SGI Indy

SGI Indy Info

Introduced in 1993, the Indy was the fruit of SGI's effort to muscle into the market for desktop publishing, low-end CAD, and multimedia. At the time, the market was mostly dominated by Apple. The Indy was the first computer to include a digital video camera, and was built with a (then) forward-looking architecture including an on-board ISDN adapter. With the inclusion of analog and digital I/O, SCSI, and standard composite and S-Video inputs, the Indy really was a multimedia machine.



At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first OS for the Indy, did not take full advantage of the hardware due to inadequate memory management. SGI realized this and quickly increased the base specification to 32 MB, at considerable cost. Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage. The latest release of IRIX available for the Indy workstations is 6.5.22.

SGI Crimson

SGI Crimson Wikipedia

SGI Crimson Futuretech

The IRIS Crimson is an older Silicon Graphics (SGI) system released in the early 1990s. It was the world's first 64-bit workstation.

Crimson was a member of Silicon Graphics's IRIS 4D series of deskside systems; it was also known as the 4D/510 workstation. It was similar to other SGI IRIS 4D deskside workstations, and could utilise a wide range of graphics options (up to RealityEngine). It was also available as a file server with no graphics. This machine was made famous with its brief cameo in the movie Jurassic Park where the granddaughter of Hammond, Lex, was using the machine to navigate the filesystem in 3D on IRIX 4.0 using the IRIX application FSN in order to restore power to the compound. The year following the film's release, Silicon Graphics released a rebadged, limited edition Crimson R4400/VGXT called the "Jurassic Classic", which included a special logo and featured SGI co-founder Jim Clark's signature on the drive door.



Features:

# Superpipelined MIPS 100MHz R4000 or 150MHz R4400 processor.

# Choice of seven high performance 3D graphics subsystems deliver performance and features to match any application.

# Up to 256MB memory and internal disk capacity up to 7.2GB, expandable to greater than 72GB using additional enclosures.

# High performance I/O subsystem includes four VME expansion slots, Ethernet and two SCSI channels with disk striping support.

SGI O2

The Silicon Graphics O2 (codename "Moosehead") is as an entry level workstation the successor to the Indy line of desktop workstations. It doesn't have the various graphics options that other Silicon Graphics machines have but it comes with built in graphics and support for more advanced digital media solutions (audio and video). The Silicon Graphics O2+ extends and updates the original O2 series from 1996, but offers no change in the underlying architecture.



History

1996, October: Introduction of O2 family
1998, February: Dual display solution announced
1998, May: 250 MHz R10000 processor introduced for O2 series
1998, July: 225 MHz R10000 processor replaces 175/195 systems
1999, April: 270 and 300 MHz R10000 processors announced. Standard system configurations enhanced.
1999, July: Availability of QED RM5200 processor running at 300 MHz announced
2000, July: New processor: 400 Mhz R12000A with 2MB secondary cache
2001, August: O2+ announced at SIGGRAPH 2001 in Los Angeles, California
2002, May: End of Production (EOP) announced for O2 and O2+
2002, October: O2 and O2+ have disappeared from the SGI website

Irix

SGI Irix

Irix History by Ryan Thoryk

IRIX is a computer operating system developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) to run natively on their 32- and 64-bit MIPS architecture workstations and servers. Based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions.

The current major version of IRIX is IRIX 6.5 which was released in May 1998. New minor versions are released every quarter. Through version 6.5.22, there were two branches of each release: a maintenance release that included only fixes to the original IRIX 6.5 code, and a feature release that included improvements and enhancements. An overlay upgrade from 6.5.x to the 6.5.22 maintenance release is available for free download, while version 6.5.23 and higher require an active Silicon Graphics support contract, despite only running on Silicon Graphics hardware.



The IRIX name was first used around the time of release 3.0 of the operating system for SGI's IRIS 4D series of workstations and servers, in 1988. Previous releases were identified only by the release number prefixed by "4D1-", eg. "4D1-2.2". The 4D1- prefix continued to be used in official documentation to prefix IRIX release numbers.



IRIX 3.x was based on UNIX System V Release 3 with 4.3BSD enhancements, and incorporated the 4Sight windowing system, based on NeWS and IRIS GL. SGI's own Extent File System (EFS) replaced the System V filesystem.

IRIX 4.0, released in 1991, replaced 4Sight with the X Window System (X11R4), the 4Dwm window manager providing a similar look and feel to 4Sight.



IRIX 5.0, released in 1993, incorporated certain features of UNIX System V Release 4, including ELF-format executables. IRIX 5.3 introduced the XFS journaling file system.

In 1994, IRIX 6.0 added support for the 64-bit MIPS R8000 processor, but was otherwise similar to IRIX 5.2. Later 6.x releases supported other members of the MIPS processor family in 64-bit mode. IRIX 6.3 was released for desktop systems only. IRIX 6.4 improved multiprocessor scalability for the Origin 2000 and Onyx2 systems and was marketed as "Cellular IRIX", although it only incorporated some features from the original Cellular IRIX distributed operating system project. IRIX 6.4 had severe reliability issues, limiting its adoption. IRIX development stabilized with IRIX 6.5, released in 1998. The current version of IRIX is 6.5.30, released in August 2006.



IRIX 6 is compliant with UNIX System V Release 4, UNIX 95 and POSIX (including 1e/2c draft 15 ACLs and Capabilities).

IRIX has strong support for real-time disk and graphics I/O. IRIX was one of the first Unix versions to feature a graphical user interface for the main desktop environment. IRIX was widely used in the computer animation industry and for scientific visualization due to its once-large application base.



IRIX uses the Indigo Magic Desktop, which by default uses the 4Dwm X window manager with a custom look designed using the Motif widget toolkit.

SGI Octane

SGI Octane - Wikipedia

SGI.com       SGI Octane 2

Inside SGI Octane

The SGI Octane (and the very similar SGI Octane2) are UNIX workstations marketed by SGI. Both are SMP-capable (up to 2 identical processors) workstations, originally based on the MIPS architecture R10000 processor. Newer Octanes are based on MIPS R12000 and R14000. Octane2 has four improvements compared to Octane. Octane2 has revised power supply, system-board and xbow. Octane2 also shipped with VPro graphics and supports all available VPro cards (V6, V8, V10 and V12). Later revision Octanes also included some of the improvements mentioned. The machines shared a codename "Racer" or "Speedracer" inside SGI.

The Octane was the direct successor to the SGI Indigo2, and itself was succeeded by the SGI Tezro, and its immediate sibling is the SGI O2. SGI withdrew the Octane2 from the price book on May 26 2004, and ceased Octane2 production on June 25th, 2004. Support for the Octane2 will be withdrawn in June 2009.