Continuing with classic movies, Jurassic Park was syndicated the living daylights out of, 25 years ago.  It might be on 24/7 nowadays for animals who still pay for cable.  The sequels are all but forgotten but the original has become a god tier meme.

Younger lion didn't appreciate just how much this movie promoted SGI.  It might have been the only reason they got famous in the 90's.  The trinitron for the mac was actually better in 1993 than any CRT lions would ever have at home.  The SGI actually had a shadowmask monitor, which matched the peculiarly obsolete monitors of SGI's younger lion noted.

The shadow mask had a CU which actually looks fake.  All the cells had the same color when real shadow masks had a different color in each cell.

Lions took but 1 photo of a real shadow mask on May 4, 2005. 

There was a more subdued mac, showing video in a quicktime player.  In 1993, that alone would have been stunning.  The SGI was running demos.   Except for an enhanced version of flight on the irix, the demos never impressed lions.

Only later in the game do we see how the SGI would normally have been used, with xterm & xosview in SGI's trademark italic helvetica.  It was showing 4 CPU's.  Many viewers must have pondered if this system with 4 CPU's was real.  Obviously, the way Lion fvwm has been configured for the last 30 years is not the way it was in IRIX.  They had less beveling & fatter grey borders.  Lion FVWM has emulated CDE.

The now legendary file browser scene was 1h53 in.  Even young lion had trouble seeing how it was possibly useful but it must have sold a lot of SGI's, along with that nugget about 4 CPUs. 

Young lion wasn't impressed in the blackhawk theater in 1993.  The pacing seemed to stutter & actors were overly dramatic.  The monsters weren't all that scary. 

By 1993, SGI's had been behind the scenes of most movies of the last 10 years.  It might have been the 1st time they were pitched as a user facing platform rivaling Windows.  They really thought this minimal UNIX interface with very little software was going to replace windows.  The reality is 30 years later, every serious program is written from the ground up to run on all 3 platforms.  It definitely involves giving up advantages of UNIX.

 

There were what looked like 5 Sun workstation pizza boxes, but with no obvious logo. 

IMDB pegged the deskside confuser here as an SGI crimson. Crimson came out in 1992 & Onyx came out in 1993, in the same case.  Kind of unimaginable 150Mhz  clockspeed in a time when lions were in high school.

 

 A lion could only dream of having a desk surrounded by that much big iron, nowadays.  Younger lion was surrounded by a jungle of accumulated, donated hardware until around 2008, but the space requirement & the cost of running it all became unaffordable.  Systems were getting outdated too fast to justify still using them in a renderfarm.  The last systems were all scrapped to save space. 

In some ways, lions still are surrounded by big iron, but they're all raspberry pi's, microcontrollers, & 1 laptop.  They all have more clockcycles than the past jungle & serve a purpose equivalent to what the PC's were doing in the past, manely robot control, machine vision, packet routing, data logging, audio capture, image display. 

 Also noted OpenGL began at SGI.  That has always given it a special appeal.

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It's the 70's & 90's here.