SGI: Hardware

A curous serial number

pentium
From Kamloops, BC
Who joined Aug. 28, 2006, 6:29 p.m.
Wrote the following at March 9, 2015, 8:04 a.m...
I'm wondering if anyone is still around who could better tell me exactly how early one of my 4D/20's are.

Inside it is date stamped May 9 1989 and is serial E0300003. The oldest mention of a release date is October 1988 . I'm optimistic that they had built 300000 machines by then and I'm optimistic this is machine number 3 so what is up with the serial number?
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guardian452
Who joined Aug. 21, 2007, 10:12 p.m.
Wrote the following at March 9, 2015, 4:46 p.m...
Serial numbers could mean anything. The E could be 5, the 5th letter, for may, the fifth month.

It could be the 3rd machine in the 30th production lot, or the 3rd lot, or the 300th. Somebody, somewhere, knows. It ranks up there on the trainspotter index, IMO. But the number by itself doesn't mean a whole lot.

Then again, I have as my main keyboard a TG3 with a datestamp of 06/06/06 (:
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ClassicHasClass
From Sunny So Cal
Who joined July 25, 2012, 7:12 p.m.
Wrote the following at March 9, 2015, 5:54 p.m...
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robespierre
From Boston
Who joined Sept. 12, 2011, 2:28 p.m.
Wrote the following at March 9, 2015, 8:32 p.m...
I don't know better than anyone else, but SGI made the PI at two factories, one in Mountain View and one in Cortaillod. It would make sense if the sequences were different between them. "E" might also refer to an upgraded E-Module. For comparison, my Swiss PI has a serial of 37000726. Same number of digits, but no E prefix.
In later models, the serial number is the same as the lower 4 bytes of the main MAC address, but that convention wasn't in use for the PI.
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jan-jaap
From Wijchen, The Netherlands
Who joined June 17, 2004, 11:35 a.m.
Wrote the following at March 10, 2015, 2:02 a.m...
A Personal Iris from Cortaillod? That's unusual, that facility didn't open until late '92, more than a year after the Indigo was introduced.

My wife worked there for a short period of time (she's from Neuchâtel, Switzerland)
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