It's the 1990s and as a kid back then one computer company loomed large when it came
to super powerful systems. You had heard of them but these systems were hugely expensive,
and beyond the reach of normal people. They were used to develop some of the most graphically
impressive games of the time, and the films you watched. That company was SGI and this is one of
their workstations the Octane 2. We're going to have a bit of a play with this machine, and have
a look at some of the history surrounding it. SGI started life as a manufacturer of raster terminals
which is essentially the bitmap equivalent of a green screen dumb terminal. I mean you could put
pixels on the screen rather than just text it made use of the geometry pipeline Jim Clark and Mark
Hanna created at Stamford. This raster terminal also made use as a Motorola 68000 as the cpu,
which meant that SGI realized that they could turn their terminal into a standalone computer which
eventually they did. This standalone machine would run System V UNIX and was the basis for SGI's
initial reputation as a graphics workstation company. The 68000 soon became the limiting
factor for SGI's workstation capabilities and given RISC was the next big thing,
SGI found a new RISC cpu from MIPS to base their new machines around.
The Iris 4D was the first SGI machine to make use of the MIPS cpu and would also see SGI rename its
version the System V UNIX to Irix. This marks the beginning of SGI's most successful period.
SGI started making sales to all sorts of market sectors from mathematical modelling which is
where I first use an SGI machine in BNFL's maths modeling department, scientific visualization,
airport security scanners, 3d cad/cam and most famously of all film production.
SGI soon found its niche in the burgeoning world of cg, fast becoming the workstation of choice for
animators. Most of the well-known cg heavy films of the time were done on SGI machines, for example
the abyss and terminator 2. SGI machines soon became so familiar with filmmakers they started
to appear in films like this SGI Crimson here in Jurassic Park. It's a UNIX system I know this.
And also a 1995 film Disclosure, a film about sexual harassment and cd-rom drive manufacturing.
Where the least realistic part, and I'm including a young Demi Moore coming on to an aging Michael
Douglas, was that every member of staff had an SGI workstation. We are supposed to believe their
IT department had an out of control spending problem and nobody looked at their budget.
They also only seem to use them to open emails in the most excessively animated email client ever.
Also for no reason they built a VR interface to their database. I mean that feels like a useful
ui experience. SGI machines are also used in the growing world of 3d animation with Toy Story,
A Bug's Life, Antz all being created on SGI hardware. SGI kit soon took over the editing
process in the same way that virtually all film and video is edited on computers today.
Flame by Discrete Logic was first used on SGI machines to edit 1993's Super Mario Brothers
the movie, a film whose star Bob Hoskins described as the low point in his career,
and a film that he wished he'd not said yes to. Luckily for SGI it proved that their systems were
great for editing films, even if that film is awful. The Octane we're going to look at
was primarily used for editing so we're going to get to see flame up and running on that.
With SGI starting to see itself as a machine for creatives, SGI started including derpy little
things with its machines, for example when it produced the low-cost version of the Indigo
the Indy (well low cost for SGI) it came with a set of juggling balls. For the Octane things
got even more derpy, they produced the music cd to come with it i'll i'll i'll play you a sample
[bad bad bad music]
Yep SGI did this, drink it in okay they did make this around the time that Harry Connick
jr had had some success musically, so social attitudes towards his music were different
back then. [Bunty] You know i've recently been listening to and enjoying the music
of Harry Connick jr. [Nikki] Well it's not radio head but it's okay. [Narrator] Whereas
of course now we know the correct response is a little different. [Bunty] I've recently
been listening to and enjoying the music of Harry Connick jr. [Nikki] I want a divorce!
SGI had quite the range of systems from desktop workstations to massive side of desk machines
they also had huge rack mount based servers or multi-rack based systems
sgi even tried with low-cost machines firstly there was the indie which is a low-cost version of
the Indigo that was not a great success for SGI. It had some very significant performance issues.
Initially it only shipped with 16 meg of ram and the version of Irix that had memory management
problems, which admittedly later they fixed. These performance problems led to the Indy
being known as the Indigo without the go. It did come up with some interesting features though to
be added to a machine for the first time, so it included a webcam. The Indy Cam, which meant you
could do video conferencing in 1993, a think most of us tried in 2020 for the first time.
sgi then tried to build a low-cost machine again this one was far more successful
and there's a low-cost version of the octane known as the o2
i think a big part of the cost saving was probably that they just shrunk the thing down by the looks
of it i mean look how tiny it looks next to this octane the public awareness of sgi and its
graphics capabilities was riding pretty high and sgi based machines had started being used by games
developers to pre-render 3d graphics which games could include later as sprites for example rare's
donkey kong on the snares this attracted the attention of nintendo who are looking to sgi to
help them create a more powerful graphics chipset for their next console codename project reality
this could be the subject of a whole other video so i'll just give it a quick mention here
but project reality spawned the n64 the initial developer kits for the n64 were sgi onyx machines
which were not only hugely powerful they were also physically huge to boot
later on when n64 hardware could be shipped to games developers they could get away with using
an sgi indy to do the actual coding on as they no longer had to emulate the entire of the m64
everything was going about as well as it could do for sgi it had purchased its cpu provider mips to
secure the future of their cpu they just bought the world famous supercomputer company great
after sgi had entered the supercomputing space and it's around this time that sgi launches the
octane the workstation we're going to have a look at now this one is an octane 2 which is a
later version with some improvements like a more powerful cpu i'd use the nocturne a few times as
part of my work but never had one personally and frankly when it was new in the mid-90s
it cost more than the house i was living in so there was very little prospect of me owning one
now i nearly did not take this one downstairs to film it and make it look all nice like it does
now as it's ridiculously heavy i mean it's utter an involuntary swear word as you pick it up heavy
here's the page from the manual showing how to move it there's a reason it shows two people
according to manual it weighs 25 kilograms which is roughly 55 pounds for our american cousins it's
it's a heavy computer i think this must be because it's about 90 cpu heatsink as you can see it's
got a modular construction so it can be easily serviced by field engineers this started off with
the server and desk side models and soon became standard for the desktops with the octane and o2
in fact i'll show you an o2 being taken apart the connectors are a bit less delicate than that
of the octane in fact some of the connectors on the octane are so delicate but if you touch them
that's it you kill them this octane has the most powerful graphics card it can take and
the only one more powerful than it uses two slots and on this machine we've had to use the second
slot for the video i o board so we're able to get video in and out of this machine the octane
also has a cage of pcix cards which while much lower than sgi zone xio bus it's a lot cheaper
as you can make use of pci x cards that were aimed at high-end intel based systems at the time
this also greatly increased the range of add-on cards which it could use
in ours we've got a fiber channel card which we need for flame escazy card and a wonky
ethernet card the ethernet card's there to solve a problem for me because although there's an onboard
hundred meg card it has a very picky transceiver on it the octane team built ethernet adapter was
really early on to the 100 meg standard and therefore it's not really happy with an awful
lot of switches um so this is why i bought a second ethernet card so i could get that
in which would be a lot less picky with switches so i could plug it into you know the kit i've got
right let's switch to some captured footage cause i bet you're dying to see what this thing can do
firstly let's have a little look at the ui sgi has its own unique gui while most of the
other unix vendors standardized around the common desktop environment or cde and it's motif widget
set sgi instead decided to stick with their own ui possibly because it looked good and you
know was nice to use whereas the others like sun used open windows which which never looked great
one of the nice surprises for a lot of people would be that it was bundled with a copy of doom
so there was their equivalent of minesweeper here it is running as smooth as butter in a window
where even as the most powerful pcs the time the octane was released which has been the 486 dx
266 will get nowhere near this frame rate in full screen and it's not like doom was coded
to take advantage of the 3d hardware this is all cpu cpu-based this also helps us neatly tick that
obligatory box for all youtube videos about old computers and that we must show it running doom
if you want to look at sgi's hardware acceleration well we're gonna have to play some of the demos
this menu will probably be a bit familiar to nintendo fans this demo nicely shows off the
texture handling there are also some versions of software that most people probably didn't know at
an sgi port here's photoshop for example we also have a number of 3d rendering packages available
which helped to make the sgi famous in the first place we also have some 3d games that sgi produced
as quick demos for their hardware and these would have been considered quite impressive at the time
also of a sign of the times and the power of the whole wintel platform even sgi needed a way to
run windows applications so they included this emulation layer which allowed you to run windows
95 and honestly for hardware that was contemporary for the time of windows 95 this is an impressively
snappy experience my pc at the time never ran 95 this well look we can even run doom for windows
in it and it runs well and of course having shown doom running twice on this thing that
makes this video doubly retro now let's see this machine running as a video editor as that's what
this particular octane was used for first of all we have to start the fibre channel storage array
this incredibly noisy box of scuzzy discs is essential for making flamework as you can probably
imagine raw video footage takes an incredible amount of storage particularly for the time so
video was stored on these large fibre channel arrays now i've just got one of these units but
you can chain the number of them together this one holds 22 72 gig scuzzy drives at 11 at the front
and 11 at the rear giving a whole 1.5 terabytes of storage admittedly this is not a huge amount
of storage for video but larger outfits would have used more than one of these units the way
the discs are used by flame is a bit odd there's not a regular posix filing system sitting on
these discs with files and directories etc as this would have generated far too much work at the time
instead the application accesses the disk directly using a software layer called stonefs to manage
the disks this way the video blocks are stored in the most efficient way for the editor to access
them meaning we can have smooth video editing in 1995 at resolutions that are thoroughly modern
now this is going to get a bit inceptioning i'm gonna film this bit on a mini dv camera
and that is in flame so you can see what the processor would be like so here's
me recording a little bit of footage on the camera of the machine and the storage array
i'll then take the tape out and pop this in the dv cam tape unit i can now transfer the
footage from the tape to the sdi machine this uses the sdi input on the sgis video i o board
sdi is a digital video signal standard that's still in use in tv and film production
this takes a while as the footage can only be transferred at real time so three hours
of footage takes three hours you can now see it's captured as is the footage of it being captured
inceptioning and i can now do a bit of screen capture so you can see me editing it together
which i then edit into the video even more inceptiony okay we'll knock it off of the sgi
editing or this video will just recurse forever these systems became remarkably popular for news
production and tv commercials which were still pretty big budget then here's a clip from discrete
logic's promotional video for flame showing off some of the stuff created on it you recognize a
few ads in there if you're as old as me and well british you're probably wondering what this system
cost well i managed to find pricing for an octane system with the flame license storage array etc
and it came to 399 198 which in today's money is six hundred and seventy seven thousand nine
hundred and thirty one dollars or four hundred and ninety five thousand pounds if you just wanted the
octane without the video i o board and frame licenses and fibre channel etc that would have
come to a much more reasonable thirty thousand dollars which is just above fifty thousand dollars
today or thirty seven thousand pounds so you know at that parking price let's get to now if sgi was
successfully selling workstations for thirty grand you're probably wondering what happened how come
they're not around anymore well a few things happened firstly the pc started to get 3d cards
in fact nvidia one of the leading card vendors was actually started by a former sti engineer
these 3d cards initially could not touch what sgi kit could do but the gap was closing fast pcs were
also getting more and more powerful cpus at the same time linux was also a significant factor most
of the software that ran on iris could be ported to linux without too much trouble linux also
let you build cheap clusters of machines so you could rival sgi's most powerful kit sgi also made
mistakes its new ceo decided it wanted to embrace intel and it embraced what would soon become one
of intel's largest disasters the itanium this hurt sgi in two ways first the italian went
very very wrong he was supposed to have incredible performance and yet perform like a pig
as his performance gains could only be realized if compilers should group instructions together
in a way that the cpu expected and compilers never did manage to do that the very noticeable shift to
titanium also really hurt confidence in the mips based line of machines as people thought they
might end up with a dead end system and while sgi did swap focus back to mips the damage was done
and in lots of places it jumped shipped to the pc or clusters of pc's running linux
sdi had also carried out some unwise purchases for example cray from whom they kept the crailing
technology they used in their origin systems but sold the rest of the loss they also were forced
to sell their cpu division mips for a while sgi tried to be a provider of supercomputing systems
even moving to intel xeon cpus but other pc vendors running linux soon overtook them in the
super computer market sgi entered chapter 11 in 2006 which it did sort of recover from to finally
go bankrupt in 2008 being purchased by rackable systems who renamed themselves to silicon graphics
international or sgi for short who then went defunct in 2016 when they were purchased by hp
sgi may be gone but its legacy is still with us not just in terms of the films games and
tv shows they helped us make but as the technology as well irex's file system xfs was ported to linux
and is now the default file system for red hat enterprise sgi also created the 3d graphics api
opengl and its descendant vulcan they're still in use in games consoles pcs and mobiles and tablets
too given its size sgi managed to have an outsized impact on the world of film technology and media
that about wraps it up for this video my thanks to all of you for watching and of
course nikki and bunty for lending their voice talents if you enjoyed this video please let
me know by commenting in the section below or pressing the like button as i
have more sgi hardware here i could cover and if there's an interest i'll certainly do more
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