Mastodawn

During production of Finding Nemo, we started using Linux boxes in addition to SGIs.
Why?

3D painting software we wrote for laying out coral was written in C++ using templates, and the debug info was too large for IRIX, but was debuggable on Linux.

Was this a 32 bit vs. 64 bit issue?

No.

IRIX reserved half the address space for the kernel, while Linux only did a quarter.

So on Linux, we had 3GB, and the symbols fit.

It was a 32 bit show, both machines had 4GB max.

Plenty for Finding Nemo.

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Michael B. Johnson 5d ago

How do I know this?

I was the project lead, although the best parts of it were written by my smarter collaborator Michael O’Brien (eventually SVP of R&D at Technicolor).

This story is *not* the 32 to 64 bit transition.

This is just us trying to get another GB of address space, where we leveraged the ongoing Linux port work w/alot of our own.

Now that I think about it, all the impactful work I’ve done in my career happened in 32 bits of address space.

4GB always seemed like a lot to me.

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Jochen Marschall

@siracusa
I don’t remember the year that I went to a fair in Cologne (I think it was something about print/pre-print) and saw SGIs for the very first time. It must have been in the mid 90s because they demonstrated Photoshop on their machines.
Anyway, what I took away was the slogan that SGI sells 64 bit Unix workstations.
Where do I go wrong in not understanding this 32 bit issue on hand?

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Arvid Requate 4d ago

@ritchey_de @siracusa yeah, I also recall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha - but I also recall switching to Linux as admin towards the end of the millennium, primarily for cost reasons (university). Maybe software support for 64 bit was still a limiting issue then.

DEC Alpha - Wikipedia