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SGI Indigo2: An $86,000 Workstation from 1995

6 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this demo2 months2019–2024 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

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

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.

“he did a great video on it” (HN, 2024)

2 recommendations · 1 citations · Demos

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@ckozlowski Feb 2022 Recommends
on HN thread A baby saved ‘Toy Story 2’ from near complete deletion (2021)
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: [this video] , [link] Edit: It was Retro Man Cave, not Adrian's Digital Basement as originally written.
Covers SGI workstations like the Octane.
@pixelpoet Apr 2024 Recommends
on HN thread The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics
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: [this video]
Video on the SGI Indigo2 workstation.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@w_s_l Jun 2019 Cites it
on HN thread The charm of buying old workstation hardware on the cheap
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. [this 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.
SGI workstation as object of nostalgia.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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