SGI: Discussion

Thanks for the comments.

I think I'm going to keep the majority of my collection for now. I apologize if I made it seem like I was going to sell it all, I kind of posted the above in a semi-drunk fit of "fuck everything" depression (divorce went through last weekend, then I had to put down my Maine Coon three days later due to a formerly undiagnosed blood cancer). At the time all I was doing was work to keep my mind off everything and for some reason I thought that would be all I'd want to do from now on.

I will probably be selling the K570 (switching to a more manageable C8000), RS/6000 (-> Power 275), and ALR Revolution 6x6 (might try and buy a BeBox instead, the only thing the ALR has going for it is the LCD touchscreen and that novelty wears off after 10 minutes of listening to the thing in operation). I'll post that stuff here when I decide if nobody I know wants it first. I seem to have a lot of room in my house suddenly, so I might land up converting one of the bedrooms into an air-conditioned server room and installing desks around the entire wall perimeter for everything to live on in a less dungeon-like environment.

smj wrote: I would clone the system disk so that my Omron Luna 88k has something to boot from.

I'll see what I can do. I've never been able to get networking running on that machine for some reason, so I can't dump the disks to NFS. I'll have to unpack my SCSI drives and clone it to that, then try and get an image off there through another machine that has SCSI and network capabilities. At the same time, the machine did come with a bunch of tapes- they might be the installation sources for Mach, I'm not sure. If I can pull the drive and hook it up to another system then I'll try and image the tapes for you too.

-DN

smj wrote: There's an OpenBSD/luna88k port , but it doesn't support the framebuffer as far as I can tell...

It does, except for the ultra-rare 24-bit frame buffer (which is not well supported in Mach either).

Dennis Nedry wrote: I kind of posted the above in a semi-drunk fit of "fuck everything" depression (divorce went through last weekend, then I had to put down my Maine Coon three days later due to a formerly undiagnosed blood cancer).

I've certainly been in a similar state more than once, so no worries on that score.

Dennis Nedry wrote:

smj wrote: I would clone the system disk so that my Omron Luna 88k has something to boot from.

I'll see what I can do. ... At the same time, the machine did come with a bunch of tapes- they might be the installation sources for Mach, I'm not sure. If I can pull the drive and hook it up to another system then I'll try and image the tapes for you too.

That would be completely awesome. Anything you can do along these lines would be fantastic not just for me, but for anybody out there who later acquires or takes an interest in these machines, or this corner of the Mach story, 88k development, etc.

I might land up converting one of the bedrooms into an air-conditioned server room and installing desks around the entire wall perimeter for everything to live on

I don't know anyone with a house set up that way!

That really sucks about the divorce and your cat though. Hopefully the hobby's a way to get your mind off that. It certainly is for me.

smj wrote: I would clone the system disk so that my Omron Luna 88k has something to boot from.

<off-topic>
I could give you a raw (dd) image of the 230MB disk my Luna was fitted with when I received it. It's a 3.6ish OpenBSD install; enough to get a newer bsd.rd from the network and install from scratch on a larger disk. I'm afraid I don't have any UniOS material.
</off-topic>

I use my O2 purely for experimentation at the moment, and because I have a soft spot for it. Recently, I've dusted it off and have been enjoying trying to get it to do things it never used to do, like run quietly, run a modern monitor, play MP3s and that sort of thing. Nekochan has been immensely useful for this, and it's good fun!

My first introduction to SGI was in the latter part of the 90s. My dad was working for the Virtual Reality centre at a local university (as a mainly PC tech) and I was about 13 years old. They had a pile of Indigo 2s for 3D modelling, a lab full of Indys (for the students to learn on) and the main virtual reality auditorium consisted of a curved screen and triple projector setup which was powered by an Onyx 10000. Back in the 90s when I was used to a standard PC being a Pentium 166 with Windows 95, 16MB of RAM and a 3.2GB hard drive, I was amazed by this 1.6 million pound computer with 12 MIPS R10000 CPUs, 512MB of RAM and 40GB of disk. And the immersive 3D graphics it could produce on that huge screen for the time were amazing!

After a couple of years, they upgraded to a fully hemishperical virtual reality auditorium powered by 7 projectors and a brand new Onyx 2 to drive it all. The 3D developers kit had also expanded to include various Octanes and other later SGI machines. Again, sitting there in a fully 180 degree hemispherical 3D screen back in 2000 was an incredible experience.

Then in 2004, one of the guys I knew there told me that they were scrapping the old Indy lab and I acquired 3 fully working Indys for free. They only had 133MHz R4400 CPUs, 1GB hard drives and 128MB of RAM, but I loved finally having a couple of the things for myself (I gave the third away to a friend). The PSU in one of them blew (as expected), and they haven't been powered up for years, but I still have the pair of them and as far as I know, one is in fully working condition, as is the second apart from the duff PSU.

Then 2 years after that, I acquired 2 O2s for free from the University as well after they scrapped their final SGI labs and replaced them with cheap Linux powered PCs. One of the O2s was a dead one purely for spares, but the other was fully working and still is my main SGI machine. Initially, I used it a lot and experimented with it. I added a second 18GB disk, set up Sharity on it then used a perl script to mirror all my MP3s to it. It then served as a usual jukebox alongside my PC (allowing me to use the PC monitor for gaming etc whilst simultaneously being able to control all my music with XMMS). Then my MP3 collection outgrew the hard drive in it and I finally popped it into the loft and bought a PPC Mac Mini for playing with along side my PC.

And then, last month I moved house, got a bigger desk, moved my 4 SGI machines and thought "Hey, lets fire up the O2 again and have a play with it!". And here we are. Old, slow and clunky by today's standards, but a clean/streamlined OS and of course it's a beautiful little machine, despite being around 15 years old!

very nice intro Trippynet and welcome here

Trippynet wrote: And then, last month I moved house, got a bigger desk, moved my 4 SGI machines and thought "Hey, lets fire up the O2 again and have a play with it!". And here we are. Old, slow and clunky by today's standards, but a clean/streamlined OS and of course it's a beautiful little machine, despite being around 15 years old!

So... pictures?

I'll have to dust off my digital camera. Note that it's just a rather messy desk with an O2 & granite keyboard sitting next to a 27" TFT with a PC under the desk. Nothing special, although the O2 is in pretty immaculate physical condition, despite spending many years in a University student lab. The other O2 is physically in fairly bad shape and the Indys are currently in a cupboard under the stairs.

Oh, and one other thing I've since remembered which amazed me back in the 90s. Apart from the glorious purple Indigo 2s which scattered the developers lab (a far cry from the boring beige PCs of the time), the other thing I found amazing was that each one had a enormous 21" CRT as well. Again, back when the average PC had a 15" screen and a high end PC had a 17" screen, it was quite a sight.

Must admit, I'd love to own an Indigo 2 at some point...