SGI: hinv

My newest Octane. Found on craigslist for $30, picked it up for $25 (graphics were said to be "hosed"). Reseated everything and got some ebay memory and it seems to be working fine so far. I still need to let it run for a while to be sure. It crashed the first time I tried to install IRIX, but I reseated everything since then and ran another install. Drives are from a couple Origin 200s I picked up a few months ago, probably going to move the DAT2 drive to my Octane2.

This is my first multiprocessor SGI that doesn't sound like a shop vac, though not my first with a graphics console since I added a SI board and IO6G to my Origin2000.

I'll be either adding another gig of ram (if I find another good deal) or seeing if I can convince it to use 384mb of the 512mb sitting next to it in static bags (2x128, 4x64). My first attempt brought an error message as if it didn't recognize one of the modules.

Nice and cheap!

Re the Ram, try and swap the modules around. I bought some RAM from Ian and no matter what I did, I couldn't get one of the 256mb modules to work in the last four slots...! Once I moved the old ram to slots 4-8 and the new ram to slot 1-4 everything was peachy!

I love my dual Octane...If I had to buy another dual machine it would have to be a Tezro. If some money falls my way <Yeah right!> I'm gonna get a Tezro, for sure!

-J

I'm pretty sure that used to be one of my machines...never really did anything with it, though. If it is, it came in a lot with a 400 Mhz 02 from a boeing surplus auction. I abandoned it in WA when I moved back to IL at the end of the summer because I already have too much SGI stuff here Did you buy it from an unusually tall girl?

I don't remember her being unusually tall, but certainly tall, skinny, and very happy to have it go away. I was thinking it might have been yours.

Well isn't it just a small world.

Some photos of the lightbar I modded to be LED. Red is stock, but replaced the white bulbs with a white and a blue led. It's hard to capture, but it gives a nice mixed glow.

That's pretty neat! I was always amazed that SGI took the dumb decision to put incandescent bulbs there originally.

I added a "Modifications" section to the Octane page on the wiki , with pointers to the clearest lightbar mod thread I could fine ( viewtopic.php?f=5&t=16724191 ) and an excellent how-to by Kurt Huhn .

Trippynet wrote: That's pretty neat! I was always amazed that SGI took the dumb decision to put incandescent bulbs there originally.

There was no such thing as a white LED back then, and anything other than red/amber/green was pretty hard to come by as well.

guardian452 wrote:

Trippynet wrote: That's pretty neat! I was always amazed that SGI took the dumb decision to put incandescent bulbs there originally.

There was no such thing as a white LED back then, and anything other than red/amber/green was pretty hard to come by as well.

But then the question becomes: why did SGI have to have white?

I put green LEDs in my (green) Octane's lightbar and quite like the green on green look. (I plan to do a blue lightbar if I ever get a blue Octane2.) Plus there's the whole stop/go connection with the red/green lights. A green LED from the start would have made more sense to me than what SGI did.

Nice work, japes! Very tidy modification you did to yours. And I never would have thought of mixing colours of LED to come up with a unique glow like you did.

Blue LEDs had been around since the mid 90s and would have looked fine!

I put warm-white LEDs in my octanes back when I had them to maintain the original look. I think it looks neater that way. The best way to procure them is to just buy a whole string of christmas lights.

And while blue LEDs may have existed in the mid nineties, they didn't become plastered everywhere as a hot consumer electronics fad until 2004-ish. Likewise, while high-power LEDs have *existed* ten years ago, they have only started replacing mainstream CFL and incandecent bulbs in the past year or two. I bought one in 2012 for $50, and before that they were only practical for high-$ retail space, fancy offices, etc... Now you can buy a good-enough (>600lm, decent CRI) LED bulb for $5 or less .

Bear in mind that SGI machines were supposed to be high-end and I can't imagine that the cost of a blue LED was that big a deal. In the mid 90s I bought some for hobbyist use and sure they were 5 times the price of a red LED, but that still only made them £1.50 each. They looked bright and cool, and SGI machines were all about looking funky and at the cutting edge.

My problem is that incandescent bulbs only have a limited lifetime of a few years and can't be changed on the Octane without a soldering iron. I think SGI should have come up with a better/more robust solution than a little bulb that would pop after a few years.

Trippynet wrote: I think SGI should have come up with a better/more robust solution than a little bulb that would pop after a few years.

Actually, that was covered. If you remember the recent thread on the 2006 SGI price list, there was a section left out that covered basic maintenance tasks: bulb replacement, power cord swaps, dust removal, emptying /dev/null, and the like.

I'm happy to offer these services for a reasonable additional fee whenever I'm hired to perform an on-site IRIX upgrade .

smj wrote: I'm happy to offer these services for a reasonable additional fee whenever I'm hired to perform an on-site IRIX upgrade .

I'll be the CS-H/W-ENGINEER . In case you're wondering, that's an Onsite Hardware Engineer. For a measly fee of $225K/yr I'll swap bits and pieces in and out of your systems. Have extensive experience with just about every MIPS/IRIX system. Customer will have to provide access during evening hours as I have a regular job already

jan-jaap wrote: I'll be the CS-H/W-ENGINEER . In case you're wondering, that's an Onsite Hardware Engineer. For a measly fee of $225K/yr I'll swap bits and pieces in and out of your systems. Have extensive experience with just about every MIPS/IRIX system. Customer will have to provide access during evening hours as I have a regular job already

Did I mention I'm available full-time, business hours, for $10k less? PM/email for CV. References available upon request.

And that's the thing. Modern blue LEDs (the precursor to white) were invented ~1995. The Octane was designed in 1995ish. It was released in 1996. So if white LEDs were available they were brand new. Blue LEDs were $2 a piece and whites were more when they hit the market. The BOM on that light bar is around $1.00-$1.50, add $1-$2 for assembly - plus tooling and design. Adding another $2 for a blue led would have been a big hit to that part.

SGI probably put it in the catalog for $35-$50, but you wouldn't run the machine without a service contract so a guy with brown shoes and black trousers would just show up and replace the $3 part when you called.

Should they have made a new version for the Octane2 with white LEDs? or just a revised part? Maybe, but why bother.

The designer wanted a white light and SGI wasn't compromising design and I can understand that.

Now the question is, where does one find the extra long right-angle header? And is there a market for custom PCBs that have resistors and holes spaced for LEDs?

edit: I remember the first $5.00 white LED I bought was dim and had a terrible yellow cast. The next one I got was almost blue it was so cool. Nice what 15-20 years does to a product.