This beautiful purple slab is the Silicon Graphics Indigo² (though, unlike its earlier namesake, not actually indigo coloured) with the upper-tier MIPS R10000 CPU and IMPACT graphics. My recollection was that it worked at the time, but I couldn’t remember if it booted, and of course that was no guarantee that it could still power on. If this machine is to stay working and in the collection, we’re gonna need a Refurb Weekend.
↫ Cameron Kaiser at Old Vintage Computing Research
Out of all the retro UNIX workstations of old, the machines from SGI are both the most popular, the most well-known, and thus, also some of the most expensive. Yet, at the same time, everything up until the very last generation or two of MIPS IRIX workstations, generally do not seem to be particularly rare either. The community around SGI’s machines and IRIX is also quite thriving still, much more so than the communities of the other commercial UNIX variants. Still, the odds of me completing my collection of final-generation commercial UNIX workstations are low, exactly because of just how rare and stupidly expensive the SGI Tezro is.
As always, Cameron Kaiser goes into a level of detail few other people in the world do when it comes to rare or special computers, and this article about the Silicon Graphics Indigo² is no exception. Detailed photographs, an in-depth history of the machine, detailed descriptions of the hardware, the various fixes that needed to be performed, getting it back up and running, and everything else. There’s really nobody else writing these kinds of articles.
The weekend’s here, so sit back, relax, and have fun.
I get it, you want the very latest MIPS machine that they ever created, but does it have to be a Tezro? Methinks Optane machines were/are a lot more plentiful and thus cheaper/easier to find in the current day and age..
I’ve got an SGI O2, it’s pretty wild seeing a system from 1996 run Quake 3 from 1999. They really were advanced machines for their era. I’d love to explore IRIX on a more friendly form factor. An FPGA MIPS system would be lovely if someone developed it. Most of my childhood was developed on SGI. Wing Commander 3/4, Zelda Ocarina of Time, pretty much any Nintendo 64 game, but most of the Playstation games as well were developed on SGI machines. Not to mention all the movies like Terminator 2, Jurassic Park etc. Power Animator the precursor to Maya dominated the Graphics field. IRIX was so big it even had Photoshop.
I just sold my last SGI system on eBay last week. It was an R5000 O2 that I had been keeping for nostalgia purposes. I used a lot of SGI systems in my career and before that at school. For those wanting to study system design and explore early hardware accelerated graphics designs, it’s really fun to set one up and geek out. That said, the early and mid 90s systems from SGI are in the 30-year old range at this point and keeping them running is hard. Many that you come across have been parted out or have cycled through online sales so many times that they have lost key components. On top of that, the plastic used for those era cases from SGI is so brittle now that to find one in good condition is nearly impossible. I shipped the O2 with all the parts removed and packaged separately just to relieve the weight on the plastic in the shipment, but I have no idea if that will work. Hope so.
If you come across an old SGI that boots up either IRIX 5 or 6, grab it because these things are quickly vanishing.
If you are interested in playing around with the software side of things and just learning about IRIX, that is possible via emulation. It’s not going to be great, but it is sufficient to learn the OS. https://sgi.neocities.org/installguide