SGI Indy – Reprint from my old site
Wow! I never thought I’d actually own one of these. After years of lusting after a work station like this I finally bought one on ebay from a guy in Leuven. I wanted an Indy so badly while I was in university. It was even on a fantasy shopping list which I kept in my Palm Pilot (along with a ’32 Ford hot rod and Lambretta. Well eventually I got the Lambretta too). It’s like owning a classic car, the quality of the construction is very high and the operating system, IRIX is very slick.
My fasination with these computers is centred around my interest in the movie special effects house Industrial Light and Magic. ILM re-invented the fading effects business in the mid seventies with its work on Star Wars. It was the first group to make the transition from the photo-chemical to the digital world, always using SGI equipment. ILM even have a technical partnership with SGI to share developments (called the JEDI agreement).
The IO capabilities of the Indy are quite amazing. ISDN, S-Video, RCA Analog Video and Digital camera input all come as standard. In fact there is a demo game that comes with the IRIX CDs that allows the user to control the game via the video camera! No need to touch the mouse or keyboard, the software determines your position in 3D from the 2D camera input. Along with the digital camera there is also an output for using LCD shutter glasses to allow the system to display stereo 3D.
Here is my machine. It’s an R5000 which means its one of the later models, which use the MIPS R5000 processor. This example is running at 150MHz with 32MB of RAM (maxed out at 256Mb in March ’03). When I bought it it was running Linux and came with no IRIX CDs or a screen. The price was rather low so I jumped at the chance to pick it up (on the train with my bike!). Only afterwards did I find out that IRIX system CDs are very hard to come by. Luckily I found an online shop in the UK called 13w3 (named after the video connector used in Sun and SGI UNIX boxes) run by a great chap called Ian who could sell me a copy of IRIX 6.2. For the first few months I managed to borrow a Sun 20″ multi-sync monitor from work which worked perfectly.
Recently I found a 17″ SGI/Sony monitor on eBay in the UK. It came from a guy in Leeds called James who runs a great SGI fan site called microcosmos. In this picture you can see the Indy is running the camera capture utility (that’s me in the window on the left of the screen taking the picture). It’s also running “fsn” the “Virtual Reality” file system navigator as seen during the infamous scene in Jurassic Park where the horrible girl says “I know this, it’s a UNIX system” (rest assured in the book it’s the boy who’s the computer nerd and the dinosaur nerd). Just to the left of the Indy you can see an Apple SE/30 running the fabled A/UX!
Here is a snapshot of the IRIX X Window desktop from my machine. You can see a terminal session, Netscape, the IRIS camera software and a game called Slotcar running. The slotcar game is one of a group of demos for SGIs Inventor software. Its fun, shows off the capabilities of the system very well and reminds me a lot of an arcade game called “Hard Driving” I played for hours as a teenager.
The downside to running a niche market operating system is that application software is quite difficult to come by. There are plenty of freeware open source utilities (all of the usual UNIX suspects) but finding commercial third party applications is very trying. This was always a problem when running Apple computers but the number of SGI machines around (especially in Europe) is far less. This is reflected in the prices of applications that sometimes appear for sale on the web. A copy of Adobe Photoshop 3.0 for IRIX and set you back by a lot of money.
This picture shows some optional input devices for SGI machines. The first is a Button box which extends the functionality of the keyboard. It allows the operator to assign key strokes to individual buttons. The second is a Dial box, this allows analog input to applications. For example it would be used by an animator to control XYZ transitions in a 3d modeling package.
Could it be possible that this device was inspired by the controls from the early motion control rigs at ILM? This picture shows ILM veteran Dennis Muren setting up a shot using the Dykstra-flex motion control rig built by ILM for The Empire Strikes Back. The dial control box he is using looks just like the box available from SGI 20 years later.
It seems likely as effects camera operators coming from the photo chemical world would have lots of experience using these devices but then have nothing similar when it comes to moving a virtual camera in software. Much like the DID (Dinosaur Input Device) developed by Phil Tippett (another veteran of TESB) for Jurrassic Park so that his animators would have something tactile to work with.
Issue 4 (1.04) of Wired magazine was so stoked by the machine that they gave it some column width. I found this copy of Wired in a charity shop just after acquiring the Indy. Wired wunderkind William Gibson is on the cover, I have to say I was a little skeptical but since starting to read his stuff a few years ago I’m hooked.
This is why I love eBay so much especially in the current economic climate where broke companies are off loading old stuff. Where else can you find great machines like this for a fraction of their former value. Boot sales and flea markets are fine for consumer items like old Macs but its on eBay that you see the real top line kit. I have no idea as to the origins of this particular machine. Leuven is a university town so I’m guessing that it was part of a media lab somewhere there. The previous owner didn’t hint as to where he’d got it, only that he was “running it with Linux as a DHCP server at home”. Well I didn’t want to press him on the point as he didn’t seem very keen to sell it and said he really needed the money.
Silicon Graphics ran this full page ad in the same issue. Click the image to see a larger version.
Here are some excellent Indy resources on the web.
- SGI Advice – Indy Page
- Obsolyte
- Reputable Systems – Indy Tech
- 13w3 Where I picked up the IRIX 6.2 CDs.
- microcosmos
- nekochan.net The Number one SGI Otaku
