Many new members here might never have seen how things were like in Discreet Logic times in the 2000s where SGI computers were the coolest things ever, making our Inferno* / Fire* products shine. Since everything is on the internet, have a look at this nice piece of history captured by our Inferno jedi @cnoellert at the time he was living in nice Sweden and got “molested” by Batch
Video courtesy of our friend @Bjorn_Benckert, who shared this memory on Facebook this week.
For context, this was while we were still building the shop. Syndicate wasn’t finished at this point—the machine room was still WIP, the suites were still WIP, reception was still WIP but we had jobs that needed to be done so we did them. We built two beds into the closet so we could sleep during long renders during long nights.
The two Onyx2s were single RM, SDIO board only. Flint on the Octane and Max on the PCs. Cineon was running on the RE2. We hadn’t installed the Genesis at this point.
It’s hard not feeling insanely nostalgic when I watch this. I was 25 and Björn was 26 and so were Pernie and Petter, I think… Mattias and Jempa might have barely been 21 or 22. Our lives were still sprawling out in front of us and the horizon was super diffuse. We were invincible.
Since we were talking LTO - 2000 vintage HP SureStore tape library - 4 drives, 40 tape slots…
Not sure if this was LTO1 or DLT actually. Designed and built the field service software for it. And have a patent that totally is an intuitive invention for any engineer, but serviced the patent metrics well.
Took a while of digging around the on the Internet archives. Found a few images from my first computer - a self-build project of a Motorola 68K CPU, basic CRT, and audio-tape storage interface… October 1984.
Back then self-built meant you got a blank PCB, the boot EEPROM and PAL chips, then you went to the electronics store bought a big bag of ICs, resistors, capacitors, etc. and went to work with your soldering iron.
No OS back then, just a basic BIOS that allowed you to write assembly code.
Much has changed in 40 years. No longer have the computer nor the Oscilloscope I needed to debug it, but I still do have the multi-meter I used back then. Still works and gets pulled out from time to tim.
… 
