At my University, the CIS department had a bunch of really expensive SGI servers (Origin 2000’s) together in a server room that was kept at some chilly temp, 50° or 60° or something (nothing crazy). One weekend the power went out, and while the CIS department had battery backup for the machines, facilities didn’t have battery backup for the A/C. They said, afterward, that the temperature in the room climbed by 200°F within a dozen minutes, and all of the SGIs crashed. The hard drives in those were designed to be spun up exactly once - the machines, once powered up, were never powered down - and the abrupt shut down ruined all the disks. I don’t know what it cost to replace them, but it was a minor financial scandal.
I loved SGI at the time. SGI shipped that model in these giant, 8’x4’x4’ crates, on which they printed “TERMINATOR - THIS SIDE UP ⬆️”, which in the 90’s was hilarious.
A bonus, related power outage story: once a friend of our’s was working on her graduate thesis; she was a graphics artist, so it was a CGI animation she’d build on a NeXTSTEP desktop. A few days before submission, some drunk ran his pickup truck into a power line pole in the middle of the night and killed the power in the off-campus housing where she lived and was currently working on her almost-complete program. The surge wiped her project - again, mid-90’s, disk was expensive, tape was even more expensive, and few people did backups regularly. She was set back several months and had to submit a really early version of the film. That wasn’t a funny story; it was a traumatic experience for her, and we all felt terrible about it.
Those really were some wild-west days, though, and there was some seriously sexy, entirely unaffordable, hardware out there, before everything went beige. NeXTSTEP and SGI workstations were the pinnacle of style, but even Sun offerings had some pizzaz. It wasn’t until Jobs came back to Apple that computers started getting style again.
Sgi boxes were the shit, but they came with a crazy price tag. A friend bought their smallest one (indy I think) which was still quite fun even though it soon felt quite crippled compared to a basic pc with Linux.
Unrelated story, I managed to save an early model (iris 3020 iirc) from the trash and found a home for it in a technology museum. So that was nice.
Frankly whoever proposed a hard drive that couldn’t power down should’ve been backhanded by everyone in the room. Themselves included. Whatever team shipped that immediately evident error should’ve been fired. Not even “out of a cannon, into the sun.” Just regular told to pack their shit.
I may have misrepresented it: they may have been able to be parked, but that required a controlled shutdown - not a sudden hardware failure. And these were supercomputers, before cheap commodity hardware took over server rooms. It was common that these would be turned on and almost never be shut off except when being replaced.
Lots of hard drives required parking and would risk running the drive if the heads weren’t parked before being spun down. The design required the later of air from the spinning disks to float the heads over the disks - if you didn’t park the heads before spinning them down, the heads would touch down on the disks, sometimes while there were still spinning, and scratch the surface and ruin the disk.
Time for my funny story!
At my University, the CIS department had a bunch of really expensive SGI servers (Origin 2000’s) together in a server room that was kept at some chilly temp, 50° or 60° or something (nothing crazy). One weekend the power went out, and while the CIS department had battery backup for the machines, facilities didn’t have battery backup for the A/C. They said, afterward, that the temperature in the room climbed by 200°F within a dozen minutes, and all of the SGIs crashed. The hard drives in those were designed to be spun up exactly once - the machines, once powered up, were never powered down - and the abrupt shut down ruined all the disks. I don’t know what it cost to replace them, but it was a minor financial scandal.
I loved SGI at the time. SGI shipped that model in these giant, 8’x4’x4’ crates, on which they printed “TERMINATOR - THIS SIDE UP ⬆️”, which in the 90’s was hilarious.
A bonus, related power outage story: once a friend of our’s was working on her graduate thesis; she was a graphics artist, so it was a CGI animation she’d build on a NeXTSTEP desktop. A few days before submission, some drunk ran his pickup truck into a power line pole in the middle of the night and killed the power in the off-campus housing where she lived and was currently working on her almost-complete program. The surge wiped her project - again, mid-90’s, disk was expensive, tape was even more expensive, and few people did backups regularly. She was set back several months and had to submit a really early version of the film. That wasn’t a funny story; it was a traumatic experience for her, and we all felt terrible about it.
Those really were some wild-west days, though, and there was some seriously sexy, entirely unaffordable, hardware out there, before everything went beige. NeXTSTEP and SGI workstations were the pinnacle of style, but even Sun offerings had some pizzaz. It wasn’t until Jobs came back to Apple that computers started getting style again.
I wish companies still did things like the ‘TERMINATOR’ stamping on the crates. Gotta love the whimsy.
Sgi boxes were the shit, but they came with a crazy price tag. A friend bought their smallest one (indy I think) which was still quite fun even though it soon felt quite crippled compared to a basic pc with Linux.
Unrelated story, I managed to save an early model (iris 3020 iirc) from the trash and found a home for it in a technology museum. So that was nice.
Doing the work of the lord.
I wanted an Onyx for so long, until IIT no longer made any sense.
SGI was one of the good companies.
Frankly whoever proposed a hard drive that couldn’t power down should’ve been backhanded by everyone in the room. Themselves included. Whatever team shipped that immediately evident error should’ve been fired. Not even “out of a cannon, into the sun.” Just regular told to pack their shit.
I may have misrepresented it: they may have been able to be parked, but that required a controlled shutdown - not a sudden hardware failure. And these were supercomputers, before cheap commodity hardware took over server rooms. It was common that these would be turned on and almost never be shut off except when being replaced.
Lots of hard drives required parking and would risk running the drive if the heads weren’t parked before being spun down. The design required the later of air from the spinning disks to float the heads over the disks - if you didn’t park the heads before spinning them down, the heads would touch down on the disks, sometimes while there were still spinning, and scratch the surface and ruin the disk.
Thank you for the stories :)