Comment by spankibalt
6 hours ago
Most beat it, e. g. the aesthetically much superior UI of the Canon Cat, which one can admire on the same website. Aside from that, many SGI computer cases look tacky, sort of like the N64 of the computer world; they also remind me a bit of Colani's case designs. Well, at least the guts were/are impressive.
Weird comment. They stood out positively in a world where literally everything was beige.
I fucking love beige! Besides, there were many non-beige PCs on the market, especially outside of the US. And no SGI workstation ever had the coolness factor of something like the all-black, pyramid-styled Meadata Systems/Technologies "Snofru" 386 workstation from 1989 (which might've been just a Tradeshow Special).
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Comparing IRIX 4DWM desktop to the Canon Cat is like saying you prefer the UI on your washing machine. Among workstations SGI was light years ahead - the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.
> Comparing IRIX 4DWM desktop to the Canon Cat is like saying you prefer the UI on your washing machine.
Equation (as opposed to comparison) and preference are two very different things, friend. And yes, I'm one of those weirdos who prefers minimal, low-color, high-res, high-contrast, and angular/facetted (almost brutalist) GUIs and TUIs to, say, SGIs offerings. Like the Canon Cat's and many others. We'll both live.
> [...] the engineering team had designers in it, and it shows.
The GUI is not as grotten ugly to me as those from most modern offerings, or certain vintage offenders, e. g. early-to-mid Workbench, Windows XP (excluding the Classic Theme), I'll give you that. But it certainly doesn't knock me out of my socks.
> high-res, high-contrast, and angular/facetted (almost brutalist) GUIs
The implied criticism here of IRIX being low res, low contrast and in any way having rounded edges demonstrates some serious ignorance of the subject.
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