My Ex-wife worked for the SGI Engineering Department as an Analyst. They worked on this and the Windows NT machine that almost bankrupted the company. I knew several of the SGI Engineers and they had all kinds of issues developing cooling systems. It was kinda funny, but they were trying to give all of the logistics team SGI computers to do office work but kept griping about the cost the office workers griped that they had to run all of their office software from DOS making it difficult for them to jump between their UNIX and DOS environments. Eventually they decided to just go out and buy office computers for everyone.
I could see why that lost. I googled this and in 2002 I already had a 1.8 ghz AthlonXP with 1 gig of ram and a 20 gb had for 1/20th the price! Shoot, if I was not a poor young college student I could have gotten for 1/8th the price at $4000 an AthlonMP dual core 2.4 GHz and 4 gb of ram and a Nvidia Quadra graphics with a scsi adepetic card which would be many many times after running Windows 2000 pro or Linux. Even my poor student build could outdo this with a pathetic 600 MHz chip and 18gb drive. 2 gbs of ram and graphics were nice in 2002 but not for 30k dollars as a cheap build with 2 gb was 1/15th the price.
@@notanetcher windows is good only for c# development, other languages and toolchains require too much effort just to set up and run hello world compared to *nix environment where you just write g++ helloworld.cpp
@@Synthematix Nvidia was born out of SGI when Jensen Haung had a disagreement of moving their patented GPUs to consumer pcs. So that part lives. The fact is Athlons and the Pentium IV smoked the mips chips. There was nothing special about them anymore after Intel copy catted risc designed with the Pentium Pro and forward
It’s really incredible the things we were willing to put up with in regards to sound. The loud hard disk, the fans. Steve Jobs famously hated it, and in a way, he was right. We would never put up with something like this today. Granted, this is a professional product, but a consumer desktop from the time was not much quieter. Just incredible how powerful machines today really are.
Fuel and Tezro came too late, were too expensive, performance wasn't ahead of the game anymore and the graphics workstation market had already switched to NT and Linux. Sad. Octane2 with v12 was my last SGI.
"The system is coming up." Strong Bad: (major key hooDOOdooDOOdoodles) Why does this machine feel so much cooler than even my many-times-more-powerful Ryzen box?
Unfortunately because the Fuel doesn’t have built in sound you have to use a USB dongle or a plug in sound card. That always seem like and odd design flaw since every other desk top system they made before had sound.
A (pointless) cost cutting measure; most of SGI's target market for Fuel didn't need audio. The Revolution 7.1 is cheap and works well, but yes it really made no sense to exclude audio given the overall cost of the system. Ditto GigE, something Tezro had by default.
Nostalgic Unix Workstation with very capable Graphics and CPU Power for 2002. Running Maple or Mathematica to visualize animated numeric solutions of Partial Differential Equations in 2D/3D with a higher plot point count might have been thinkable. Cool stuff.
Strange machine, and I still wonder what SGI were thinking. Looks cool, but the 4GB RAM limitation and the fact that it's uniprocessor only made it seem more like a successor to the O2 than anything else, but it wasn't priced like that.
There was nothing they could do. I could see why they went with Windows NT. The fact is mips, digital, and Sun's Sparc didn't have the fabs to make as good as chips anymore like Intel. Worse, the patents on their risc designs and methods like pipelines and l2 cache expired and Intel put them in making their systems far far faster and much much cheaper. Windows 98 and DOS were dead with XP and Windows 2000 out so it was good enough to beat Unix. If you really hated win32 you could get linux too now on the intel chips. SGI was toast as no economies of scale were there.
oh gosh, only if the internals are missing entirely- it'd be such a sin to gut it that way If there's even a remote chance it can be restored 😅 People have gotten to be absolute wizards at repairing trashed motherboards
FVWM with aliased italic helvetica in 2002 was already some kind of retro super computing. You had to be really attached to some version of Maya or some big custom IRIX software to spend that money.
SGI was doing good business while their products were near cutting edge with professional graphics technology that ran 3D software. But as soon as the common WinTel PC could do the same it was lights out for the company.
Is that the Dell Ultrasharp U2412M? because I have that exact monitor as a secondary monitor alongside my main monitor which is the Dell G2722HS... Dell makss really nice monitors!
Looks like it. I used to have a 5x1P eyefinity setup with those as the central 3. Still got one running as a wing to put IRC on, been chugging along fine for about 12-13 years 24/7
600 mhz and a small 18 gb hard drive was bad in 2002 when this was new and laughable by 2006 when it was discontinued. I can sadly see why Sun and SGI lost to Wintel. The upcoming Linux distros killed the rest. A simple Pentium IV could at 2 ghz could smoke this. WindowsXP had a VMS kernel and delgations of ACLs in it and real reliability like Unix as well as Server 2000. Sure it ain't enterprise yada yada or a real unix, but good enough for 1/20th of the price. I envied these in the early 1990s as a kid! But in 2002 for the same $$ I would build a super gaming system with a Xeon or Athlon MP with an Nvidia Quadro and run Linux instead and dual boot XP instead.
The entire graphics/multimedia/animation industry ran on SGI hardware in the 90's and early 2000's. So I'd definitely say yes, lots of useful abilities.
Useful abilities? What would that be in a time where my phone has more FLOPS, more texture and graphics memory, more MIPS (😂), a higher fillrate and even has a higher native resolution than any SGI ever had? Now even if you want to develop software for IRIX you might still be better off nowadays using a recent computer running a recent OS and a modern IDE and then just cross-compile for MIPS/IRIX.
@@Thiesi I think it was quite a thick layer of special purpose software developed and optimized for the SGI platform. So with less abilities in late SGI workstations - there was still good optimized software+workflow since mid 90s.
@@Thiesican your phone run a professional CAD package and can you use your phone to do actual engineering or product design? And I don’t mean some toy program like ShapR or SketchUp. No one does serious engineering on a fucking phone 😂. Your phone is for consuming, not creating. And like many consumers when you look at serious creative tools like an old workstation you’re just confused and slip into bragging about your phone or Xbox 😂
Oh crap! ! It was amazing and... damn weak at the same time. (oh, I am off to wiki to check when it was released) Ohhh crap(II) - 2002-2006. So mostly, wiki says that 700MHz R16000=PIV-3GHz.. But there are dualcore 64bit Athlons coming soon with DDR memory and finally 2006 DDR2/socketAM2 kill everything on the desktop side. Ohh crap(III) only 4gigs of RAM. Seems like it was hanging on strings of fast UltraSCSI 10-15K dries and 64bit PCI bus slots. And Vpro graphics for video processing.
And I doubt a 700MHz R16K would match a 3 GHz Pentium IV. In 1999 SGI was struggling with keeping the R12K/R14Ks to match competition (even non-RISC such as the Pentium-III architecture). Ref: websrv.cecs.uci.edu/~papers/mpr/MPR/19991227/131701.pdf
My Ex-wife worked for the SGI Engineering Department as an Analyst. They worked on this and the Windows NT machine that almost bankrupted the company. I knew several of the SGI Engineers and they had all kinds of issues developing cooling systems. It was kinda funny, but they were trying to give all of the logistics team SGI computers to do office work but kept griping about the cost the office workers griped that they had to run all of their office software from DOS making it difficult for them to jump between their UNIX and DOS environments. Eventually they decided to just go out and buy office computers for everyone.
I wish DOS never existed. It's BAD, and we still suffer from Windows vs Linux/macOS compatibility when coding on C++
May I ask why you got divorced?
I could see why that lost. I googled this and in 2002 I already had a 1.8 ghz AthlonXP with 1 gig of ram and a 20 gb had for 1/20th the price! Shoot, if I was not a poor young college student I could have gotten for 1/8th the price at $4000 an AthlonMP dual core 2.4 GHz and 4 gb of ram and a Nvidia Quadra graphics with a scsi adepetic card which would be many many times after running Windows 2000 pro or Linux.
Even my poor student build could outdo this with a pathetic 600 MHz chip and 18gb drive. 2 gbs of ram and graphics were nice in 2002 but not for 30k dollars as a cheap build with 2 gb was 1/15th the price.
@@Gameplayer55055Linux sucks
@@notanetcher windows is good only for c# development, other languages and toolchains require too much effort just to set up and run hello world compared to *nix environment where you just write g++ helloworld.cpp
I sometimes like to dream about that SGI could have done with modern hardware had they persisted.
same
Unfortunately they all went Mac now.
Nothing, the company destroyed itself because of greed.
@@Synthematix Nvidia was born out of SGI when Jensen Haung had a disagreement of moving their patented GPUs to consumer pcs. So that part lives. The fact is Athlons and the Pentium IV smoked the mips chips. There was nothing special about them anymore after Intel copy catted risc designed with the Pentium Pro and forward
Cool but, I wish people who had these machines had the software that made them so powerful like the 3D and hollywood stuff.
We do.
@@lookoutforchris video plz
You mean like 3d studio max or Maya? Or the OS?
It’s really incredible the things we were willing to put up with in regards to sound. The loud hard disk, the fans. Steve Jobs famously hated it, and in a way, he was right. We would never put up with something like this today.
Granted, this is a professional product, but a consumer desktop from the time was not much quieter. Just incredible how powerful machines today really are.
What a gorgeous case. I would pay good money for a modern atx version just like it.
too bad, you get nondescript black and white boxes and water tanks instead
Fuel and Tezro came too late, were too expensive, performance wasn't ahead of the game anymore and the graphics workstation market had already switched to NT and Linux. Sad. Octane2 with v12 was my last SGI.
So cool, I miss the 'glory' days of 90's computing.
"The system is coming up."
Strong Bad: (major key hooDOOdooDOOdoodles)
Why does this machine feel so much cooler than even my many-times-more-powerful Ryzen box?
Unfortunately because the Fuel doesn’t have built in sound you have to use a USB dongle or a plug in sound card. That always seem like and odd design flaw since every other desk top system they made before had sound.
A (pointless) cost cutting measure; most of SGI's target market for Fuel didn't need audio. The Revolution 7.1 is cheap and works well, but yes it really made no sense to exclude audio given the overall cost of the system. Ditto GigE, something Tezro had by default.
Nostalgic Unix Workstation with very capable Graphics and CPU Power for 2002. Running Maple or Mathematica to visualize animated numeric solutions of Partial Differential Equations in 2D/3D with a higher plot point count might have been thinkable. Cool stuff.
Ahhh yes, 93, when all that mattered was how cool your screensaver was, simpler times
Strange machine, and I still wonder what SGI were thinking. Looks cool, but the 4GB RAM limitation and the fact that it's uniprocessor only made it seem more like a successor to the O2 than anything else, but it wasn't priced like that.
There was nothing they could do. I could see why they went with Windows NT. The fact is mips, digital, and Sun's Sparc didn't have the fabs to make as good as chips anymore like Intel. Worse, the patents on their risc designs and methods like pipelines and l2 cache expired and Intel put them in making their systems far far faster and much much cheaper. Windows 98 and DOS were dead with XP and Windows 2000 out so it was good enough to beat Unix. If you really hated win32 you could get linux too now on the intel chips.
SGI was toast as no economies of scale were there.
Would love to daily one of these , the 90s were special
Amazing Machine, Would like to have one in my collection
i wish i could find a broken one and stuff modern PC components inside. The case has such a timeless design.
Disgusting.
@@lookoutforchris what?
oh gosh, only if the internals are missing entirely- it'd be such a sin to gut it that way If there's even a remote chance it can be restored 😅
People have gotten to be absolute wizards at repairing trashed motherboards
FVWM with aliased italic helvetica in 2002 was already some kind of retro super computing. You had to be really attached to some version of Maya or some big custom IRIX software to spend that money.
We were young at this time
What a beautiful machine 💘
SGI was doing good business while their products were near cutting edge with professional graphics technology that ran 3D software. But as soon as the common WinTel PC could do the same it was lights out for the company.
Wonderful
Looks like one of my experimental "Winux 10" systems ^^
Damn it's loud.
SCSI hard drive.
Edit, oh you meant the fans 😂
Beautiful 👍
Not gonna lie, the case is too futuristic for such an old machine.
Usually such the computers have a boring ugly yellowish case.
Is that the Dell Ultrasharp U2412M? because I have that exact monitor as a secondary monitor alongside my main monitor which is the Dell G2722HS... Dell makss really nice monitors!
Looks like it. I used to have a 5x1P eyefinity setup with those as the central 3. Still got one running as a wing to put IRC on, been chugging along fine for about 12-13 years 24/7
omg 2GB of ram that's crazy
Ikr. I’m running 64gb (overkill) but 2gb was “enough” back then.
Man those fans need replacing.
i would have legit sold my ass with an advantageous payment plan to get one of these back in the days
Develop for Nintendo64 software?
And now in 2024 my mobile phone is more powerful than this workstation.
600 mhz and a small 18 gb hard drive was bad in 2002 when this was new and laughable by 2006 when it was discontinued. I can sadly see why Sun and SGI lost to Wintel.
The upcoming Linux distros killed the rest. A simple Pentium IV could at 2 ghz could smoke this. WindowsXP had a VMS kernel and delgations of ACLs in it and real reliability like Unix as well as Server 2000. Sure it ain't enterprise yada yada or a real unix, but good enough for 1/20th of the price. I envied these in the early 1990s as a kid! But in 2002 for the same $$ I would build a super gaming system with a Xeon or Athlon MP with an Nvidia Quadro and run Linux instead and dual boot XP instead.
How painfully slow
But can it run......... CRISIS?
john W cote
jr
Can it do any useful work or is it forever stuck in the past running old demos?
The entire graphics/multimedia/animation industry ran on SGI hardware in the 90's and early 2000's. So I'd definitely say yes, lots of useful abilities.
Useful abilities? What would that be in a time where my phone has more FLOPS, more texture and graphics memory, more MIPS (😂), a higher fillrate and even has a higher native resolution than any SGI ever had? Now even if you want to develop software for IRIX you might still be better off nowadays using a recent computer running a recent OS and a modern IDE and then just cross-compile for MIPS/IRIX.
@@Thiesi I think it was quite a thick layer of special purpose software developed and optimized for the SGI platform. So with less abilities in late SGI workstations - there was still good optimized software+workflow since mid 90s.
@@ran2wild370 And none of that is relevant today.
@@Thiesican your phone run a professional CAD package and can you use your phone to do actual engineering or product design? And I don’t mean some toy program like ShapR or SketchUp. No one does serious engineering on a fucking phone 😂. Your phone is for consuming, not creating. And like many consumers when you look at serious creative tools like an old workstation you’re just confused and slip into bragging about your phone or Xbox 😂
Oh crap! ! It was amazing and... damn weak at the same time. (oh, I am off to wiki to check when it was released) Ohhh crap(II) - 2002-2006. So mostly, wiki says that 700MHz R16000=PIV-3GHz.. But there are dualcore 64bit Athlons coming soon with DDR memory and finally 2006 DDR2/socketAM2 kill everything on the desktop side. Ohh crap(III) only 4gigs of RAM. Seems like it was hanging on strings of fast UltraSCSI 10-15K dries and 64bit PCI bus slots. And Vpro graphics for video processing.
Probably Opterons were the first to replace those systems.
And I doubt a 700MHz R16K would match a 3 GHz Pentium IV. In 1999 SGI was struggling with keeping the R12K/R14Ks to match competition (even non-RISC such as the Pentium-III architecture).
Ref:
websrv.cecs.uci.edu/~papers/mpr/MPR/19991227/131701.pdf
Tech was developing so rapidly around the turn of the century...