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And then you had to buy the software. A license for a 3D modeling package like Softimage or Alias cost at least $10-15k, and you probably also needed a separate raytracing package for high-quality output.
Someone is selling a copy of Alias for SGI for $2500 on eBay today: https://www.ebay.com/itm/335622694059
But if, in 1994, you did have an SGI and Alias and enough artistic skill and technical competence (and patience…) to produce liquid logos and dancing soda bottles and face morphs, you would certainly recoup that $80k investment quickly. It was a very rare skill that needed very rare hardware. You could get highly paid freelance work by simply calling up ad agencies.
That scarcity a bit hard to imagine today, when anyone can download Blender onto their standard desktop computer and learn it by watching online videos. It’s cool that 3D art has been thoroughly democratized.
Steve Jobs wanted NeXT to essentially be SGI.
I have a soft spot for the Octane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Octane
The G4 cube, was Apple version of it whe when Jobs returned to Apple.
They were so expensive they only made sense to run 24/7/365 in order to get their money’s worth. They had a service engineer on call permanently who wasn’t allowed to be further away than 25 miles from the servers at any time.