Where was this machine made?

I was using these in the UK at the time and ours were 'Made in Switzerland', which I liked.

You mention the Crimson in the article, another machine I knew in period. I was showing someone around one day and they rudely said that it was a 'very large box for a single CPU'.

My introduction to SGI was the Indigo and I usually had whatever was latest until I had O2s and a massive Onyx2 with Infinite Reality3. No machines have had the impressive presence that these machines had in period. Although nice hardware has came out since then, nothing just makes civilians drop their jaws in awe and wonder.

By analogy, it is like the difference between one of those vast organs that you get in cathedrals and the synthesisers you get in a music shop. Musicians would probably prefer the latter, but normies like me just don't get that wow feeling.

Although newer machines were better, I always felt that something was compromised each time. For example, the wonderful OG keyboards and ALPS mice, they got a little bit creaky and plastic over time. It was also the same with cases. I appreciated the design goals of O2 but it was very creaky and there was not the usual choice of video breakout boxes with genloc and all those fun things that we had back then.

For reference, my Onyx had 256Mb of RAM and 64Mb of graphics RAM, if I can remember correctly. This was less than the 384Mb I had in Indigo2 machines, which we had to boost due to a software memory leak just to get the runtime. This level of RAM was huge in period (when office PCs had 32K of video RAM, if you were lucky) and yet today a single tab running YouTube will take more than a gig of RAM.

I would like a mini-museum of SGI machines, however, without the hardware specific applications that I used these machines for, I feel that it would be a case of 'never meet your heroes'.

No machines have had the impressive presence that these machines had in period. Although nice hardware has came out since then, nothing just makes civilians drop their jaws in awe and wonder.

Eh, I don't know about that. The Onyx2 looks like a dorm fridge that also makes espresso. Meanwhile, here's Seymour Cray, inviting you to have a seat on his couch...

(author) Rear panel on this one says "Made in USA."

I suspect your dismissive coworker didn't realize everything else inside a Crimson. I just wish I had the space for one, even though I'd be using the workstations more.