The collected works of josehill - Page 11

jan-jaap wrote: You'll run into the 2TB max LUN size before that, which is a SCSI limit. Annoyingly, the same 2TB LUN limit applies to SAN storage.

Come to think of it, the biggest single LUN I ever actually attached to an IRIX machine was, indeed, just under 2 TB. It cost us a little less than $200,000 at the time!

Minor historical note: iPlanet Webserver is the descendant of the Netscape Enterprise Server and Netscape FastTrack Server products. FastTrack was bundled with IRIX at least as early as IRIX 6.2, continuing through the first handful of IRIX 6.5 releases, when it was replaced by SGI's flavor of Apache . I used Enterprise Server on IRIX for a rather demanding web application (by 1998 standards) until SUN bought the product line and IRIX support was dropped. It was a great product for its time: fast, flexible, and very easy to administer. FastTrack also was pretty impressive for its polish, IMHO.

Well done!

I salute you, sir!

Take a look at http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=slAE ... &q&f=false

DEC, SUN, HP. Bonus SGI Showcase article, too.

At least in the past, Corel had demo versions of WordPerfect for various Unix systems, including IRIX, over at ftp.corel.com. I haven't looked for CorelDraw stuff, but maybe they have some info about it there.

jpstewart wrote:

• http://www.cnet.com/products/coreldraw-unix-v3-5-ibm-deca-sol-hp-sgi-cd/specs/

Hmm. I guess there was an IRIX version. I wonder if it ever made it onto one of those old "Hot Mix" demo CDs that SGI used to send to support contract customers back in the 90s. I have a few Hot Mix discs somewhere in the catacombs...

SGI was hemorrhaging cash at the time. I was told by people at SGI that there was brief consideration of doing a port, but given SGI's rapidly deteriorating financial position, it made more sense to try to IRIX'ify Linux (by doing things like developing the SGI ProPack and open sourcing XFS and PCP) than to try a full port.

Given the financial circumstances and that SGI's differentiating market was far more interested in the performance you could get out of very large systems than in what might be done at the workstation level (i.e. no one who could write big checks cared about the GUI or desktop stuff), the idea of porting a few key technologies made some sense, especially if you had QuickTransit for running many IRIX binaries under Titanium/Linux and you simultaneously dropped everything else that went into porting, developing, and maintaining what was, by then, a niche OS.

Keep in mind, it would not be long before SGI would start cost-saving measures like dropping licenses for PostScript, etc.

(Note: I am not commenting on the wisdom of moving to Itanium, itself. I am only commenting on SGI's Linux on Itanium vs IRIX on Itanium decision.)

Sweet!

One of my old sysadmins was a huge HP-UX fan. He was a real professional: he managed systems running all of the common commercial flavors of Unix, and also OpenBSD. He had something positive to say about all of them, while also being honest about the headaches that each entailed, too. He was one of the few who could say, "Oh, you'd want to run that particular application on {platform X} because {reason Y}," and, after researching the question further, you'd find out he was right. He always said that he had the most fun working with Origins, but I could tell that his heart was really into his big box HPs. It was an emotional thing, as much as anything else, I think. You never get over your first Big Iron, I guess.

I have no comment on the topic, porter, but nice to see you posting. You've been missed.

jan-jaap wrote:

josehill wrote: You never get over your first Big Iron

.sig worthy

Hah! I've never used a sig on Nekochan. Maybe it's time to add one!

Kumba wrote: Then there's this surprise:
IRIX for x86 and the 700MHz O2

Yeah, an interesting tidbit, for sure. I had heard about an x86 port before they announced the Itanium move, but no one I knew at SGI seemed to take x86 seriously (aside from the NT-oriented folk that Rick Belluzzo brought in). To the degree they thought of x86, it was either as a desktop or a cluster solution, and SGI was all about the large, single system image (SSI) at the high end, and they didn't really care much about the low end or clusters at the time. "Clusters are for kids."

I'm not sure if SGI would have been successful if they threw a lot of resources into a serious commercialization of an x86 flavor of IRIX, but it sure would've been interesting to see how it might have turned out.

guardian452 wrote: As for CAD, I use Dassault's Draftsight.

It's interesting that Dassault also got into the life sciences software business, including Linux desktop software, when it recently purchased Accelrys, including its DiscoveryStudio product line.

This is IBM's version of UNIX for the PS/2.

Centuries ago (1994-1995?), I helped a physician pal of mine figure out what he needed to do to migrate to a new electronic medical record system. I walked into the office, and I saw a bunch of PS/2s. When I booted them, I saw they were running AIX. At the time, I had zero interest in AIX, so the machines went to some office equipment salvage company. Too bad I didn't ask for one; I'm sure the price would've been the calories needed to carry it to my car. It'd be neat to play around with one of them today.

This is a bit of old news , but since I was just poking around on some Indy threads, I'd like to remind folks that Nekochan hosts a mirror of the old Reputable.com site, including the very helpful Indytech page and a bunch of interesting photos .

The full mirror is available at http://www.nekochan.net/reputable/

(Our pal, skywriter , used to have a "Big Old Nasty SGI" Page at reputable.com, too. That's mirrored separately at http://www.nekochan.net/~skywriter/ )

Some additional perspective here - http://www.infoworld.com/article/268787 ... thedeepend

SAQ wrote: Why'd they start replacing /bin/sh with BASH anyway? Sun went into depth as to why that was not a good idea (and better to have a static /bin/sh), and it's not like sh added too much bloat to the system.

What are you, some sort of graybeard who knows things and stuff?

ClassicHasClass wrote: I updated the OS X universal bash already (10.4-10.9, PPC and x86).
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2014/09/ ... dated.html

Thanks, CHC! I'll load it on some machines today!

duck wrote:

robespierre wrote:

Code: Select all

$ sudo -s
# chmod -x /bin/bash
# ln -f /bin/ksh /bin/sh

fuggeddaboutit....

On linux this will likely break things badly. Remember that these kids have been thinking that sh = bash since they first licked a beige box.

Yeah, duck is right. I'd be cautious about about simply replacing bash with ksh as "sh" on a production machine, especially if it's a multi-user machine. If you can be sure that every script is limited to basic Bourne functions, you'll probably be okay, but ksh and bash are not 100% interchangeable. They are both supersets of sh functionality, but the extra features do not completely overlap each other, and if anything calls a unique function, the results may be quite unexpected.

There is also the problem of scripts which explicitly call /bin/bash, which is usually the "correct" thing to do if you are using superset functionality.

ClassicHasClass wrote: What are you saying, VP? That the floppy makes your internal drives hard?

Thank you, I'll be here all week.

I'm tempted to issue a Moderator's Warning for corniness.

Thanks, CHC. Much appreciated!

Nice to see that you're still alive and kicking, too, sky!

foetz wrote: a second shellshock thread now

Actually, this is the third thread. I keep merging them, and a new one appears! Kind of like patches to bash!

Speaking of 5dwm/MaXX Desktop, I just noticed a two week old tweet by the @MaXXDesktop account (from Eric, I presume):

hey all! I am about to produce the binaries for DR4 and I was wondering with Distributions? Lemme know. cheers

Nice to see some activity!

sgibill wrote: Hi,

I'm the OP of http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/12303 ... ssic-theme and I was wondering -- is there any interest in having a 4dwm Windows 10 theme developed? I know this one dev but he charges money.

Bill

I think there'd be more interest here in seeing the 5dwm project (or something similar) come to fruition, though that project has had a difficult history. I see that you posted on the old 5dwm thread. I'll comment further over there , but there may be some upcoming activity with 5dwm .

PS. Too bad that your post on Neowin didn't get a better reception, but that is a site where half the posters have recent memories of wearing diapers and drinking out of sippy cups. Whenever I set up a Windows box, I like use the Windows Classic theme on the Admin account to make sure there is a clear visual reminder if I am logged in as admin for some reason. It's also a very efficient, unobtrusive theme, but I think that goes against the Neowin religion.

bigD wrote: If any of my SGI's booted to something resembling Windows, I'd kick my cat.

Apologies if I misunderstand your quote, but I think OP was suggesting the opposite, i.e. having Windows boot to something resembling the SGI desktop.

armanox wrote: Once upon a time OS X used zsh for the shell (IIRC).

The default shell in OS X versions 10.0 through 10.2.x is tcsh. Apple switched to bash in 10.3.

I'm in the same boat as smj and Classy, even though I'm an east coast guy, not a California dude.

The first system I used in earnest used tcsh as the default shell, so that was the first shell I truly learned , instead of merely tinkered with. Now, tcsh just fits like a glove, and I can't remember the last time I needed to do something and I didn't know how to do it with tcsh. There may be shells that are better for some purposes or more feature rich than tcsh, but it's unlikely that the effort required to learn something as well as I currently know tcsh would actually reap sufficient rewards in increased productivity. I have bigger problems than shell selection these days.

uunix wrote: Interactive UNIX Operating System Version 2.2

Now, that's something you don't see every day!

A Reality Center room, obviously, though I'd settle for a standup screen model. http://escience.anu.edu.au/lecture/cg/D ... en.en.html

pentium wrote: Looks like a rebadged Power Mac 9600 to me.

Pretty much, though the AWS 9650s shipped with dual hard drives strapped to an Ultra SCSI-3 JackHammer SE RAID card. They also shipped with one of three software bundles: an "Application Server Solution," an "AppleShare Server Solution," and an "Apple Internet Server Solution."

IIRC, the AppleShare Server Solution basically was AppleShare IP v5 (including Windows client software) and some additional admin tools, The Internet Server Solution bundled the WebStar http server, Tango, BBEdit, etc., and the Application Server included Now Contact & UpToDate Servers for shared contacts and calendars, a Fax server, and some database tools. Depending on exactly when the system shipped, it may have had other tools, too, like Retrospect Remote for backup management, Adobe PageMill, and so on. At the time, the software bundles actually were quite cost effective.

Aside from the software bundles and the RAID card, it's a Mac that can run any MacOS from 7.6.1 to 9.1. You might need to hunt around for the FWB drivers if you want to use the RAID functions on different versions of MacOS. Of course, you could just hang drives off the motherboard SCSI bus, just like any other Mac.

She was writing about the kinds of codes running on NASA Origin systems, systems that would run multi-day (or even multi-week) jobs pegging dozens/hundreds of cpus at 99+% sustained utilization. For people doing that kind of stuff, a 16 cpu Origin is a development/testing machine, a 32-64 cpu one is the one you use for simple, light duty jobs, and you think very carefully about optimizing what you put on the 512 cpu machine, because once you start the job, that machine is not available to anyone else for a week. Fine, her first sentence was an overstatement, but I'm sure her intended audience understood it in the context of those kinds of jobs. Her intended audience almost certainly was not interested in writing interactive desktop applications. In other words, your interactive use case is not at all what she was writing about (though a lot of her points are applicable to certain kinds of desktop jobs).

Any programmer who understands what she wrote would not make the kinds of architectural mistakes you suggested, hamei. To be fair, though, I have been amazed by the number of developers (on any platform) who really don't understand parallelization at all.

foetz wrote: on some days i could even rephrase that to:
"I have been amazed by the number of developers (on any platform) who really don't understand."

Well, he does have a couple of pictures of naked motherboards on his site, IIRC.

I wonder exactly how many people actually ran Solaris 2.5.1 on PPC. Counting engineers at Sun and IBM, the total probably made it into at least three digits. What are the odds the total made it into four? Five?

n1mjb wrote: Could it be a Power Series 830 or 850? I couldn't find a ton of details, but the Wikipedia article seems to indicate they're the PC counterparts of the Model 7248 RS/6000.

Yeah, I think that's it. Just one of IBM's PReP machines. I found a two page ad in InfoWorld , too.

Here's an interesting blog post from John McCrea, former SGI marketing/business development guy from the go-go days.

http://therealmccrea.com/2014/11/13/mak ... sentation/

He has a few other interesting posts with some "insider history" under the "SGI" tag . Worth a look.

vishnu wrote: "SGI had gotten rid of all PCs and Macs; the company ran its entire business only on SGI hardware."

I wonder how long that policy lasted...

Quite a while, actually. Pretty much until the very late 90s, IIRC.

hamei wrote: I have my doubts ... there was quite a bit of bitching in the newsgroups about having to have two computers just to write a simple report, because Nedit was not exactly a word processor ...

That started in the late 90s. I spent a lot of time at SGI facilities in the mid/late 90s. You'd see Macs and PCs in some of the engineering/training labs where they were doing networking and interoperability stuff, you generally wouldn't see them in people's offices.

vishnu wrote: Presumably it's a Windows 8 take on the original 4DWm classic, source code from 1992 attached for everyone's viewing pleasure.

Not necessarily. There were a lot of high end, IRIX-based weather analysis and visualization systems out in the wild. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that a government agency like NOAA would still be running some of them.