SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 - Silicon Graphics Onyx RealityEngine²
Dodoid1 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2018–2024
tutorial · general · evergreen · 2018–2024 on HN
Dodoid gives an in-depth look at an SGI Onyx RealityEngine2, a $250,000 graphics supercomputer from 1993, covering its history, a physical overview, a teardown and some demos and games.
Shared as a nostalgic tour of SGI hardware for people who remember that era.
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4 comments from Hacker News
Fun vid that might bring back some memories :) ▶ this video "SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 - Silicon Graphics Onyx RealityEngine²"
Back in 1993, I was in college and working for the extended education department running their all their computer infrastructure. One day, someone wheeled this approx. 3x3 foot sized box to my door and asked me if I wanted it. It was a SGI Onyx with a giant monitor sitting on top, with a keyboard and mouse. I plugged it in and it sounded like an airplane taking off. It immediately heated up my entire tiny office. It was the 4th Unix I had ever played with (Ultrix, NeXT and A/UX were previous ones). It had some cool games on it, but beyond that, at the time, I had no use for it because A/UX on my Quadra950, was so much more fun to play with. I don't even think I ever opened it up to look at it. I don't know what I was thinking. lol. After realizing it did not have much going for it, I ended up just turning it on when the office was cold and using it as a foot rest. Oh yea, found a video... ▶ this video
SGI is Silicon Graphics - they were the pioneers in 3D animation especially for the movies, research etc. Jurassic Park was entirely rendered in SGI workstations. These workstations were incredibly powerful and extremely expensive (think > $250,000 for the higher end gear in the 1990s) but pretty amazing. Also, for the time it had very advanced user interfaces. SGI Irix was the name of the OS which ran on these machines. ▶ this video
The VRML demo at 18 minutes in really took me back: ▶ this video 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.