Friday, 28 September 2018

Enthusiasts Keep Obsolete Supercomputers Alive

quote [ Nearly 30 years after Silicon Graphics ruled the high-performance computing roost, its supercomputers have found themselves a new home with a small community full of enthusiasts—some of whom weren’t even alive during the company’s heyday. ]

Nostalgia for stuff you couldn't afford at the time.

SGI's $250,000 Graphics Supercomputer from 1993 - Silicon Graphics Onyx RealityEngine²

Thumb is the Indy, SGI's attempt at breaking into the low-end workstation market (starting price $4995 in 1993).

Earlier this year I bought an O2 workstation (their second and last low-end model), which as the article notes is the ideal starter SGI (you can use regular PS/2 keyboards/mice and normal VGA monitors, as long as they're sync-on-green tolerant or you don't mind everything tinted green.)
[SFW] [science & technology] [+2]
[by Ankylosaur@4:08amGMT]

Comments

cb361 said @ 9:09am GMT on 28th Sep [Score:2]
What kind of idiot community lets the single website that holds the corpus of their shared knowledge vanish, along with the guy who runs it? I have no sympathy whatsoever.
Ankylosaur said @ 9:39am GMT on 28th Sep
They can always reform under the banner "Silicon Guises".
lilmookieesquire said @ 2:25am GMT on 29th Sep
Ya. Only a bunch of asshats would do that.
hellboy said @ 11:07am GMT on 28th Sep
You missed the big news in that article - Klout is dead!
Bleb said @ 11:39pm GMT on 28th Sep
I used Indys and O2s in college. And some other SGI beer-fridge-looking thing that we used as a server. It's a little mind-blowing that hardware costing tens of thousands of dollars would take two to five minutes to render an image that my phone can now render 60 times per second.
lilmookieesquire said @ 2:23am GMT on 29th Sep
Fun fact the former Mountainview silicon graphics office is home to their computer museum

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