The collected works of vishnu - Page 16

hamei wrote: They've been that way for a looooong time tho. Maybe forever ? It took an Act of God to buy a Selectric typewriter in 1976.

The peecee thing was a temporary abberration.

It's a well known fact that three-letter computer companies (IBM, SGI, mumble mumble mumble, some others, etc.) do not market nor do they sell to members of the general public. Years of research into why this is the case have failed to uncover how this benefits their business model...

TV Paint screenshot from our very own listing of IRIX commercial software:

mia wrote: so amiga~ish.
Good app though, works nicely and it's fast.

You've got the IRIX version? Wherever did you find it?

According to the Wikipedia article the last Amiga version is "distributed publicly," whatever that means. It also says version 3.6 was the first port to IRIX and DEC Alpha. It must have gone over like a lead balloon on IRIX but it looks like they slogged along with the Alpha port for a while. I can't remember who said it but one of the contributors at Unix Review once commented that "Alpha is the chip that makes everything that Intel does look silly."

Here's a totally off topic question, did Visual C++ exist on AlphaNT?

I've had the same personal email address for 19 years, from the mom 'n pop ISP I signed up with in 1994, I have no idea if they've been "patriot acted" yet as in the case of Lavabit, but there's no reason to think they haven't...

Hey that Indy looks way too mint to scrap, from the video it looks like there's not a scratch on it! If you don't want to doctor it up I'm sure one of us would be more than willing to take it off your hands in the Hardware For Sale forum...

Anyway yeah it's the Dallas chip battery, I've had to replace the one in my Octane twice since 2007, and when the battery goes dead it renders the machine absolutely unusable. And as others have mentioned you'd get a ton more useful information from the bootup if you motivate yourself out to the local Micro Center and procure a NULL modem cable...

Nice! Who's your decorator, Benihana?

Seriously though, that is lovely, worlds better than my decrepit workstation setup...

jeremy123 wrote: the IBM issued matrox G-450 - does not work (bug in the matrox driver on PPC platform)

Huh?! I'm pretty sure that's not right, IBM says the GXT4500P or GXT6500P are the right cards for the 285, and you can get either one on Ebay right now for 50 bucks (for the GXT6500P) and 10 bucks (for the GXT4500P).

With regard to the drive bays, IBM says the front four are for disks and the back three for DVD ROM/DVD RAM/CD Player, which is a bit ambiguous...

IBM doesn't actually say it in so many words but they imply that installing 4x300 in the front side bays maxs out the addressable disk space.

So you don't have AIX or you just want to run Linux on the thing? Because with AIX driving those graphics cards you'd have a pretty kick-ass 3D workstation on your hands...

Robyn wrote: BTW, by way of introduction, since I'm new here, I'll mention that I have been looking after
SGI systems since about 1989, starting with IRIS 340 server and Personal IRIS 4D,
and on up through Indigo, Octane, O2, Indy, Origin 2000, Origin 3000, Altix 350 and 3700,
and newer XE clusters. No UV yet. For storage, TP9100, IS220, IS5000.
I have loads of old manuals etc. from the IRIX days.

That is quite the resume!

Thanks for signing up and don't be a stranger now you know where we are...

Does the 9111-285 have a headphone jack? Can't really be a "workstation" without a headphone jack can it?

With regard to more drives, I don't know how the backside bays connect to the bus, ribbon cable or jacks or whatever, I assume the DVD ROM/DVD RAM/CD players that are supposed to plug in back there are SCSI, couldn't you just shoehorn a SCSI hard disk back there and see if the system can see it? Also, I'm not sure what the bug is that prevents X from talking to the GXT4500P or GXT6500P but it's got to be fixable, same with the sound card, there are a ton of open source audio mixers there's got to be at least one that can be hacked to interface with the audio.

Also, do you have the AIX version of Catia? I've got the IRIX version on CD but haven't tried installing it yet because I'm pretty sure the installation CD doesn't come fully equipped with a functional license key generator....

hamei wrote: Inidigo is a very nice computer. I really liked mine.

Well wha'd ya do wit it?

You know what Mark Hughes said, an Indy is an Indigo without the "go"...

I'm pretty sure it starts from a shell script that does a bunch of snooping around on the system and sets 87 billion environment variables that read like Polish jawbreakers and then launches the Catia binary...

hamei wrote: The Audio PCI Adapter for Workstations is a high performance workstation class audio PCI adapter that is optimized for support in the AIX professional workstation environment and their associated applications. It is 3.3 volt, 32 bit PCI adapter that runs at 33MHz speed and complies with the Intel AC 1997 Version 2.1 Specifications.

Well there you have it! Just compile the Linux Kernel AC97 driver as a module and you should be golden, I've been using AC97 sound hardware since Kernel 2.0.34 and it works great...

For the convenience of anyone searching in the future, the undocumented command is "let the carnage begin" - relevant Nekowiki page is here: http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/Use_a_rbrick_in_place_of_a_NUMAlink_module_on_Origin_300

Color me amazed!

It's a beautiful piece of hardware though ain't it? And kudos on your "workstation environment" featuring a sofa...

ClassicHasClass wrote: I have Catia on one of my HP C8000s, but it came with it from its previous owner. Haven't figured out how to start it up yet.

Okay I broke down and installed it on my Octane, the magic invocation to start it is a shell script named "catstart" somewhere in its insatallation root (can't recall the foldername exactly).

wenp wrote: Well to be honest I cant see any difference in performance.
Its rather additional futures in 7. But then I haven't really test it hard, maybe there would be a difference after 4 days of calculations.
For now definitely most impressive part of this machine is disk subsystem - super fast. If it only could take 8 drives it would be a treasure.

Did it have any of the CD/DVD/optical drives in the back bays when you got it?

If it was more mid to late 90's it could be NothingReal's Shake:

I used to race my '71 Dodge Challybore all the time!

Never won once...

hamei wrote:

vishnu wrote: I used to race my '71 Dodge Challybore all the time!

ooh. Nice bet you wish you still had it ...

Yeah! No, I drove that thing into dust...

hamei wrote: I had a 67 Eldo for a while, the one with the helicopter landing pad on the hood ? Used to fantasize at stoplights once in a while, next to some p.o.s. Toyota, "If I opened the door right now, I could crush that Jap crap like a bug ..."

They'd a been spam in a can! I had a 75 Lincoln Town Car, robin's egg blue, a thing of beauty but it had carburetor issues in that it spewed gas all over the intake manifold, one day it burst into flames on the corner of 66th and Penn Avenue in South Minneapolis and burned to the ground, I had sold it to a friend of my dad's for a couple hundred bucks and his insurance paid him like $1800 for it, despite the inconvenience of having to bail out of a burning car and then find another ride home when it burned down to scrap metal he was pretty okay with that..

hamei wrote: But nowadays I dream of something more like this ....

All it needs is a set of Webley Vickers!

Windows Services for UNIX is a free download and has a fully functional NFS server...

jodys wrote: The Indy has a further advantage; it is fast enough to be usable for my purposes, but slow enough that I can't run anything even approaching a modern browser. I simply can't waste time on the web

What's an Indy? An Indigo without the "go."

Why does that quote never get old?

Ha ha, you meant "go to your room and backup your RAID one magnetic particle at a time with a toothpick!"

We still have an Indy that we use to run PV Wave but we got rid of our last Indigo at least a decade ago...

I've long been tempted to do what you're contemplating but I'd do it with Origins not Altixs. My reason is simple; IRIX and MIPS vs. Linux and Intel. Yes the Origin loses the almighty PETAFLOP bragging rights to Altix, but then Altix loses that (all the time) to Big Blue,

Plus, I think the Origin's colors are more decorative...

MrBill wrote: Yeah the origins look much more stylish, especially in that fancy rack. You can numa link them together like the altix ones?

Yes you can numalink Origins, for example the O350 scales to 32 processors and 64 gig memory, and the graphics options are vastly superior to Altix because Onyx InfinitePerformance and InfiniteReality are both compatible with Origin. You can start small because a single compute module works just fine all by itself...

When InfiniteReality first came out Hughes Aircraft used it to build F-16 fight trainers for Air Force use but I'm pretty sure there aren't any members here who have one of those with the complete virtual reality chamber to go with it...

We (which is to say those of us at my place of employ) wrote a pretty cool simulator that began on IRIX and segued to Solaris and Linux (reverse evolution), it's an integrated evaluation and simulation system for ground combat vehicles.

cybercow wrote: I think at the time i was researching there was invenor-like Coin 3D.

Coin3D was released under the BSD license in March of this year: https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/wiki/Home

From TFM:

The development of Coin was in the beginning primarily done on Linux and IRIX systems, but is now mostly developed under Linux, Windows with Cygwin, and Mac OS X systems.

How many times has that story been played out over the years...

bluecode wrote: I sent you a PM on Sunday and have not heard back. So I ASSume you would not be happy to go to bat, as it were.

Don't respond to reactionism by being reactionary!

SAQ wrote: It's harder to get the drive to write something for an operating system whose last minor-non-patchfix update was almost 7 years ago and last major update was 15 years ago. Due to the progression of other OSes, new OpenGL versions, etc. you also wind up having to have a lot of "just for IRIX" stuff.

Yep, when you declare your OS "abandon ware" all the loyal vendors that developed for it abandon you.

They say that when Apple was circlin' the drain the only thing that kept them going was that Microsoft never pulled their Office for Mac port...