The collected works of eMGee - Page 4

‘Helping’ me ...? Plus, I wouldn't be able to accept a credit card anyway, unless it was via PayPal (I guess).

Bank transfer also exists, though the international fees are horrible.

The chassis looks a bit better, with two doors instead of one fragile one (on the 9114-275).

That is both very interesting and nice to hear, I must say. Elastic Reality is also a very powerful Avid application, I believe it was more or less ‘bundled’ with Matador and/or Media Illusion .

How do you mean you cannot change it?

I've noticed the same too. It'd indeed be nice to be able to separate the vectorized, multi-layered, graphics and to be able to go through them layer by layer.

I had no idea. I'd have to double check then (maybe it's an IRIX port specific thing), I was under the impression it streams whatever is on :0. Out of curiosity, does the program rely on OpenGL? Because that might be the bottleneck.

How do you mean? You don't need an IRIX system to open or otherwise manipulate a PDF document from the TPL though (unless you meant something else).

I luckily never felt ‘sorry’ for anyone not having to use Windoze.

ritchan, purely out of curiosity, have you managed to set anything up in the meantime?

Ryan Fox, that'd be amazing and almost a ‘dream’ come true. I won't be counting on it, but like you say, who knows. (I know this site draws attention, because a lot of people I speak to — interested in UNIX and UNIX-like/derived systems — have often heard of this place.)

You're right, it could've been far worse.

I hear that a lot of people are quickly losing interest because of those “vuvuzela” horns, which are capable of producing literally a deafening noise (at ~135 dB at close range). They keep blowing on them constantly, from the start to the end of a match... even during the national anthems.

Also several journalists and even the team of Columbia, who knows who else too, have been robbed — even at gunpoint — so far, often in the seemingly secure confines of ‘5-star’ hotels. Though they decide to put a lid on it, because that can't get in the way of all the football (or “soccer”) fun, can it now.

In other words, lots of fun!

Too bad you don't have Houdini (or a license for it rather), before SESI dropped IRIX platform support one could generate “Apprentice” (fully functional, non-commercial) licenses for version 5.5 and above. Houdini is my favourite 3D animation software, particularly for IRIX (it were always very stable versions, if not the most of the supported platforms).

Not only is this forum a great resource for SGI, Sun, HP, IBM and such (vintage) high-end systems, but it's also great for shopping!

I fear pentium is right... (This has also happened to me before.)

I love mine also Zerolapse! It's not only powerful — even for nowadays' standards, very capable I'd say — but also the one of the most complete, full-featured and fulfilling RISC UNIX desktop experiences I've had so far! The only thing IRIX systems ‘lack’ is USB and the like support, but I can live without it (I have other systems, across the network, to deal with that).

Good to hear! What are the specifications? Are the system start-up, system checks, initialization and booting process times of the POWER5 systems a bit less long? Because those of the POWER4, or RS/6000 and pSeries systems in general, almost made me long for the 386 days...

Alver, if I may ask, what is your username over at DR?

I'm looking for 2 GB PC2100 ECC (184-pin) DIMM s (i.e. not ‘kits’). Preferably of a certain quantity; I'm actually looking for twelve (12×), but fewer than that is also fine. Please contact me through the private messaging system.

I know that, I've used several high-end systems (I even owned some, like a Origin3200, after all), but the RS/6000 or pSeries (even “system p,” or whatever, IBM keeps changing it to even more ‘fancier’ names) really break all ‘records’ though. HP Integrity systems — like my rx2600 — also perform a bunch of checks, but they don't take as ridiculously long as with the average POWER system either and I wouldn't say that Integrity systems are a bunch of unreliable ‘junk’...

That's awesome! (About OpenWatcom.) I unfortunately don't have any AXP systems anymore, but I think I'd at least want to try it under Qemu sometime!

Indeed, good call! The only issue or bottleneck is that some PHP and the like extensions can experience some difficulty with the file system (and the file version control, in particular). Though I believe that they ironed out most of those issues by now.



In the PDF headers of most HP/Compaq documentation (like for OpenVMS), it appears that most of it was actually authored with DECwrite. DECwrite also has powerful HTML output capabilities, lots of the online documentation seems to have been generated with it, too. So yes, pretty ‘usable’ indeed.



The ES* were (and still are) quite high-end indeed. The ES47 was the last and most high-end AXP rack system, I think. (Which the Integrity “Superdome” and such only replaced a few years ago.)

That looks great and very clean indeed! (More pictures would be greatly appreciated.) The Sun mice haven't changed much over the years, that mouse looks almost identical to the one that I use with my SPARCstation 5 (is it one of those early optical ones like mine?)

I recently updated my web-site over at ‘Deathrow,’ I also made this customized OpenVMS ‘swoosh’ (30th anniversary) logo featuring Vernon the VMS shark (the DEC equivalent of the cube logo, I guess). I don't think too many have seen it yet, I thought I might as well post it here also.

I'm glad you figured it out and got it to work! It can really be that ‘simple’ sometimes, so I've experienced also.

The lovely topic of SCSI IDs and termination. The last time that I've spent a fair amount of time messing around with this was with a DEC AlphaServer 1000 system that I used to own (which, by the way, didn't and don't in general come with enough controllers and internal flat-cables and such to accommodate all the physical SCSI channels out-of-the-box, which I only found out after carefully reading the manual). In the end, I luckily nearly always figured it out with SCSI, even though it sometimes required lots of trying around and different SCSI converter/adapter, ID, etc. configurations and setups.

There was no other way, unless I shrunk Vernon so much that he'd barely be noticeable. (By the way, what's wrong with the Integrity line? They're great quality systems, I for one love my rx2600!)

You make some fair points (I loved my DEC AlphaServer 1000, despite some issues I had with it), but... Integrity, ‘commodity’?! Well, certainly not in my book!

Luckily IRIX was never big on Java, unlike how Solaris (9+) and AIX are. (Even with Java-based system administration and maintenance tools...)

I thought you hated your IBM 9114-275 and that it was the reason why you sold it? Anyway, you have one again and you seem to love it; funny how things can sometimes go! Aside from the CPU and RAM, what are the specifications of that system of yours currently? (Did you manage to install more HDDs? I heard that POWER systems can sometimes be picky about disks). By the way, how is audio under AIX? I heard some bad stories, with regard to distorted sound (with the standard IBM-branded audio adapter). Can you deny or confirm that?

Also, what about your public shell idea? Or are you going to be using it as your ‘main workstation’ now? Either way, best of luck and good work on the porting.

Okay, I'll wait and see with regard to the shell server. I think you're right, I recall you complained about it, but I think I've heard others complain also (possibly on usenet).

I'd like to second hamei's notion and say that I too appreciate Nekonoko's time, dedication, work and that he provides us with this excellent forum, wiki and so on. I'm very grateful for it! I've been on a few forums, this is definitely one of the best I've ever been on.



That's in Belarus, isn't it? I knew someone who told me they [still] celebrate it there.

Do you have more information, specifications, on the DEC 3000 (300 & 400) Alpha systems? Also, do you have keyboards to go with them? (Because those particular models won't take regular PS/2 types, correct?)

The choice for the shark, Vernon , was quite clever; very well thought out in fact and had more to it than many might presume. Below are two quotes on the history of Vernon the VMS mascot, from the excellent VAXination.ca .

Thank you for the bit of information! Serial console would always work, but I thought DEC used a proprietary keyboard interface (somewhat similar to that of Sun and early SGI systems, I read somewhere) for a while also.

That was a very informative lecture, I knew a lot of things already. I'm a big admirer of William Shockley, for instance. Also interesting to see mention of DEC. The German technology was so amazingly advanced for the time, the Allies were basically reverse engineering it (along with counter-measure technology) to be able to even make a small impact. It was also interesting to learn that it was (most likely) Terman's advice that led to HP.

Thanks for sharing!

Could anyone please tell me what modern, either consumer or professional, PCI (not PCI-E) graphics adapters/cards are available with good IA-64 Linux and Windows support? HP-UX is pretty limited with regard to choices (OpenVMS even more so), so I have a general idea of my options. But, if anyone has some additional information (that HP isn't providing), feel free to enlighten me.

On my rx2600 I have Windows XP 64-bit edition and Debian Linux for IA-64 in a multi-boot configuration and I was wondering if Houdini Apprentice for IA-64 still archived somewhere? I'd love to try it out and see how it works.

I heard the same, but I was hoping I heard it wrong. Anyway, what is the most recent then, would you know that?

br3d, thank you for the thorough information. D-EJ915, what card do you use?