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SGI Indigo2: An $86,000 Workstation from 1995

LGR · 2.2M views · 2017-01-06 · 12:01

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Overview

LGR looks at the Silicon Graphics Indigo2, a UNIX workstation that cost about $86,000 in 1995, covering its pros and cons, games it can run, and whether it is worth owning today.

On Hacker News

Recommended in threads about SGI and vintage workstations as a good look at the hardware.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2019–2024

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What people said

pixelpoet · 2024-04 · Recommendation

Random trivia which will likely get buried but whatever: the rendering software Octane Render got its name from my refusing to let the author use my rendering software's name, and he had some historical beef with us, the two devs of Indigo Renderer, so he named his renderer after the SGI machine that came after the Indigo, Octane. He also leant his SGI Indigo2 to the LGR guy on YouTube, and he did a great video on it: [VIDEO]

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ckozlowski · 2022-02 · Recommendation

You're on the right track. As told in the Next Web story, the workstation in question was a Silicon Graphics Octane or there abouts. These were incredibly expensive and were provided by the company. In addition, according to the story, they were the ones who set up the file sync for her to be able to work from home. LGR and RMC have both done videos on the SGI Octane and are worth watching: [VIDEO] , [LINK] Edit: It was Retro Man Cave, not Adrian's Digital Basement as originally written.

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w_s_l · 2019-06 · Reference

For one I would love to have an SGI workstation, I still have CG magazines from this era and its plastered everywhere in the ads, and I'm still amazed at the graphic output (so smooth) and what we had in the 90s. [VIDEO] I'd imagine something like this would've been used to make Crash Bandicoot and likes. It'd be really interesting to play games built on this thing.

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