…Backes and his team were able to feed their graphics directly to the appropriate monitors on stage…

At 24fps, with a 180° shutter angle, you'd have an exposure time of 1/48th of a second, around 20ms. With an OLED display and probably with an LCD that would still flicker at 60fps, so the phosphor on the CRTs is probably what makes it look good.

My experience in the 1990s machines were that SGI machines were falling down left and right.

There was that time I went up to Syracuse for a conference on Java in scientific computing and Geoff Fox put up a demo where two identical twins from Eastern Europe were working at two terminals simultaneously that they couldn't get to work. The punch line was "Never buy a gigabyte of cheap RAM!"

Another prof bought an SGI workstation without enough RAM, couldn't get anything done with it, left it plugged into the power outlet and Ethernet anyway, and we find out 8 months later the root password was the empty string.

My first decent *NIX computer was an SGI Indigo that I rescued from a dumpster at a military-adjacent subcontractor that was also my first tech job.

Hmmm. Probably it wasn't sterilized by the book.

I took that beast home and loved it. It was actually reasonably beefy even into 2001, and IRIX was very slick *NIX by 2000 standards. When you turned it on you could see my electric meter spin faster.

Came with a huge-for-the-time monitor, probably a 19", which caused some envy among friends.*