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SGI IRIS 2400 (1985)

VintageCG · 122.1K views · 2010-03-07 · 5:51

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Overview

A short demo reel of the 1985 Silicon Graphics IRIS 2400 workstation animating flat-shaded polygons on a 68010 CPU. It shows the early SGI graphics that preceded their later fame.

On Hacker News

HN shares it as a classic glimpse of early SGI hardware graphics in retro-computing and IRIX threads.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2013–2023

Topics

History of computingComputer graphics & renderingDemoscene & retrocomputing
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sgiiris 24001985retrocomputingcomputer graphics

What people said

luciusdomitius · 2023-09 · Reference

XFCE is frankly the last full featured Desktop Environment, truly focusing on responsiveness and zero-lag SGI-style: [VIDEO] MacOS X, Windows and the mainstream Linux DEs have nice animations, but it is fun watching them the first day. After that it is just annoying. Really hope that Wayland integration works well for them.

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kloch · 2023-05 · Reference

Classic SGI demo video from 1985: [VIDEO] I remember when my dad brought a VHS copy of this home. I couldn't believe the high-res smooth color graphics.

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kristopolous · 2013-11 · Reference

I found a 68K SGI Iris 2400 machine up and running in college in about 2004. It had a sticker with the hostname on it. Later on that week, I went to the department homepage, got the staff roster and tried to guess the usernames. I telnetted to port 25 and tried RCPT TO hypothesized names, like so $ telnet host 25 MAIL FROM: a@a.com 250 Sender OK RCPT TO: afranks 550 Recipient not found RCPT TO: arty.franks 250 Recipient OK ... With this list of usernames I logged into the FTP to try to guess trivial passwords: $ telnet host 21 USER arty.franks User OK PASS 1234 Login failed PASS password ... Eventually I got a valid username/password combo. Now I can just telnet <host> and log in. I got a line like this: Last login April 12, 1992. $ It had this ancient version of IRIX on it, a hard drive under 100 MB, no X, a version of egcs, some ancient version of perl, no bash, and I think 12MB of RAM? It was fun, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. We executed this attack from the school library. Putz'd around a bit, in amazement of how old it was, and that it was still online, and then logged out - never to return. [VIDEO] - a video of the machine

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Sources

Video by VintageCG, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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