Refurb Weekend: Silicon Graphics Indigo² Impact 10000
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The author refurbishes a vintage Silicon Graphics Indigo² Impact 10000, sparking nostalgia and enthusiasm among commenters who share their own experiences with SGI hardware.
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In grad school, I ended up borrowing an old teal Indigo2, with graphics upgrade, that my research group had sitting around, to use from my dorm room, mainly as a terminal.
(I owned almost nothing in the world at the time, not even a computer, having shed my possessions in a "Gattaca" kind of way, of not saving anything for the swim back from grad school. But an SGI Indigo2 is more than powerful enough to be an SSH terminal, and my electricity use wasn't metered. And, unlike the laptops I'd borrowed, no one would want the Indigo2 back.)
Getting IRIX installed involved multiple installation tapes (or was it CD-ROMs?) that some kind person in the lab happened to still have.
An admin later offered to give me this Indigo2 that I was borrowing, but they first needed me to bring it back in for inventory. Around then, I'd finally built (or was about to build) a Linux box, and hauling the Indigo2 and its huge CRT anywhere was a chore without a car, and I'd soon be graduating, and moving away lightly. So I carted the Indigo2 back across campus, and left it for good. Hopefully it ended up with someone who preserved it, as the author here does.
I don’t know what it is, but there’s something just so mystical about SGI’s computers. I don’t know animation, and never got to work with IRIX, but at some point I want to get my hands on a Silicon Graphics computer (as well as a Sharp X86000).
In about 1998 a friend gave me a Casio PDA (E-15?). It was surplus because it wasn't great, and sluggish. CPU was a close relative of the on those Indy workstations used.
In 2002 I was working for a visual effects shop in the Bay Area. Among the chaos of wires, Wacom tablets and GeForce cards in the IT bay were two large stacks of Indigo2 Maximum Impact workstations. The ones with the MIPS R10k CPU and fancy graphics option. We complained when we had to move them because they were so heavy, and nobody could be bothered to take them to e-waste.
It had two stacked large PCB, the upper one was full of RAM chips totalling a whoping 8 MByte of RAM ;)
Equation (as opposed to comparison) and preference are two very different things, friend. And yes, I'm one of those weirdos who prefers minimal, low-color, high-res, high-contrast, and angular/facetted (almost brutalist) GUIs and TUIs to, say, SGIs offerings. Like the Canon Cat's and many others. We'll both live.
> [...] the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.
The GUI is not as grotten ugly to me as those from most modern offerings, or certain vintage offenders, e. g. early-to-mid Workbench, Windows XP (excluding the Classic Theme), I'll give you that. But it certainly doesn't knock me out of my socks.
The implied criticism here of IRIX being low res, low contrast and in any way having rounded edges demonstrates some serious ignorance of the subject.
The criticism, "implications" (i. e. your speculations) aside, is that based on the screenshots of the desktop I've seen it's just not enough for me. Not even close.
But since I've never used an SGI workstation, I am indeed largely ignorant of its "hidden" UI/UX qualities. And who knows? Maybe you can pimp the desktop's visual design enough that even I fall in love with it.
> But since I've never used an SGI workstation
Evidently.
The first source is the December 1989 issue of the Happy Computer, containing a report from the Munich tradeshow "Systems", which took place from 16th to 20th October 1989. You'll find a picture of the Snofru on pages 124 and 125. According to the description, its guts are a 386 with 25 MHz, 4 MB RAM, and an 80 MB HDD (12 ms). 1989 price: 35,000 DM. Meadata Technologies was a Munich outfit. Here, the machine is shown in a gold or sandy taupe livery. [1/2]
There is at least one other German magazine which reported on this very machine; it think it was the c't. Oddly enough, they showed a very small picture of an all-black machine. But maybe I just misremembered; I have to look that up. [3]
[1] Magazine online-view here: [https://reader.kultmags.com/Happy%20Computer%201989-12]
[2] Direct download of the archived mag here: [https://kultmags.com/Happy%20Computer/1989/Happy%20Computer%...]
[3] EDIT: After checking my archive I see I didn't misremember. The December 1989 issue of the c't has a picture of the Snofru on page 18. The styling is all-black with some red highlights. It also goes into a bit more detail on the specs: Intel motherboard, 64 KByte cache, 4 MByte RAM standard (expandable to 24 MByte; the below-referenced DOS International also mentions RAM expansion cards), a Plus (a Quantum subsidiary) Impulse hard disk system with a maximum of two internal HDDs (80 MB options were offered), as well as two controllers for connecting external storage for a combined maximum of ca. 2.6 GByte. Graphics card is a Video Seven. The PSU was located in the the top of the pyramid and has an "allegedly" very quiet fan, which was embedded in a dampening enclosure made of rubber. The envisioned application of the machine was to be that of a fast, networked file server.
[4] EDIT 2: The December '89 issue of DOS International IDs the machine as "Snofru XXV" and shows two small pictures: the all-black version on page 6, and a seethrough illustration on page 8. The magazine can be found here: [https://kultmags.com/DOS%20International/1989/DOS%20Internat...]. The text also makes note of "confidential" impartiations relating to orders by "high-ranking managers" of "well-known banks".
[5] Finnish mag Bitti shows the all-black machine on page 23 of issue 9/90 as well (photo repro only in bw). Price: 87,400 Suomen markka.
I'm going to consider my suspicion you were just trolling confirmed.
Heck, even now most business equipment (even the art calibrated ones) are 60Hz…
BUT, this second generation of SGIs felt special. Ok a third gen, but the first one in beige boxes does not count. Crimson in gen before was also special.
Years later I was given a machine I worked on, since I'm in retro machines and game and all and to my disappointment it was the purple one, not teal (teal got lost somewhere). Now, imagine that since purple one is vastly superior to teal one, hah. Got indy along with it, webcam and all to be web ready!
I only skimmed through article for now, but is there a specific reason you haven't went with period-correct IRIX 5.x and went with 6? On a side note, SD2SCSI or similar to get rid of the spinning rust? And ultimate question, what do we all do with power supplies? They will die.
The power supplies are a bigger question, but some work has been done on this already with other systems, notably the Fuel. There is at least a way to repair the Impact supplies' caps, though that's not all that can go wrong. I expect we'll eventually see conversion kits for these other big systems at some stage.
Remember "Erwin", the SGI O2 in the userfriendly.org comic? https://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1065/737/1600/user%20fri...
The comic is now dead, but it had a long and amazing run.
I still keep an SGI O2, Octane, and Fuel around for nostalgia hits nowadays, and they never disappoint:
https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel_Blen...
https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel.jpg
In all cases it's hard to argue that MIPS devices were sold on the strength of their CPUs from the mid 90s onwards.
Not really, no. The memory system and graphics systems are completely different, and the CPU is a different MIPS processor to one in any SGI desktop. Some devkits did involve having whole subsystems on expansions in Indys though.
It should say something that when the Indy was announced the quip was "It's an Indigo without the go" so even had the N64 been Indy based it would not have been noted for CPU performance.
The N64/PS1/PS2 (and others) weren’t exceptional for very long, if ever, in terms of CPU power. They relied on dedicated graphics hardware, low price, ease—of-use, a business model that allowed for selling the base hardware at a loss, and devs optimizing for a fixed platform to stay competitive for 5-10 years as PC hardware improved.
AFAIK SpecInt and SpecFp would like to politely dissagree. /s
The older 8500 has an article available with a die shot: https://ardent-tool.com/CPU/docs/MPR/19971117/111505.pdf It's like 75% cache even back then. (Fast SRAM With Integrated CPU is extremely accurate, lol).
I'm glad someone else thinks so!
There's a very interesting vid about the design of the ISA here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C53tGHzp1PI and I think it's pretty clear they learned from early MIPS/Sparc. It's a shame it got abandoned in the Itanium push.
The Alpha was also a performance king in that era, but tbh I don't have the same nostalgia for it, although clearly it was executed very well.
I think an updated PA-RISC design be awesome for modern workloads; huge caches with prefetch, a good branch predictor + a 8-10 wide dispatch, and some sort of vector extension. A Mix of AMD Zen+X3D & Apple ARM. To be fair, ISA doesn't matter as much really these days, any core with similar features probably would perform well.
There's always someone who thinks VLIW or a similar is a good idea. So far that's been a bit tricky for a general purpose CPU, or even some parallel designs.
* 100% personal opinion, I've never actually worked on HW design directly *
PA-RISC has mostly always had large L1 caches ( that used to be off-chip), and usually no L2 cache.
I know this bit of trivia, but I don't know the technical reasons/trade-offs for it.
I've been trying to donate this stuff to local museums for a while but sadly, none seem interested. The O2 still boots without any issues, and at least one of the screens work. Shame to just throw away.
We also had a gorgeous lab of NeXT computers in a basement computer lab. Between just doing what seemed like magic in Mathematica and seeing how small I could make fonts on the laser printer, I also got scolded directly by Steve Jobs by replying to his default email in the mail client with 'read receipt' enabled. He said it was a violation of his privacy lol.
Edit: This was the email - https://blog.hayman.net/2025/05/06/from-steve-jobs-great-ide...
Thanks for posting this; never seen that particular model before. It looks like one of those kitschy, pad-supplied coffee or soda makers. I find the urge, very prevalent from the mid-90s to the mid-Aughts, to entomb even professional-grade electronics in cases that look like cheap toys or other household appliances both bizarre and fascinating, analog to the 70s trend of styling (especially home) computing devices as faux-wooden furniture pieces, et cetera.
Back in the 90s my best friend's stepfather happened to be the top dog of SGI Benelux (Belgium / The Netherlands / Luxembourg) so... My best friend had an SGI Indy (Indy, not Indygo) at home.
After school we'd go back to his place and have fun with the Indy. That thing already had a webcam (in, what, 1993?).
I remember a 3D demo of oil pipelines, some crazy music video with little balls bouncing on top of sound waves and... the terminal. I learned my very first Un*x command on that thing.
One one hand we had Commodore Amiga and games nearly as good as the arcade and on the other hand we had the Indy.
We of course also had our mediocre beige PC with an even more mediocre OS: DOS and then Windows.
Thankfully a few years late Linux came out and saved us from mediocrity.
I was using these in the UK at the time and ours were 'Made in Switzerland', which I liked.
You mention the Crimson in the article, another machine I knew in period. I was showing someone around one day and they rudely said that it was a 'very large box for a single CPU'.
My introduction to SGI was the Indigo and I usually had whatever was latest until I had O2s and a massive Onyx2 with Infinite Reality3. No machines have had the impressive presence that these machines had in period. Although nice hardware has came out since then, nothing just makes civilians drop their jaws in awe and wonder.
By analogy, it is like the difference between one of those vast organs that you get in cathedrals and the synthesisers you get in a music shop. Musicians would probably prefer the latter, but normies like me just don't get that wow feeling.
Although newer machines were better, I always felt that something was compromised each time. For example, the wonderful OG keyboards and ALPS mice, they got a little bit creaky and plastic over time. It was also the same with cases. I appreciated the design goals of O2 but it was very creaky and there was not the usual choice of video breakout boxes with genloc and all those fun things that we had back then.
For reference, my Onyx had 256Mb of RAM and 64Mb of graphics RAM, if I can remember correctly. This was less than the 384Mb I had in Indigo2 machines, which we had to boost due to a software memory leak just to get the runtime. This level of RAM was huge in period (when office PCs had 32K of video RAM, if you were lucky) and yet today a single tab running YouTube will take more than a gig of RAM.
I would like a mini-museum of SGI machines, however, without the hardware specific applications that I used these machines for, I feel that it would be a case of 'never meet your heroes'.
Eh, I don't know about that. The Onyx2 looks like a dorm fridge that also makes espresso. Meanwhile, here's Seymour Cray, inviting you to have a seat on his couch...
It was the Indigo that made espresso. :)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SGI_Espressigo
https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconGraphics/comments/1eh9puu/sg...
I suspect your dismissive coworker didn't realize everything else inside a Crimson. I just wish I had the space for one, even though I'd be using the workstations more.
Indy, Indigo, then later the Octanes, and others I can't quite remember the name of off-hand.
The video post-production companies in SOHO - I saw the CGI being rendered for Event Horizon...
The "IBM Stiction Problem" as it was called. Batches of IBM hard drives that worked fine for months - right up until the machines were powered off - which then entailed an on-site visit. The stifled gasp from the customer as I remove the old drive and give it a stern tap on the desk, to get it unstuck so I could clone it to the replacement. ;)
Enjoyed that job immensely, except for the driving around London bit.
What's amazing is how companies would invest in a whole fleet of these. You'd hear about this or that game development company ordering one for everyone on their team for a cool million or ten. In 90s dollars.
90s were a fun time in computing.
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