OK, so nothing to get anyone too excited, but I've had this machine for about 18 months and have had a hard disk fail, then graphics card, then PSU. This is what happens when you take on a 'free' machine
However, happy to report thanks to a replacement PSU from Ian Mapleson, an additional 128 MB of RAM that pretty much came free with the replacement graphics card and a 3com 100MB network card I have it running nicely now. Just need to upgrade from Irix 6.2 to 6.5. Typing this on it right now, once I'd got the gamma adjusted to cure the washed out look of a remote firefox display (thanks to Nekochan!)
I've posted some info on using WordPerfect for Unix 6.0 in my Retrochallenge Blog . Apart from requiring some symlinks to satisfy the installation checker everything has worked fine.
Oh, and my wife's favourite colour is purple, which I'm sure smooths the way compared with my usual anonymous DEC cream boxes...
Very on-topic for Nekochan, back in 1993 I had to evaluate workstations from several manufacturers: Sun, DEC and SGI. I had an Indy on loan for a week which was really nice but quite slow. The college already had several Sun computers (including a suite of IPX which were also very slow) but Sun would not offer a machine on loan (I remember having to go to one of their buildings and run some tests there) and DEC who sent a sales person to go through all the options. The budget was around GBP 10,000. I ended up opting for the DEC, a DEC AXP3000/600 with 175 Mhz processor and 64 MB of RAM, 24 bit 1280x1024 graphics and 2 x 1GB hard drives, running tru64 3.2. Now, if I had stuck with the Indy, how would that have shaped my future career? At the time it was all about performance, but of course with the benefit of hindsight it is only one factor in a decision like that. I had some difficulties with Visualisation pakages compiling on the DEC Alpha (KHOROS comes to mind) which would have probably gone a lot smoother on an SGI or Sun box.
Gotta love the choice back then however! Oh, and I retrieved that DEC Alpha several years later
However, happy to report thanks to a replacement PSU from Ian Mapleson, an additional 128 MB of RAM that pretty much came free with the replacement graphics card and a 3com 100MB network card I have it running nicely now. Just need to upgrade from Irix 6.2 to 6.5. Typing this on it right now, once I'd got the gamma adjusted to cure the washed out look of a remote firefox display (thanks to Nekochan!)
I've posted some info on using WordPerfect for Unix 6.0 in my Retrochallenge Blog . Apart from requiring some symlinks to satisfy the installation checker everything has worked fine.
Oh, and my wife's favourite colour is purple, which I'm sure smooths the way compared with my usual anonymous DEC cream boxes...
Very on-topic for Nekochan, back in 1993 I had to evaluate workstations from several manufacturers: Sun, DEC and SGI. I had an Indy on loan for a week which was really nice but quite slow. The college already had several Sun computers (including a suite of IPX which were also very slow) but Sun would not offer a machine on loan (I remember having to go to one of their buildings and run some tests there) and DEC who sent a sales person to go through all the options. The budget was around GBP 10,000. I ended up opting for the DEC, a DEC AXP3000/600 with 175 Mhz processor and 64 MB of RAM, 24 bit 1280x1024 graphics and 2 x 1GB hard drives, running tru64 3.2. Now, if I had stuck with the Indy, how would that have shaped my future career? At the time it was all about performance, but of course with the benefit of hindsight it is only one factor in a decision like that. I had some difficulties with Visualisation pakages compiling on the DEC Alpha (KHOROS comes to mind) which would have probably gone a lot smoother on an SGI or Sun box.
Gotta love the choice back then however! Oh, and I retrieved that DEC Alpha several years later
Code:
iris 2# hinv
Iris Audio Processor: version A2 revision 1.1.0
1 250 MHZ IP22 Processor
FPU: MIPS R4000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 0.0
CPU: MIPS R4400 Processor Chip Revision: 6.0
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Data cache size: 16 Kbytes
Instruction cache size: 16 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 2 Mbytes on Processor 0
Main memory size: 256 Mbytes
EISA bus: adapter 0
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version WD33C93B, revision D
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision D
Disk drive: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
CDROM: unit 3 on SCSI controller 0
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
Graphics board: Solid Impact
Iris Audio Processor: version A2 revision 1.1.0
1 250 MHZ IP22 Processor
FPU: MIPS R4000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 0.0
CPU: MIPS R4400 Processor Chip Revision: 6.0
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Data cache size: 16 Kbytes
Instruction cache size: 16 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 2 Mbytes on Processor 0
Main memory size: 256 Mbytes
EISA bus: adapter 0
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version WD33C93B, revision D
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision D
Disk drive: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
CDROM: unit 3 on SCSI controller 0
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
Graphics board: Solid Impact
Code:
iris 5# /usr/gfx/gfxinfo
Graphics board 0 is "IMPACT" graphics.
Managed (":0.0") 1280x1024
Product ID 0x1, 1 GE, 1 RE, 0 TRAMs
MGRAS revision 1, RA revision 0
HQ rev A, GE11 rev B, RE4 rev A, PP1 rev A,
VC3 rev A, CMAP rev D, MC rev C
unknown, assuming 19" monitor (id 0xb)
Graphics board 0 is "IMPACT" graphics.
Managed (":0.0") 1280x1024
Product ID 0x1, 1 GE, 1 RE, 0 TRAMs
MGRAS revision 1, RA revision 0
HQ rev A, GE11 rev B, RE4 rev A, PP1 rev A,
VC3 rev A, CMAP rev D, MC rev C
unknown, assuming 19" monitor (id 0xb)
_________________
, Fuel, VAXstation 4000/90 x2, VAXstation 4000/60, VAXstation 4000/VLC x2, AlphaServer 1000A, DEC AXP 3000/600 (desktop), DEC AXP 3000/600 x2 (rackmount), DEC AXP 3000/800 (rackmount), AlphaServer 300 4/266, DEC GIGI, Sun Ultra 5, HP ZX6000, DECstation 5000/240, VAXstation 3100s, MVII, Commodore 64 & Flyer, LA75, PP404, Juki 6100, Brother HR10
SGI Indigo 2 R8K75 TEAL Extreme 256MB,