Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

OK, thanks for the warning, I'll observe caution when/if upgrading my year 2004 mirror of Techpubs.

They add new revisions, but the old one is still there? Just look for "additional info" in the index listing all books.
For this book, there's still the -002 rev. from 1998 (The -001 rev probably relates to a pre-6.5 version of IRIX).

For other books this can be quite a list of revisions: http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... 7-4364-008

You are right, the book is still there, thanks for the pointer. Apparently my techpubs mirror does not have the "additional info" documents. The -001 i also have btw but that comes from the old source mentioned above.

I've just created a complete mirror of the "books" on techpubs.sgi.com, including the older versions of the manuals at manx.classiccmp.org/mirror/techpubs.sgi.com . The other mirrors mentioned in this thread didn't seem to be working anymore. I had recently discussed with some folks at the Computer History Museum if we should mirror techpubs, for fear that it might just disappear one day without warning.

I used a modified version of the script that was posted here (thanks for that!). I have not mirrored the man pages.

I'm in the process of incorporating the SGI techpubs content into manx , with the primary source being techpubs.sgi.com and the manx mirror listed as a mirror. I'm working on a bulk import of the metadata into manx from the techpubs pages, but what I have added so far was copy/pasted from their site.

One advantage of using manx for searching for documentation is that manx knows about all the IRIS terminal and IRIS 4D series documentation that is located on bitsavers as well as the techpubs stuff I'm importing now. The older documentation isn't available on techpubs.

If anyone has other mirrors of techpubs that follow the same directory structure as techpubs, or other scanned SGI documentation that isn't on techpubs and they would like it listed on manx, just post URLs and I can incorporate that.

fantastic legalize!
although i can't provide an active mirror i'd happily grab the whole thing as a pack if you'd be willing to make one for archive purposes. just as wikileaks i think the more people have it the better.

I'll see about getting it migrated to bitsavers and then update the mirror data in manx. This would give people in Europe a low-latency high-bandwidth mirror, for instance.

The following docs were mentioned on SGI's site, but aren't actually there. Does anyone have them?

007-0704-080: C++ Programmer's Guide
007-1303-070: IRIS Showcase User's Guide
007-1342-080: IRIS Essentials
007-1342-100: IRIS Essentials
007-1342-110: Desktop User's Guide
007-1366-140DE: Personal System Administration Guide (German)
007-1366-140FR: Personal System Administration Guide (French)
007-1680-020: IRIS Performer Programmer's Guide
007-1732-040: Deskside POWER CHALLENGE and CHALLENGE L Owner's Guide
007-1733-050: POWER Onyx and Onyx Deskside Owner's Guide
007-1859-050: Silicon Graphics Glossary of Terms
007-2253-003: InPerson User's Guide
007-2253-005: InPerson User's Guide
007-2253-006: InPerson User's Guide
007-2254-003: InPerson Setup and Administration Guide
007-2254-005: InPerson Setup and Administration Guide
007-2273-002: ImageVision Tools User's Guide
007-2275-002: Media Tools User's Guide
007-2275-003: Media Tools User's Guide
007-2275-007: Media Tools User's Guide
007-2360-003: MIPSpro N32/64 Compiling and Performance Tuning Guide
007-2391-001: MIPSpro 64-Bit Porting and Transition Guide
007-2478-002: Topics in IRIX Programming
007-2532-002: CHALLENGE RAID-5 Owner's Guide
007-2590-002: Developer Magic: RapidApp User's Guide
007-2615-001: WebMagic User's Guide
007-2615-002: WebMagic User's Guide/Help
007-2816-001: MIPSpro N32 ABI Handbook
007-3058-001: Getting Started with POWER CHALLENGEarray
007-3304-004: InfoSearch User's Guide
007-3311-004: SpeedShop User's Guide
007-3320-001: Site Manager User's Guide and Help
007-3402-002: Video Format Compiler Programmer's Guide
007-3426-001: Standard Template Library Programmer's Guide
007-3426-002: Standard Template Library Programmer's Guide
007-3426-003: Standard Template Library Programmer's Guide
007-4003-002: XVM Volume Manager Administrator's Guide

I think I have 2 DVDs worth of TechPubs mirror. Mostly the result of a rather brute force wildcard download script, so there are usually multiple versions of everything. I'll have a look.

As for the manpages: you can extract the original manpages (from the relevant sw dists) and share them online using a man2html gateway. There's one in IRIX or the netscape http server that looks pretty much identical to what techpubs serves up.

OK, if the man pages are in the swdists, then I'm not worried about that. As for your crazy brute force script, that's the one I used with modifications

007-1732-040: Deskside POWER CHALLENGE and CHALLENGE L Owner's Guide
007-1733-050: POWER Onyx and Onyx Deskside Owner's Guide

one of those 2 is on manx iirc

OK, the oldest 'TechPubs' DVD suffered badly from bit rot

Basically, I have an uptodate copy of the techpubs website (see attached index) plus a these orphaned files (don't appear in the website anymore):


If you look at the timestamps of the files you'll notice the oldest ones are from 1999, so you won't find e.g. an early revision of the Onyx1 manual there. And archive.org won't be able to help you there either. Interestingly, if you browse the oldest snapshot of TechPubs through archive.org, it shows sections for UNICOS and UNICOS/mk. Unfortunately, none of the links work ...

This one is accessible at http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/browse.cgi?coll=0650&db=bks&cmd=toc&pth=/SGI_Developer/MproCplrDbx_TG . It ends with -010, so I assume it's a newer revision of that document.
They probably forgot to update the links pointing to it in other documents, so there's a good chance the rest of the documents in that list are still accessible, but as newer revisions.

Both of these were entered into the database, but the actual URL doesn't exist.

Yes, some (most?) of the documents I listed were older versions referenced on the web site, but no longer accessible from the web site.

When I made a mirror, I didn't just mirror the most recent version, I mirrored all versions available and also made note of all versions mentioned.

In a utilitarian sense, you might only care about the most recent version of a document. From a historical perspective, you care about all versions of the document.

First off, thanks for the download script, jan-jaap! I'm glad this old thread was resurrected, or I never would have found the script. And for a long time, I've wanted to download the collections that I think I might need.


It seems they've added new docs in some of the categories (especially hardware and Linux) since that was written (apparently in 2006). I've got the following sizes (also kB), dowloaded in the last 24 hours:
184952 manuals_0530
575280 manuals_0650
1216192 manuals_hdwr
475596 manuals_linux
74284 manuals_nt

I didn't dowload the other 6.x collections, so I don't know how they compare today vs. 2006.

Ah! I see
IIRC, SGI included some of these books on IRIX CDs, so if you can find the appropriate IRIX version which existed when that document revision was released, it should be possible to extract the book from the installation CDs.

All the SGI documents are now entered into the manx database