SGI: Discussion

It seems like a lot of people here, I was always interested by weird and wonderful computers as I grew up, and had heard of the Indy and seen pics of it. About a year ago, my college was dumping out a load of old machines, amongst which was a perfectly functional Indy which I rehoused. I like that 'designed from the ground up' feel of it in terms of both hardware and software, as opposed to the sort of hacked together way PCs are.

The Indy I have is a quite slow, being an R4000 with 64MB of RAM. I was considering upgrading it, but the amount of money that would require means that it would be more cost effective for me to get one of the faster SGI machines from eBay or the SGI Depot.

As for other workstations, there's plenty of Sun machines in my college (mainly Sun Blade 100s, but there's a few unused Sparcstation 5s and Sparc Classics around the place). To be honest however, I find them kind of boring... I wish I could get my hands on something more exotic like an AlphaStation or RS/6000 for my collection.

ch_123 wrote: As for other workstations, there's plenty of Sun machines in my college (mainly Sun Blade 100s, but there's a few unused Sparcstation 5s and Sparc Classics around the place). To be honest however, I find them kind of boring... I wish I could get my hands on something more exotic like an AlphaStation or RS/6000 for my collection.

Suns are pretty well designed, and the easy availability of Solaris and the Sun compilers makes them an excellent intro to non-PC UNIXes.

The Alpha has the OpenVMS Hobbyist program, which provides OS, layered products and compilers, but there isn't an equivalent Tru64 program any more. AIX never has had a hobbyist program, so good luck getting a full setup (especially with xlC/xlC++).

You can run xBSD or Linux on them, but then you have a Linux or BSD box (albeit a very stable and reliable one). Linux support on Alpha is starting to get spottier now that it isn't new and cool, so that's something to keep watch on. Support is still pretty good, but the xBSD guys seem to be more committed to maintaining platform support than the Linux coders.

hamei wrote: ^^ "DRM" -- which is one big reason any windows crap in here is never going past win2k.

i never used any DRM protected media, but i hung it up at XP anyway.

the bar is just set way to low on windows and pc's. i need to get things done.

Jurassic Park! It also got me started on UNIX. I mean, ffs, if that stupid girl could run UNIX then so could I (the logic of an 11-year-old, enjoy)! Who says misogyny never created anything worthwhile?

I ran Linux for a while in the 90s, loved the stability vs. Windows but found it poorly-integrated. I got my first SGI in '98, an Indigo2 Solid Impact (R4400SC 250MHz) with 128MB RAM and a 2GB HDD, and I adored it and its demos and Blender and the frickin' awesome Indigo Magic environment until I somehow managed to rm -rf something I shouldn't have-- and I didn't have OS media so that put it out of commission until I was able to purchase a copy of IRIX, over a year later. It was my primary system for my first two years of college, but when I left the US to study abroad it was too heavy to bring and so it now sleeps in my parents' attic. Five years after running away to Europe, I realised I'm not going back and I finally bought an O2 - now chipped to 600MHz - and then a Fuel, and who knows what other iron the future may hold?

In 1993 my employer started lugging in vast quantities of Indigo2's for the mechanical engineers to use with Pro/ENGINEER. At the time, my group was hacking in C and fortran on two MicroVAX 3100's, but we rapidly transitioned to using the SGI's, of which there were hundreds, maybe a thousand or more. The VAX's were 1988 models, and couldn't really compare to the sgi's. I remember being more or less in awe. The ME's had been using Anvil 1000 for CAD, which likewise was no comparison to Pro/ENGINEER. We used to telnet into each others workstations and play annoying sounds, Road Runner MEEP MEEP's and various other less mature things. The pee cee users, who had no sound capability, didn't know what was going on...