Lawrence D'Oliveiro
2024-09-07 03:37:07 UTC
There are quite a few retrocomputing channels on YouTube. Here are
some clips from a guy calling himsef “jpkiwigeek”. These are from
several years ago, and his channel hasn’t been active for a long time.
He has, or had, a barn absolutely full of old gear (with a corner of
it reserved for his wife to do her scrapbooking), and I admire a guy
with the hardware chops to actually try to get some of this old stuff
working.
Like this massive SGI Onyx2 cluster, of latter-1990s vintage,
consisting of five compute nodes and five graphics nodes. I think each
node on its own would have had a five- or six-figure price tag when
new, so imagine what the whole setup would have cost.
Tour, parts one and two:
Trying to start it up:
Notice how the graphics nodes are absolutely bristling with AV ins and
outs. Could it have been used for cinema work? Or just TV?
(Standard-definition, not HD back then.) All this fancy hardware was
presumably in aid of real-time output, as opposed to taking your time
rendering out high-quality frames at one every few minutes or few
hours and encoding them into a real-time animation in a separate step
-- which is the current approach.
Wonder what the point of that real-time output was? I was thinking
“output to videotape”, but I understand there were available special
VCRs that could capture a frame a time. Or maybe the quality of
step-frame capture wasn’t the best? But they could still render a
bunch of frames, say a few tens of seconds or even a minute at a time,
play them back in real-time from disk or RAM (surely not beyond the
capabilities of such a highly-specced setup) to be capture to tape,
and then edited together into a longer, seamless whole?
Or was this going out for real-time broadcast?
some clips from a guy calling himsef “jpkiwigeek”. These are from
several years ago, and his channel hasn’t been active for a long time.
He has, or had, a barn absolutely full of old gear (with a corner of
it reserved for his wife to do her scrapbooking), and I admire a guy
with the hardware chops to actually try to get some of this old stuff
working.
Like this massive SGI Onyx2 cluster, of latter-1990s vintage,
consisting of five compute nodes and five graphics nodes. I think each
node on its own would have had a five- or six-figure price tag when
new, so imagine what the whole setup would have cost.
Tour, parts one and two:
Trying to start it up:
Notice how the graphics nodes are absolutely bristling with AV ins and
outs. Could it have been used for cinema work? Or just TV?
(Standard-definition, not HD back then.) All this fancy hardware was
presumably in aid of real-time output, as opposed to taking your time
rendering out high-quality frames at one every few minutes or few
hours and encoding them into a real-time animation in a separate step
-- which is the current approach.
Wonder what the point of that real-time output was? I was thinking
“output to videotape”, but I understand there were available special
VCRs that could capture a frame a time. Or maybe the quality of
step-frame capture wasn’t the best? But they could still render a
bunch of frames, say a few tens of seconds or even a minute at a time,
play them back in real-time from disk or RAM (surely not beyond the
capabilities of such a highly-specced setup) to be capture to tape,
and then edited together into a longer, seamless whole?
Or was this going out for real-time broadcast?