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Thread: Merry Christmas Everyone

  1. #11
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    I've never touched SGI, nor did any of my clients have them.
    I primarily consulted with banking, law enforcement and other government agencies.
    I also wrote and taught mainframe networking courses.

  2. #12
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    I never came across any of their stuff and generally associated them with the media rather than engineering graphics side of things. I guess that Sun was the most common brand over here in engineering.

    Way back they all looked pretty much the same, and I have Compaq, IBM, Digital and HP machines. They are all pretty bland mushroom coloured boxes.

    Also, people of my generation will remember Packard Bell (1986-1996) who were masters of the art of making crappy, crappy look pretty, pretty, so we are suspicious of pretty, pretty.

    I have seen visually attractive offerings from the major OEMs that are presumably intended for high profile, customer facing locations, but I go for performance rather than looks..............like this one is held together with duct tape

    Anyways, SGI went bust a couple of years back, and the trade name was taken over by another outfit who changed their name to SGI.

    I seem to recall that some years back SGI bought Cray and went into supercomputers? so I don't think that you will find a current workstation unless it is badged.

    Like in Europe you could always get Packard Bells, but they were made by NEC and now Acer with possibly someone inbetween.

  3. #13
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    Nihil; SGI is still alive and well. They DID have some issues a while back, but they are still here. In fact, they broke a world record a few months ago with their Altix Servers. They have a World record now.

    I remember my Uncle having a Packard Bell, but when that was around, I was a young one who knew nothing about Computers. Hell, I joined AntiOnline basically two years after I got my first one.

    As for the colors and so on, and the "It's pretty" thing; SGI Computers look amazing... The ones from wayyyyyyy back, are generally neon green with odd designed cases and so on. But they are NOT "pretty boxes for stupid people" or anything near that; They are serious powerhouses.

    The looks over Performance thing you brought up is NOT SGI. they just happen to look good AND be great. Remember Jurassic Park? The little girl says "It's a Unix system.... I know this!" And everyone said "Oh bull Unix doesn't look like that!"....

    Well, it does actually; The Interface you see her using is made by SGI. You KNOW you're good when actual Unix admins don't even Believe your product exists heh.

    The old SGI machines that came out around the time of those Mushroom colored things, would look like this:

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...x-SGI_Indy.jpg

    ^That is an SGI Indy Workstation. It's their entry level low end system from way back in the early 90s or late 80s.

    Their Servers look like this today:

    http://www.operating-system.org/betr...gi-3400_ph.jpg

    Absolute Beauty...

    This is a shot of multiple Workstation they make:

    http://www.mashek.com/images/newcollage.jpg

    They have no Beige boxes, or Mushroom colored things either.

    Another Server they make:

    http://www.trygve.com/onyx3200outside.jpg

    ^ I'd kick the **** out of that guy just for a chance to touch that thing.

    This is another SGI Workstation, it's called a "Prism" and it's one of my Dream Machines... This is what I'd buy if I could:

    http://bsdnetwork.blogsome.com/images/Prism.jpg

    You can't tell me it doesn't look awesome. And remember; SGI invented IRIX, XFS, and in general, are one of the few companies around to take Special FX seriously.

    On April 1, 2009, SGI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and announced that it would sell substantially all of its assets to Rackable Systems, a deal finalized on May 11, 2009, with Rackable assuming the name "Silicon Graphics International".

    So there is no fake SGI, the name change wasn't because of anything weird. They just sold most of it off, and the company changed the "i" in it.

    Either way, they are still alive and well, and still making the most Beautiful computers I've ever seen in my entire life.

    Also, they seem to be legends in the Monitor area too; I was reading an article that said the 1600sw or something along those lines, which is a monitor made by SGI, is so good they are STILL sold, after more than 10 years.

    The College I went to, had an old SGI from the 1980s, and included the Web Cam it came with. They had stuff in the 80s that PCs are still catching up to.

    I'm assuming that no one actually googled any images or info as I didn't see anyone say anything they were sure of other than not seeing it around.

    You can still buy old SGI Workstations on Ebay, and they STILL cost a lot. The Processors they use, are MIPS, which, I Believe to be superior.

    IRIX, I also think is better than AIX, HP-UX, and so on.

    I pasted the links to the images because then you can actually see what these things look like. It's NOT just a pretty case; SGI Machines are WAY more than pretty; They set world records, and, before The Matrix came out, almost every movie ever seen was made with them.

    In fact, one web site said about the Matrix "It'll take a lot of work on an SGI to make this work" and then when it was found out that The Matrix was all done on a FreeBSD cluster, they were shocked.

    Anyway, I'm a HUGE SGI fan, and so I'll jump to the defense of them any time. They're amazing machines, and they don't look like ANYTHING else I've ever seen.

    My dream machine, would be an SGI Workstation, running IRIX, and... Yea.... That's what I'd buy if I won the Lotto.

  4. #14
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hmmm..............World record eh?

    http://www.sgi.com/company_info/news...h/windows.html

    Will you be running Windows Server 2008 R2 on your dream machine???

    And please don't insult us with the energy efficient crap...............that is Rackable's technology, not SGI.
    Last edited by nihil; December 28th, 2011 at 06:49 PM.

  5. #15
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    Ummm, Nihil, I don't think I said anything about Energy. In fact I know I didn't. What's with that?

    And no, I said MY dream machine would run IRIX. I said that in the last reply.

    After looking at that link I'm a little confused as to why it was posted... I didn't mention Energy or anything about "Energy Efficient" or anything close to that, where did that come from?

    And after re-reading my post I was fairly clear on what I said.

    Anyway, here:

    http://www.sgi.com/company_info/news.../pleiades.html

    http://www.sgi.com/company_info/news...er/hadoop.html
    Last edited by gore; December 28th, 2011 at 07:02 PM.

  6. #16
    Senior Member IKnowNot's Avatar
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    I really don’t want to get in the middle of this discussion, but something I noticed when looking at the SGI website:

    IRIX is listed under Legacy ( with support ending December 2013 ) as is the Silicon Graphics 1600SW display.

    BTW, that Pleiades Supercomputer you referenced is running on, you guessed it, SUSE !

    And the other link about the Apache Hadoop systems: supported operating systems are all Linux (Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, SUSE, and Debian. )

    Hope everyone had a good Christmas and has a happy, healthy New Year.

    .
    Last edited by IKnowNot; December 28th, 2011 at 07:40 PM.
    " And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be" --Miguel Cervantes

  7. #17
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    Yea, they stopped doing IRIX some time ago now. They've ported multiple versions of Linux as you saw to their hardware, and even some versions of Windows. Windows NT actually ran on one of their old Workstations back in the day.

    I don't know why they stopped doing IRIX though, I think it's amazing. Since my "Dream Machine" will run IRIX though, I'd use a service they have, where they take machines that were not working, replace all the needed parts, and re-sell them.

    I saw a bunch of REALLY nice machines there. The price is actually really nice on a lot of the refurbished machines too. I'd LOVE a Prism.

  8. #18
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    I mentioned energy saving because that is a record they set in the last 12 months. It is what Rackable were doing before they bought the remains of SGI for 1/18 of what SGI paid for Cray.

    SGI filed for Section 11 protection in 2006 and were sold in 2009. That is a substantial part of their assets were. No going concern, no business, no manufacturing, just "assets" which would be IP, maintenance contracts and so on. One of their premises is now a computer museum and the other is Google.

    They died (which is usually what Section 11 means) and Rackable chose to use the business name, much the same as happened to Cray.

    I think that most of their top technical types went to nVidia, ATI, AMD etc...........

    This is NOT the company it used to be.

    Errrr.................NASA rank #7 in the World and has the largest single x86 supercomputer. OMFG I am impressed!..................... Anyways, the size of a supercomputer depends on what the customer can afford to pay

    "Hadoop"............... I see no relevance in that statistic whatsoever, particularly in respect of workstations. Also, the device has "Rackable" in its name, which points to its origins as far as I am concerned.

    If you want old SGI you will have to go second user, and if you want IRIX then you had better hurry as it is due to be phased out around the same time as windows XP

  9. #19

  10. #20
    Senior Member gore's Avatar
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    So basically, you've never used any SGI stuff, yet don't really think it's amazing what the founder did?

    As for the name changing ownership, who cares? Novell bought SUSE, and it's a lot different now than it was way back but it's still SUSE, and a LOT of the founding people left after Novell bought it, but they manage.

    By those lines of thinking, IBM isn't anything anymore. IBM was founded a LONG time ago, and they also made AK-47s during WW2.

    I'll give you that it's NOT the company it was back in the day, it's not. I am fine with that. But the new machines they have now, are still amazing. An Octane III is one NICE Workstation. And I know I'll be buying IRIX off Ebay, where else would I get it? The contracts they have for support, are all they have now, they don't even sell it anymore. So I'd be buying it second hand.

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