Meet the SGI Octane - A 3D Graphics Powerhouse from 1997

Thanks for watching and a special thanks to Kai who donated this machine. Did you use an Octane? Do you have examples or work to share? If so leave a comment I'd love to hear from you. If you enjoy my content and would like to show support for The Cave then here's how you can help: ● Support RMC on Patreon: www.patreon.com/RetroManCave ● Treat me to a Coffee with Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/retromancave ● Leave a tip on Paypal: paypal.me/RetroManCave Thank you! Neil - RMC

I'm ex SGI and still use mine daily - I have an Indy, Indigo2, Octane2, 320, Origin 2000 and 2100 Desksides - my Octane2 w/V12 is my daily driver. I was a Sysadmin 1995 to 1999'ish on the main campus, then towards the end in the 'now' Google complex - I'd be happy to share stories. Those years were the best times of my life - what an awesome place to work!

I remember a long time ago when I was still living in Hawaii, I used to work for Xerox doing field repair work on Xerox low to mid volume copy machines. Had a call from the call center to go over to a company in downtown Honolulu called Square Inc (Not Square Soft). When I went over there, the first thing I noticed that everyone working there was Japanese. And that office was just filled with these Octane workstations. Something I'll never forget; that traditional SGI design asthetic and that super bright power indicator line that underlined the Octane logo. They were working on some sort of Anime looking show. The designs of the characters were amazing! What were they working on? I asked my host questions on the many SGI displays I seen in the office. He just gave me a polite nod and grin and politely escorted me to the Xerox 5034 that I was there to repair. Then 5 years later while watching a movie with my friends did I then realize. . .Holy shit. . .I witnessed the first workings of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within . . . at Square in downtown Honolulu . . . exclusively on SGI hardware.

I'd love a novelty mini fridge designed after the Octane.

Such wonderful machines. I have three SGI workstations in my collection, an indy, an O2, and an Octane2 with V6 graphics. If I can help with anything for your next episode I'd love to. I'm a graphics programmer and I've written OpenGL code on the SGI machines for fun, including stereoscopic rendering stuff for their 3D glasses port. I've also written a silly benchmark called "c-ray" initially for SGI machines, which the SGI hobbyist community popularized, and is now widely used to benchmark processor speed on all architectures, and which AMD used on stage to showcase their EPYC processors recently. One thing that comes to mind is that I could write an oldschool-enough OpenGL benchmark that will be able to run on both SGI IRIX and win9x, so that you can compare OpenGL performance between the SGI graphics hardware and PC 3D accelerators of the time like the riva128. I might even be able to port the same test to glide if you can spare enough time for this, to include 3dfx cards in the comparison, but this is a long shot if you intend to release your next episode soon.

In the early 00's I was a developer working on a cluster filesystem, snfs, used primarily in the rich media applications, but also in supercomputing. When SGI spun out the remnants of Cray, they were working on a massively parallel vector computer called the X1. We were hired to port our filesystem to the Cray X1, which had a mips-like vector processor and ran a derivative or irix. Since we certainly couldn't afford our own Cray, we had to develop with an Octane and a two-node Origin200 as stand-ins for the Cray hardware. By that time a low-end octane was pretty long in the tooth and an achingly slow substitute for a hundred/thousand processor supercomputer. Builds were not quite overnight affairs, but lord they weren't fast.

I worked for Gorilla Systems in 1996 and we had tons of Silicon Graphics systems for our 3D animators. I as a developer used a Pentium system. It was a great time to be a game developer.

Saw "SGI" in the title, clicked and liked immediately.

SGI computers also rendered the backdrops for the first 3 Resident Evil games. One scene took 3 weeks to render!

I worked for a firm that did plastic injection molds. They designed the mold on the Indigo2 and the Indy. One of them was maxed out with 640MB RAM. In those days, that was more than most peoples hard drives! It was unheard of. We ran a post-processor called WorkNC on them. Good times.

I used this for work. If you watched some of the 2D sequels done by Disney, they were ink and painted, as well as composited with these machines.

I worked for DeBeers in around 2003 at a sub-division that designed and manufactured diamond sorting machines all in a single building. The mechanical CAD team used SGI 02s exclusively up to that point, but it really was the tipping point that year. The price/performance ratio for PCs with GPUs meant that all the SGI, VAX, ALPHA, Sun and Transputer boxes were replaced with x86 by 2004. It was absolutely heartbreaking.

Those are not normal optical audio in/out plugs, they are meant for ADAT (Alesis Digital Audio Tape), a magnetic tape format used for the recording of eight digital audio tracks onto a Super VHS tape. And I also noticed, the Octane was "Made in Switzerland"?!?

I desperately want to see someone render something with this machine, I love the way early 3d renders look and something about these machines is really something else

FYI, when Octanes were around the Pixar renderfarm was all Sun workstations, not SGI. SGI's were great at real-time graphics, but the hardware was unnecessary (and way too expensive) for offline rendering. Everyone jumped ship to linux and intel hardware as soon as they could.

"That looks... proprietary." 'What does?' "All of it."

Aww man i remember the time back then when the name "silicon graphics" always made you think of CGI rendered pictures that were the highest quality you could get anywhere. THE standard that others had to compete against. And then suddenly… they were gone…

I was a one man IT Department in the 90's (still am :) ) and the company I was working for at the time, we got 5 octanes for the engineering department. I have no idea how much they paid for the hardware, but the Catia and Solidworks software was $150,000 Canadian and it forced me to learn the operating system and patching etc.. and setting up a secure FTP connection to the big 3 automotive companies, since they where being used for automotive engineering.

I spent the first 8 years of my CG career (from 95) working on a variety of SG machines, including the Octane. As well as a year training for a Masters at Uni prior to entering the industry. Fond memories of all the SG machines, I probably need to pick one up for old times sake!

My university used them as workstations in the CS department. We had a handful of Octanes, 15 or so O2s, a similar number of Indys and an Onyx or two in the visualization department. We mostly used them for programming exercises, though there were people doing 3D projects on them. They beat the shit out of the Sun 3 workstations (or the older HP workstations), but got sorely beat by a couple of discount beige-box Linux computers a couple of years later. When the SGIs were phased out, I had a choice of O2s, Indys and a couple of the more or less broken Octanes. In the end, I got 4 Origin 200s, including XIO cables. Even at the time the Origins were phased out, they were relatively powerful, but seeing how much power they used, I ended up giving them to a friend who would appreciate them more as I didn't see myself ever switching them on.