first paid job - this was after the 10th grade in high school - was writing a kind of printer driver for one of these machines. One of the researchers at a local university had the same problem you did, and heard about this kid who was supposed to be good with computers :)
The SGI GL manuals (this was before it became OpenGL) included all the mathematical formulas they used to display the graphics - the rotation and perspective matrices to transform the coordinates, the vector cross products to calculate shading, and so on. I took these and implemented a subset of GL which outputted PostScript commands to a text file. This was then sent straight to a laser printer (Apple, I think). I didn't implement everything that SGI did, of course - no smooth shading and I think I could handle only the simplest types of occlusion. But it was good enough to handle the models that the researchers needed to print.
I still remember the SGI manuals in big 3 ring binders. This is what I learned linear algebra from - thanks guys.
I don't remember which model that was but I do remember almost falling out of my chair as it was the top of the line system at the time.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMDEX
Personally I find that learning about these machines is a good way to better understand computer architecture because each one was, during its reign, some really smart bunch of peoples idea of what was state of the art. You can see the evolution of ideas that way.
So the gap between high-power and low-power components was way, way smaller back then, and I'd wager that a huge chunk of power in these SGI machines went into their high-speed bus systems.
Another big difference is how the power system was laid out. Here are the specs of a SGI Onyx 2 PSU [1]:
In that day and age, most of everything in there would've run off 3.3 V. So the PSU directly, centrally provides that voltage and due to the large currents droop and such will have to be considered carefully in the entire system design (and it almost certainly uses remote sensing at the backplane, perhaps even sampling various points in the system). This makes sense, because there are many components and the difference in power between them is kinda small.Nowadays, a computer PSU provides essentially two voltages: 12 V and 5 V standby. It still provides "legacy" power, like 5 V and 3.3 V rails, but these are derived with simple buck-converters from the 12 V rail(s) in modern designs. Because a modern computer has few components requiring a lot of power, each of them has their own local converter sourced by 12 V to reduce losses.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170314114558/http://sgistuff.n... https://web.archive.org/web/20170314160011/http://sgistuff.n...
I am Dodoid, the creator of this video. Created an account here to ask you this. Where did I make that mistake? I'm fully aware that there was a world-wide-web in 1993, and if I made the mistake of saying that there was not, I have a post-release correction system and can add a correction to the video.
Anyway, I hope things have improved.
Thanks for the interest, -Dodoid
What a tremendous waste of money.
Was really impressed by how responsive the file manager was wrt. the immediate appearance of icons for files created from terminal. It also kept track of which folders were open in other windows, giving them different appearance - felt like one was interacting with actual objects.
Tried numerous times to get the same feel on Linux; there used to be a project called 5dwm to recreate the Indigo Magic Desktop experience, I should check if it is still around for additional kick of nostalgia...
[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/
The machines most certainly stood out in a time where the only options you got for an exterior finish were beige and beige.
The most fun I had with the machine was playing GlQuake 1 at 1280x1024 on a T1 line and bragging about it on the chat where everyone thought I was lying. Of course, a year later the 3DFX Voodoo 1 would come out and deliver approximately 1/4 the fill rate for 1/1000 the price.
Besides that, it was a fine machine. Lots of cores that I didn’t know how to utilize. Occasional bugs in the OpenGL implementation that might have been me accidentally triggering edge cases. Command line compiles, gdb, lots of core dumps.
SGI really lost it’s way after this. Years later they would be showing at SIGGRAPH with multi-wall-sized displays, but without the programmable shading that would be all the rage not just right then, but for the next two decades... They went so far as to publish papers showing that with hundreds of passes and temporary buffers using fixed-function shading, you could eventually get mostly the same results as the new-fangled programmable BS...
The brilliant engineers of SGI soon moved on to become founding members of Nvidia, ATI, Imagination and other graphics tech companies.
It’s called “the University of Silicon Graphics.”
You are probably misremembering things. GLQuake came out in 1997, after 3DFX Voodoo in 1996, not the other way around.
In my lab, we only had one of the SGI Indy machines - it was fun surfing the web on the original NCSA Mosaic browser on that pizza box machine.
I remember how convinced some people were that VRML was going to be the future of the Web. 3D graphics in your browser, all coded with a simple markup language! How could it fail?
Ultimately it was just too complicated for the average web surfer to navigate, especially in the '90s. For a while, though, it really looked like the visions of virtual worlds that cyberpunk fiction loved might show up in your Netscape browser.
There's some modern VRML-esque things now, A-Frame and ReactVR come to mind.
Thanks for the link to A-Frame though! This looks great - I am loving the declarative nature of it, and the scene-inspector seems like a really useful tool.
We have tons of really popular game titles, and millions of people playing or watching or chatting, as tournaments unfold. We fill convention centers with people playing games, and stream a webcam feed of people at conventions playing the games. But it's all still games, world of warcraft, fortnite, minecraft, eve online.
So, what if it wasn't a game? What if it was more than video conferencing? What if there was more going on, and an immersive system of interaction closer to first person gaming engine was as relevant, in social terms as facebook, twitter, bitcoin, uber, amazon, google, github, along with email, chat, and file sharing, all as a single service?
What if all your home automation and mobile devices were integrated? What if it gave your GPS location to the world, and authenticated you selectively as context sensitive pseudonyms, or conversely your authentic legal identity, securely and as preferred?
How much of that is possible? And how much of it do we actually want? But most of all, if corporations collaborating with governments, or an open community of enthusiasts, put this in your hands, would you trust it? Would you put all your eggs in one basket like that?
How many IP addresses would a system like this require, to keep each context secure from another, to preserve pseudonyms, and not leak GPS location information? What about background audio, and geolocation by timing attacks? Plus the basics of platform security, knowing what we see every day in terms of zero days getting dropped, and leaving people out in the open?
It's cool to think about, but our technology as it exists, is a drafty outhouse, compared to the brick shithouse we really need.
I don't want to have to navigate a space in order to find something. Navigating space is a limitation of physical objects; replicating it in an online environment is an error. It's like if automobiles were designed so that steering and speed were controlled with reins.
It was exactly that.
I participated on one SGI demo around 1995. It included tehnology demo and the grand vision from some guy I don't remember.
They had few the these bad boys (bigger refrigerator sized models) and very fast internet running Netscape browser. They wanted us to start to develope for this to this new thing called Java that would allow code run everywhere.
They demoed what they thought internet would look like after 3-5 years:
* 3d browsers with VRML. HTML is replaced with 3d virtual rooms with 3d surround audio.
* you can attach pieces of Java code to the VRML and freely interact with objects
* people would buy stuff in the internet using micropayments possibly using new fancy new digital currencies like DigiCash (this was still hand waving). There was also this thing called E-gold few years later.
* the demo included virtual kitchen design app, virtual rooms with water fountains and java controlled robots, and fish that responded to their environment.
It was all mindblowing technologically, but none of the ideas were new to me because I had been reading Snow Crash (1992) and others. Jaron Lanier and VPL Research were also known to work with these things.
In fact, it looks like we are repeatedly trying to bring the same vision alive. Every wave of attempts is getting us little bit closer but always falling short little bit.
In the current wave Nvidia has replaced Silicon Graphics and there are new technologies doing the same things in VR and AR. Now we have cryptocurrencies, javascript, Wasm, WebGL, mobile GPU's, 5G. Most of the current bleeding edge will crash when the next recession hits around 2020 or so and some of it will survive. I'm looking forward to the next generation of technology emerging around 2025 ...
I did believe that this was fairly game changing tech. I showed my 3D models sticking 2m out from a rear projected Reality Wall powered by an IR engine in the Detroit office.
But SGI was beset with inane leadership, and we began our terminal decline mere weeks after I was hired ABD from grad school. I finished up my thesis and developed an autoinstaller code for Irix at the same time. Writing the manuals in LaTeX.
When I was much younger my dad (who has a print business) was tasked with printing panels for F16 jet fighter pilot cockpit to be used in a simulator of the aircraft. The simulator was developed by a private company. One Saturday he took me to their office. They had one of these and gave me a demo of it. Until then all I knew was of standard consumer computers (commodore, pc, macs etc) . In another pretty big room they had a lot of amiga computers used to make the 3d models. I then had a go at the simulator. 180 degree screen, a real cockpit, and pretty amazing 3d graphics.for the time. Flew my jet through a mountain tunnel. I think the only thing that impressed me as much as the simulator itself was the sgi. I've never experienced that kind of futuristic computing power.
Flashback scene ends...
[1] http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=832 - Nameco Magic Edge Simulator Ha rdware at System-16, The Arcade Museum
[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/199400... - Vert ical Motion Simulator Familiarization Guide (pdf) (1993)
[3] https://www.aviationsystemsdivision.arc.nasa.gov/facilities/... - NASA Vertical Motion Simulator
One day, the din of the machinery paled and withered under a thunderous earth-shaking draconian roar - whiplashing my head out of the rack toward the windows - an F/A-18 tilted sideways at the edge of ground effect ripping a minimum radius turn back to from whence it came ... without ever leaving the airfield. Sigh. There is no simulator for That.
Not one for nostalgia but I have found myself cooing over old computers the way most react to babies. A BBC B can bring a tear to the eye. If you are in the UK then http://www.tnmoc.org/ is well worth a visit. Its like a themepark for nerds.
Working at one of those noisy brutes must have been harsh. It brings back flashbacks of years spent in server rooms. Kids with their cloud computing don't know what they missed!
I remember using an Archimedes after years of fighting to get my games to run well on a BBC Micro. Wow - it felt like cheating!
[1] Pacific Gas and Electric, a California utility company
I used the machine as an undergrad, doing some coding as part of the university's driving simulator project.
Is it an SGI thing or was it just sitting in a box as a spare all this time?
My father was generous enough to give me an O2 in the late 90s so I could learn 3D graphics, since I was interested in making special effects for movies. We didn’t have any software then but found this thing called Blender which was available for free and worked on IRIX. Still have a bunch of blender books and manuals from back then. Good times!