Chances are you've never heard of this machine, but maybe some of you have? Is an SGI thread ridiculous?

Chances are you've never heard of this machine, but maybe some of you have? Is an SGI thread ridiculous?

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forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=16730737
sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/mailman/message/29647655/
archive.org/details/cdromsoftware?and[]=SGI&sort=-publicdate&page=2
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SGI is cool but it's basically 'nerd's first 'obscure' tech company'.

No one has one because every retard is a collector that thinks it's worth 600 dollars.

They just need to opensource IRIX and the desktop.

That's never happening now that HPE owns SGI.

Managed to get a good deal on some machines and spare parts from a guy that was selling his collection. Still, $300 Indys are ridiculous.

But I thought HPE spun out to microfocus.

My dad is a movie/TV art director and my mom used to run the trailer department at one of the major studios (She was actually responsible for the first full implementation of a digital NLE system at a major studio.) Both sides used a lot of SGI machines in the early days of computers in the industry.

I'd pay like 50 bucks for a good spec O2, but I've seen maybe 2 sell for that and they've all be in California with no shipping available.

Yeah, the deal that I got was a couple old laptops for a whole pile of machines, so probably about $50 worth of value went into the O2, but it was along with a lot of other machines and obviously I paid more $ worth of laptops than that for the whole lot.

Whether IRIX went to Microfocus is still unclear. I have heard rumors about some of the code being torrentable, but not all of it and you might never find a seed.

IIRC SGI released parts of the source of IRIX for some maintenance thing but not all of it.

Some people want to have the ARCS firmware source so that they can build newer, faster CPU modules that you can upgrade your firmware to use, but getting that done would be quite a challenge (no pun intended) even if you had code and access to a lot of old MIPS processors.

>Whether IRIX went to Microfocus is still unclear
I'm sure it would, microfocus is a company that collects antiques.

ex-SGI. I've fixed a lot of Octanes. Swapped the power supply on twin tower too :) Making me remember the good old days. Thanks.

I bought a nice 250 MHz/MXE Octane from weirdstuff for $50 in 2014, died three fucking days after I got it home and won't turn on at all.

At least I still have my VW, maybe some day I'll get my hands on a nice O2 to pair with it.

People on Nekochan will sell the damn things for a song if you live nearby, I saw a POWER Indigo2 on there a while ago for $150, which isn't bad considering how rare they were, Indies, teal Indigo2s and even low-end O2s can go for as low as $20-$50, even free depending on the circumstances under which they're getting rid of it.

IRIX is likely so riddled with other companies' IP that it would be an absolute legal nightmare to BSD/GPL it, and it wouldn't accomplish shit anyway. Just look at CDE for fuck sake, GPL'd for four years and it still can't even compile properly without introducing major security vulnerabilities, and that shit has much more practicality and "community backing" than IRIX ever will.

Nobody's going to put in the work to get it running on x64, neither is anybody going to audit the damn thing, let alone even figure out how the fucking thing works since the hardware it was built on is so [publicly] undocumented it's practically alien technology. Relicensing is not a panacea.

Maybe a PSU? I have heard of Octane PSUs dying unexpectedly. Does anything look wrong with the machine? Burning smell? Did you touch the compression connector?

My mom's exboyfriend worked for Disney. It's hard for me to thing of SGI as obscure. I saw hundreds of workstations as a kid.

>IRIX is likely so riddled with other companies' IP that it would be an absolute legal nightmare
Sun managed to do it with Solaris.

>People on Nekochan will sell the damn things for a song if you live nearby
I've never seen that. I see things regularly going for 400-500 dollars.

What particular machines did they use? Just curious. Did you ever see any non-workstations (Onyx, Origin, Challenge, etc)?

>Just look at CDE for fuck sake, GPL'd for four years and it still can't even compile properly
It compiles fine. If you are worried about the security vulnerabilities, you patch them.

I feel the PSU is probably the issue, I noticed a little rust on the fan grate when I got it and the fan itself spins a little when you plug it in at first, just doesn't respond to the power button. No smells or any odd sounds though.

>Did you touch the compression connector?
Don't think so, wouldn't you pretty much know immediately if you damaged it? I pulled the boards a couple times to check part numbers but I remember always handling them by the edges and I didn't notice any fingerprints or other signs of contact on those connectors when I opened it up last about three months ago or so.

But it was 2 years ago, so my memory's just fuzzy enough it makes me wonder if I really want to risk another $100 on a power supply in case it turned out that I was that fucking dumb.

I think Solaris was a bit of a different story, but I'm quite tired and having trouble turning up results on exactly how they managed to do it. Still, I'll stick by my main statement: it won't accomplish much. IRIX would need a lot of work to bring it up to snuff, you'd maybe see some more glaring security holes patched up quicker but no major improvements otherwise.

Here's a guy earlier this year that had a nice looking O2 R12K/300 up for $140:
forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=16730737
You just have to be patient with these kinds of listings, but they do show up.

As far as I'm aware CDE still requires you to run rpcbind in insecure mode which can introduce a few major vulnerabilities, and it's been known pretty much since they released it under an open license. If you have anything to the contrary, however, I'll gladly concede, but it seems like it hasn't been patched, skimming sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/mailman/message/29647655/ seems to imply that there was no real universal solution for every distro? Whatever the case, CDE's still really neglected even after being opened up. It's not always as easy as "just patching it"

If you buy a new PSU and it doesn't fix it, you can safely assume the old one is alright and resell it or the new one without losing much value. A nekochan "hardware wanted" post might help you get one for less than $100, but since it's one of the first parts to go on most machines there may be nobody willing to part with theirs.

That's true, I guess. Not like I'm in it much anyway, the same config on Mapleson's depot is like $600+whatever ungodly trans-atlantic shipping charges it would incur.

It's been about 20 years, but in the past I've used SGI's to run the very first Stratasys fused deposition machines.

>SGI is cool but it's basically 'nerd's first 'obscure' tech company'.
I think Sun would be more fitting for that desu, don't see a lot of SGI users/owners here very often, definitely not as much as fellow slowlaris hipsters

>tfw bought an SGI O2 for my birthday a couple years ago and it never recognized the optical drive I bought for it

I've seen them at computer expos in the mid 90's, looked badass as fuck but the price tag was insane

We had some people who unironically used IRIX boxes as their daily driver
Dunno' if they're still around

I received 2 SGI O2s from a company that upgraded to some newer hardware

They were legitimately cool machines. At the time they crushed Photoshop and video rendering the modular system was really nice and Irix OS reminded me of BEos was able to handle lots of simultaneous processes at during the time of mac system 7 and windows Me

They would have been insane to not charge that price considering who wanted their machines.

there is one of these with no os on sale at a local computer graveyard.

i don't know what i would do with the fucking thing

I used to covet these so much when I was younger. Didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of raising the cash.

Ahhhh, nostalgia ^^

I have 3 of them, and an o2.

ama

tl;dr you fell for the unix meme

I LUSTED for some Silicon Graphics BITD. I remember the first time I saw the tower in an issue of Computer Shopper... Oh if I had the money then. Kudos to you cool kids.

The only person I've heard talk about SGIs was a furry admin at Digiclipse

you rang?

thank god I don't on the first revision unified heatsink BGA nightmare.

>On August 11, 2016, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced its intention to acquire SGI for $275 million, a deal expected to close near the beginning of 2017.[1]

RIP

i remember you telling me about this

we /irix/ now

is it still dead?

I like these SGI machines, but at those eBay prices, the price-to-fun ratio makes a purchase way too unjustified. Would be nice to fondle one for a bit, but not have one permanently in my posession.

THICC

never was dead. just never tried turning it on yet because it's massive enough I need a proper desk and monitor setup to use it with during testing, and a clutter-free space at that.

won't have that until the bedroom is done being cleaned up. also have that Indy still which is probably DOA anyway, because most of them need a major re-capping job done in the PSU to begin with at this point in time. what I can say about the machine though, is that NJIT had some interesting computer names that I can say I'm OK with. pic related. Indy has two drives.

golden nugget.

&& muh rams.
I'm hoping to find a more permanent home for the Indy sometime soon. I'm actually afraid to power it on because of the known PSU issues until I can either crack the PSU open and inspect it, or have someone else a bit more qualified on working on these to do so. probably the former and totally not the latter before it goes anywhere, but the fact of the matter is, I don't want the Indy that much.

dank

It's exactly vice versa, Sun is more obscure then SGI.

once again, you rang?
enjoy a nice, painfully-thicc Seagate Elite 9 10GB full-height SCSI drive from 1994 in a lunchbox enclosure.

When I started work at the Atomic Energy Commission in France ten years ago, there was a pile of these machines in a corridor that were being retired. I suppose they used to be used for physical simulation or some other scientific computing.

What does one do on this kind of job, user?

My O2 has the infamous gear issue with the optical drive, but I have am external drive so I just took the drive out.

Side note, this scene is so incredibly hot it's ridiculous.

If it's not too expensive, rescue it! If you can't figure it out, sell it.

Check out your local used sales website, or the Nekochan Forums For Sale section. You can find better deals there.

what scene is this? sauce?

Fuck you I was doing graphics on O2 before you were born.

Later on I had O2, Indigo2, Octane at my home and I was using r4k Octane as main machine for some light development and web browsing but after unfortunate incidents in life I needed to sell all of them away.

Now thing is that eBay used to be much more diverse in terms of SGI availability but these days they are not really there. I think at some point the british faggot who sells SGIs on his web page (not sure if he does this anymore) bought each and every single available sgi machine off every ebay. Especially Fuels.

So where as this hobby was quite cheap now it has become expensive because of this faggot.

Yeah, Ian Mapleson. At his site is a good way to get weird parts if you need them, but the prices are never optimal. Also I'm pretty sure Octanes were available in single and dual configs of R10k, R12k, and R14k, but never an R4k. Are you thinking of your Indigo2? They were available with R4k, R8k, and R10k.

>Ian Mapleson
This nigga wants 3000 dollars for an Octane who the fuck is buying these?

I would never buy a complete system from him, but spare parts are a little more reasonable and he has a good selection of different things.

Reverse image search with google. And you're golden.

They had really nice cases.

I worked at the SGI doing phone support(irix specifically

Found the jew

>Chances are you've never heard of this machine, but maybe some of you have?
Uh, I remember them putting Stardent out of business....

>I think Solaris was a bit of a different story, but I'm quite tired and having trouble turning up results on exactly how they managed to do it.
They ditched SunOS and started completely fucking over with entirely in-house development. Even then, OpenSolaris doesn't share large parts of the original Solaris kernel.

I had a friend of a friend with a 19" Stardent rack in his living room. He was still paying the thing off ten years after buying it...

Maybe if you're in the states... These things are a dime a dozen as they were really expensive back in the day. Unless you're the regional TV station you could forget about getting one.

>I would never buy a complete system from hi
But apparently he has them all.

Why did SGI nerds let him cuck them?

original Octane "skins" go for more than you think, if they're mint or near it. brittle plastic makes everything worth money.

SunOS was originally based on 80s BSD towards the end of the 80s they rebased it on SVR4

They just paid for the ability to have total control over all of the source somehow

In my case, robotics research for nuclear maintenance and intervention. But jobs go from nuclear fusion research to nuclear medicine research to radioactive waste treatment research. It's a large organization.

I never used the Sun/SGI workstations myself. Wish I had be it only for nerd points.

Yeah my school 16 years ago had a bunch running shitty Irix and threw them all out for some cheap Compaqs that blew them out of the water.

Yeah the video output shit was nice and so was the native architecture at the time but now they're just collector fodder.

Yeah, not exactly quick anymore. Much better than other machines from the time, but still slow.

We also had a video toaster which was beyond cool but I'd hate to see what they go for these days.

>st look at CDE for fuck sake, GPL'd for four years and it still can't even compile properly without introducing major security vulnerabilities,
That always gives me a good laugh every time it's brought up

perfect, ty user

Sounds like you had some shitty Indys that were running long past their expiration date, or one of those gimped R5K O2s with no cache

Hard to say since it was so long ago but they were pretty great for realtime Maya work. The compaqs they replaced them with had crappy software raid that would fuck up constantly but they all had quadro cards that straight up whomped the sgis on rendertime.

Everyone knows SGI because of the N64 and Jurassic Park.

>being retarded
lmao

Hell no, that shit was everywhere. Sun was practically the face of the dotcom boom and workstation *nix in general, much more common out in the wild than SGI gear for sure.

SGIs were used as props in a lot of movies in the '90s but that doesn't mean the audience knew what they were looking at, I don't remember the N64 hype enough to really touch on that other point though.

give me your octane faggot I want to fall for the meme too

yes, have an o2 and all irix cds. Currently 6.5.22. I have the original box that it came in, virtually in mint condition.

Pic related.

archive.org/details/cdromsoftware?and[]=SGI&sort=-publicdate&page=2

Nice collection here. Used that site and some other ones to find irix cds to get this up and running. Dont know how you would burn this on a Windows OS, but it worked fine on brasero under ubuntu. The site has one or two cd images that are corrupted, but vast majority are fine.

pic related.