IRIX and Software

https://archive.org/details/cdromsoftware?and%5B%5D=SGI&sort=-publicdate&page=2

Now this is commercial software. But on archive.org ...

Mods: Feel free to delete this posting, but my guess it's a legal offering.

Cheers

Archive.Org seems to skate under the Fair Use defense for everything that they do. Mirroring web pages without prior permission is not sanctioned by the copyright laws either.
They have a project to upload and share every CD-ROM ever published.

They just put everything up and leave it up until someone bitches, then, if it looks like the complainant is well enough heeled they take it down...

Looks like a good site where things like hotmix titles could find a home...

I tried to google specific SGI CDROM's and google returns a link to the archive.org entry. So posting links to these entries at archive.org doesn't seem to be a problem, and shouldn't get you into trouble.
You can actually download CDROM images, although i'm not completely sure these images works, i.e. contains all the files and information.

Among them is an IRIX 6.5.6 installation and overlay, 7.3 compiler execution environment, various 3rd party software, various hotmix CD's, 1600SW drivers, basically the works.
Needless to say, i am a bit surprised

Disc images appear to be straight 'dd' style images.

If they manage to keep this online I've got a couple of hundred more for them

OK, I downloaded a couple of disc images. Most appear to be good, but it appears some of them are truncated.

For example, "O2 Demos 1.1.1 for IRIX 6.3 Including R10000" is a 225MB disc image. It has an SGI disk label (volume header) and an EFS partition. In SGI disk labels, partition #10 is always the entire disc. You can use this to sanity check the disc image length (on Linux):

will return the content length of the disc image. The actual disc image file should be at least this many bytes (most are slightly bigger, this seems to be a side effect of how they made these discs back in the day). For the O2 demos, that's some 615MB so this image is well short. An attempt to loop mount it and copy the files will result in I/O errors.

The same applies to:
Cosmo Software May 1996 for IRIX 5.3, 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4
IRIX 6.4 RECOMMENDED REQUIRED PATCHES 4/98
O2 INSERT FIRST

I downloaded only a handful of images -- I had most already. It makes me want to sanity check the contents of the images for CRC errors before I add whatever I got here to my collection ...

jan-jaap wrote: OK, I downloaded a couple of disc images. Most appear to be good, but it appears some of them are truncated.
..

Did you retry any downloads again just to be sure? I downloaded about 60 scanned PDFs of old DEC manuals from archive.org recently, but I'd say about 15 were truncated. On a second attempt at the bad files, some were ok, but some were truncated again. So it could be due to bad downloads at that site.

kramlq wrote: Did you retry any downloads again just to be sure?

If you go to the page for the CD: https://archive.org/details/sgi_O2_Demo ... ing_R10000 and hover over the "ISO image" download link, it says it's 212.2MB. That number is way short.

jan-jaap wrote:

Code: Select all

dvhtool -d <EFS image filename> --print-partitions | grep "Part# 10" | cut -d ',' -f3 | awk '{ print $2*512 }'

I was going to respond with a portable version, but there is no portable 'od' or 'hexdump' with correct handling of other-endianness. The best I found was 'xxd' (always uses big-endian), which is not part of POSIX.

I also found that the "O2 Demos 1.1.1 for IRIX 6.3 Including R10000.img" and "Cosmo Software May 1996 for IRIX 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 and 6.5.img" were too short.

It is worthwhile just trying to burn one of those shorter images to CD to see if it might work? I thought that some CD tools created larger images (with some sort of buffer bytes) - but I am not sure about that (can recall seeing/reading this once)...

cris_adder wrote: It is worthwhile just trying to burn one of those shorter images to CD to see if it might work? I thought that some CD tools created larger images (with some sort of buffer bytes)

We're not talking about some buffer bytes here, but a ~ 600MB image truncated to ~ 200MB. Nu burner can make up for that

I skipped the physical media and tried loopback mounting the disc image in Linux. If you try to copy the files off, you'll get I/O errors at some point.

Archive.org has alot of good stuff. Stuff that would've been quite difficult to get a decade earlier.

Hopefully they add more to the collection. Perhaps I'll offer up some of my stuff too.

My former inside guy at sgi (he's at Cray now) told me many years ago that sgi management had long since ceased to care about Irix installables showing up in the wild. I mean, if you called sgi and asked to buy an Irix license would they even sell one to you?

That's what makes it a sketchy one when talking about "abandonware".

From a legal point of view, it's still propriety and licensed software, and hence it's illegal to distribute. On the other hand, if it now has zero commercial value to the company, then what's the point in spending money to clamp down on the distribution of something with no value? This is what "abandonware" sites rely on - distributing something illegally, but which has no value and hence no point in clamping down on, so the sites typically get left alone most of the time - unless a company involved decides that the software does still have value and hence takes action.

From a moral point of view, I don't see the issue with sharing and downloading something which is abandoned and valueless - especially when it's not possible to buy it any more. However, it's still technically illegal, which is why for little sites like Nekochan, it's a thorny issue which is best avoided where possible.

Archive.org being who they are, my assumption is they did their homework before going public on this otherwise they would of received at least one DMCA takedown notification by now, especially now that it's posted here and in the past SGI kept tabs on what we were doing.

Much to my amazement there are still seven nekochan hits at sgi.com.

pentium wrote: and in the past SGI kept tabs on what we were doing.

How thoughtful of them, eh?

Krokodil wrote:

pentium wrote: and in the past SGI kept tabs on what we were doing.

How thoughtful of them, eh?

I remember a particular time years ago, forget who it was, but they found that if they ran a cron fsck on an XFS volume in a particular configuration the machine locked solid almost on cue. I believe someone posted that they (SGI) were notified of the issue through the forums and not long after they released a patch for it.

Not a recent incident, but they are watching......