I received a demo of a $250k SGI when I was about 14 (1990). It powered a military F16 flight simulator and the experience was nothing short of mind blowing. Those machines were tightly packed magic.
My first job out of college was implementing the image generator for the simulator for the landing signal officer (LSO) on the USS Nimitz.
It ran on an 8 CPU SGI Onyx that was about the size of a refrigerator. The view was from the position of the LSO, at the aft end of the carrier deck. In the actual installation, the images were projected onto curved screens giving a 270 degree FOV. I do wish I could have seen the final product!
When I was in Civil Air Patrl, we went to Fallon Naval Airstation in Nevada, when they were still doing Top Gun there.
The flight review theatre was AMAZING, it had a huge screen, and the graphics were 3D wireframe - but they had the entire valley modeled and had a huge trackball and they could review the flight scenes in 3D -- this was ~1988/89
It was amazing... but I am not sure if it was backed by SGI, but based on your comment, I believe it would have been.
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I bought one of the early OpenGL capable graphics cards frm Evans and Sutherland in ~1997 to run Softimage on Windows NT with a Dual PII 266 based machine...
The card had 32MB of graphic ram. it cost me $1,699 -- and it was a full length AT board.
I was trying to get an O2 -- but it was way out of my price range.
Sorry, I've posted this before so always feel like blabbering if I repeat - but here goes - I was 14, my dad had a print business and printed all the cockpit panels for a private company developing an F16 simulator for the Israeli air force. He took me to their offices one weekend.
The setup was a full 180 degree screen projections, a realistics 1:1 F16 cockpit with all the panels and buttons etc, and a SGI running the show. They gave me the spinning Beatle car demo, and then sat me down to fly. That day left a hard imprint (including the price tag on the SGI which they were proud to mention). I was an Amiga kid, and to top it all off, the other room had what seemed like hundreds of Amigas, which were used to build 3D models for the simultaor.
I remember that flight simulator demo, it was something you'd find at events and trade shows or even super fancy arcades. This was back in the first VR 'boom' and tail end of the era of arcades. Some companies used SGI and similar powerful workstations to build simulator game pods, like for mechwarrior and spacecraft racing games. People would pay for a 5-10 minute session in one.
"Demo" can mean a lot of things. Getting hands on a VIP pass at an airshow meant I received, as an 8 year old, a rather comprehensive demo... of JAS-39 Gripen multirole fighter jet. Just the seat I sat for half an hour cost $250k.
Sometimes you can get yourself into really interesting places :)
