Oh how I lusted over the Challenges, the Octanes, the Indigo2s of the time. It was a revelation when I finally was able to sit down at a console of an Octane (with two, count 'em TWO R14000 and a whopping 2.6G of RAM), tooling around in IRIX via 4dwm was so much more satisfying than today's UIs. It was snappy and low-latency unlike anything I've used since.
Later on, I was able to do some computational work on an Altix 3700 with 256 sockets and 512G of RAM spread over four full-height cabinets with the nest of NUMAlink cables at the back), at the time running SuSE linux and that was wild seeing the 256 sockets being printed out with a cat /proc/cpuinfo. Now the same capabilities are available in a 4U machine.
The corporate lineage story is also just as interesting as the hardware they made as well. Acquisition, spinoff, acquisition, rename, acqusition, shutter, now perhaps just a few books and binders and memories in the few remaining personnal at HPE are all that's left (via Cray, via Tera, via SGI, via Cray Research).
I still keep a maxed out Octane2 in running order for posterity. Occasionally logging in to it reminds me just how a desktop environment should feel. We truly have lost something since then.
I really wish they'd do movies like they made for RIM about: Cray, DEC, Compaq, SGi, Pixar. sounds like these places were either wild or strait up IBM culture or some clash or both either inside or outside. Raven and id Software would be neat too. Westwood Studios.
Later on, I was able to do some computational work on an Altix 3700 with 256 sockets and 512G of RAM spread over four full-height cabinets with the nest of NUMAlink cables at the back), at the time running SuSE linux and that was wild seeing the 256 sockets being printed out with a cat /proc/cpuinfo. Now the same capabilities are available in a 4U machine.
The corporate lineage story is also just as interesting as the hardware they made as well. Acquisition, spinoff, acquisition, rename, acqusition, shutter, now perhaps just a few books and binders and memories in the few remaining personnal at HPE are all that's left (via Cray, via Tera, via SGI, via Cray Research).
RIP SGI