There’s just something about backing the path, far from the cutting edge of discovering the simpler joys of yesteryear. We have a contest about to conclude along these lines, and there are festivals celebrating all things retro in the world of computers and electronics around the world. Vintage Computer Festival (VCF) Southwest happens back in the summer, but [Wave Design] just posted a glorious retrospective, complete with the full 1990s video-editing workflow, completed on an SGI O2.
The footage was recorded on a vintage DV camera from the 90s, and played with a slightly newer Sony tape deck, which we have to admit, also counts as retro in these late days. That’s piped into a vintage SGI O2 workstation that would have carried us back in the day, whose only concession to modernity is the inclusion of an NVMe SSD through a collection of adapters we can only call a hack. This may bury the woes deep, but it turns out that there is now an NVMe driver for IRIX 6.5. Save with a modern SSD [Wave] of dealing with the literal stack of external drives called video editing back in the day, so we can hardly blame him.
After the hardware walk-through, [Wave]The video comes in software that is surprisingly modern. The footage he creates is definitely not. It looks exactly like it was broadcast in 1996, perhaps after an episode of Reboot – which conveniently enough, also used SGI workstations in its production, although with a decidedly rare type of digital video tape.