Silicon Persistence

Hey all, Ernie here with a recent piece of mine that also showed up in Motherboard. In case you haven’t read it yet, it’s a good one and highlights both SGI and the the excellent community IRIX.cc. Read on, and hope you dig!

Today in Tedium: Recently, I was faced with an unusual question about a piece of hardware that very few people have ever used. The question: What makes a giant workstation, one that once cost as much as a house when it was first produced in the early ’90s and makes as much noise as a vacuum, so appealing to a 16-year-old? Unlike an old Super NES or Amiga, there isn’t really a nostalgia factor to the Silicon Graphics Onyx when it was released a quarter-century ago, unless you spent time designing games rather than playing them during the Clinton era. But the video evidence was there: A Canadian teenager had gotten his hands on an Onyx, a device best known as the primary software development platform for the Nintendo 64, and in the video he published highlighting the ins and outs of the gigantic machine, he was clearly psyched about it. He’s not alone, either: A passion for SGI lingers well into the modern day. Today’s Tedium talks all about it. — Ernie @ Tedium

The hardware may be the same, but the SGI community is evolving

Something you might not pick up from a cursory watch of the video profile of the SGI Onyx, featured above, is that its creator, who calls himself Dodoid online, represents something of the new face of a relatively old form of computer collecting.

One does not acquire a 250-pound Onyx supercomputer by accident. This is an incredibly complex machine—with graphics that were beyond state of the art at the time of its release and still hold their own today, loaded with gigabytes of RAM at a time when computers of its era counted RAM in the tens of megabytes, reliant on a MIPS chip architecture at a time when PCs used Intel and Apple used PowerPC, and with a facade that recalls a fancy air conditioner more than anything else—and Dodoid is deeply familiar with its many parts. Perhaps it’s for that reason, and his matter-of-fact approach to presenting the machine, that his video has received nearly 600,000 views on YouTube since it was posted last month.

Dodoid, shown with an Onyx. (YouTube screenshot)

Dodoid, who prefers to keep his online presence separate from his his real-life one, was born in 2002, at a point when SGI was already in the midst of a lengthy decline in influence—and nearly a decade after SGI had its pop-culture peak after one of its workstations was sabotaged by Wayne Knight’s character in Jurassic Park. It’s a fascinating machine, but not exactly a common one.

But long-timers in the SGI community, like Ian Mapleson, a British computing expert who has long run a website that sells equipment for the machines, were quick to compliment Dodoid’s work.

“Dodoid is awesome,” he told me in an email. “His enthusiasm reminds me of me back when I first got into SGIs in 1993, though honestly he’s a heck of a lot smarter than I am, and he’s jumped into all this tech stuff 15 years earlier than I did.”

The 16-year-old, who pays for his SGI hobby via a laptop resale business, finds himself a leading light in the SGI scene due in no small part to that passion, though shifts in the SGI community itself have also played a role: Just a few months ago, the main forum for the community, a site called Nekochan, was shut down, precipitating a subcultural sea change.

Its founder, a man named Peter Plank (who goes by Nekonoko online), publicly blamed the shutdown on the challenges of complying with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). While GDPR played a role in the shutdown of a number of legacy data-driven platforms, most notably Klout, it’s possible that even a community of supercomputer enthusiasts would face the same kinds of legal problems, though a stringent regulatory rule like GDPR could potentially put any organization on notice. Nonetheless, Nekochan is gone.

Plank, who I haven’t been able to contact despite multiple requests for an interview, hasn’t offered any further context as to the shutdown or whether the site, with its wiki and in-depth forums, will return in some way, but whatever his reasoning, the situation has created a deep information void in the SGI community.

Mapleson noted that the site’s four-month hiatus has left a long line of broken URLs in its wake. “It’s been gone so long now that Google has wiped those entries from its search system as well, so now it’s almost as if the site never was,” he wrote.

These machines, full of parts that could break down at any time and reliant on an operating system that stopped being officially updated more than a decade ago, have basically stayed alive out of the sheer will of its small community of users. With the shut down of Nekochan, that will was tested.

Replacing this font of vintage workstation knowledge is IRIX.cc, a website intended to get around a Nekochan rule against reselling software, but now at the center of the SGI community. Raion, a 24-year-old Virginia sysadmin who helps run the site and asked not to use his real name for privacy reasons, said that Nekochan’s shutdown required him to significantly increase resources for the site. But the really hard part about it is the additional moderation need that the community requires.

“I do the very best I can to give answers to anybody who comes in or if I don’t know the answer, I try to ping a user who may know,” he explained. “Running a community such as this is 10 percent knowledge and 90 percent leadership.”

Considering the complexity of the machines, institutional knowledge is an incredibly important part of SGI’s continuing survival. But, when it comes to Nekochan, at least, one might wonder if the issues that come with running an online community for more than a decade played a role in its demise.

Dodoid, who also asked not to use his real name, suggested the existence of an online community around SGI, even with the elements of friendship and camaraderie that naturally build up around hobbies of this nature, highlights something of a degree of necessity.

“IRIX.cc only took over when Nekochan died and it became clear that it wasn’t coming back,” Dodoid, who serves as a moderator for the community, explained. “Something else could only take over if the same happened to IRIX.cc. All this to say, the community is tight-knit out of necessity. We have to stick together and one site has to be the focal point of our world.”

To put it another way, he explained, IRIX.cc is the center of the SGI world because that’s where everyone has landed—whether they actually like the platform or not.

The SGI community has only occasionally gotten notice from the outside world. In 2004, for example, the community got a shout-out from Wired, which highlighted many of the major players at the time, including Mapleson and Plank.

But this kind of exposure is rare, and SGI systems don’t get anywhere near the notice that more mainstream vintage systems, like the Commodore Amiga, the Apple II, and the DOS-era IBM PC, have received.

Which creates an interesting dynamic for folks that haven’t closely observed the SGI scene. Retro collecting for SGI doesn’t work like you’d expect.

Ian Mapleson, shown with an Onyx 3800. (courtesy of the subject)

How an enthusiast community changes over a quarter-century

The thing about SGI that makes it interesting to consider from an online community standpoint is that, even though it’s fairly small now, it has a reach that dates back to some of the earliest days of the internet.

Mapleson has experience on the SGI platform dating back to the days even before the web browser Netscape—a company cofounded by longtime SGI head Jim Clark—so as a result, he’s seen the SGI community shift a lot over the last quarter-century. Mapleson says that during the early 90s, hobbyists were fairly uncommon, and only appeared in force after the used market had built up to some degree in the late 90s. Before that, SGI-focused commenters came from academia, the business world, and even SGI itself, and would often use Usenet to communicate.

The volatile nature of Usenet, the place where the flame war gained its name, was generally not as deeply felt on the SGI groups, which were not in the “alt” section and were moderated. Responses were generally delayed, which helped define the tenor of the general conversation, and the groups were helped along with detailed FAQs.

Of course, all of these knowledgeable folks weren’t exactly welcoming to outsiders.

“I remember one perfectly sensible question from a PC user who asked, ‘What is an SGI?’; the answer he received, ‘If you don’t know, you can’t afford one,’ was of course amusing to everyone else at the time, but it was also a sign of where things were going wrong,” Mapleson recalled.

An SGI Fuel next to a ZX81. (courtesy of Mapleson)

As the web era got going, a number of SGI enthusiast sites gained momentum (often with out-of-date designs that could be used on IRIX-capable web browsers), but one site or another faded from view or stopped getting updates. Nekochan, when formed in the early 2000s, was one of many sites focused on SGI issues. But it eventually became much more of a centralized resource for the community.

The differences between Usenet and web technology, Mapleson noted, had an effect on the way people in the community worked with one another.

“In a way, the instant nature of modern forums like Nekochan make it too easy for people to react to something with emotion rather than intellect, they say things they later regret; people know they can edit posts of course, but by then, the damage may have been done,” Mapleson stated. “With Usenet, basic arguments were less likely, the system as a whole felt more formal.”

Nekochan was active for around 15 years, outliving SGI itself and allowing the culture to coalesce around the site. During this period, the SGI employees faded from view and the hobbyists became more prominent. While people like Mapleson, who have a professional interest in the platform as well as a personal one, have maintained a presence in the scene, other long-timers have faded in and out of view.

SiliconClassics’ Aaron Rogers, who was responsible for the discovery of the source code for the Nintendo 64 game Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on an SGI Indy workstation last year, notes that his interest in the platform has faded some over time.

“I think I’ve taken my interest in SGI as far as I care to, at least for now,” he wrote in an email. “I own all the SGI systems I ever wanted and most of them have been stuck in storage for years.”

A community of this nature, focused on a line of computers that few people outside of the world of film, academia, and industry have even had a chance to try, is going to be by default fairly insular. If old-timers fall away, at some point, so does the institutional knowledge.

That’s why users like Dodoid and Raion, young and fairly passionate about what the SGI platform represents, are so important to this community right now.