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AFAIK nt was to be portable from the beginning. Never was too popular beyond x86. I had the opportunity of playing with SGI Fuel and O2, both with MIPS processo
by marcodiego 6y ago
AFAIK nt was to be portable from the beginning. Never was too popular beyond x86. I had the opportunity of playing with SGI Fuel and O2, both with MIPS processors, in early 2000's and they were severely limited by having only one viable OS. Linux on these never got all the drivers it needed. Even today such machines would be useful if documentation about its hardware was made available.
- eschaton 6y agoStrange, my Octane, O2, and Indigo2 don’t really feel limited by running the operating system that was developed specifically for them.
- marcodiego 6y agoIt was soon impossible to install software except by those "that was developed specifically for them". Even compiling new qt versions, which made the Fuel become very hot, was troublesome to build more modern software.
- speed_spread 6y agoAlthough not too bad a Unix, IRIX was pretty much a closed environment. Support from most open source libraries and apps was poor. I remember running Netscape on my Indy and... that was it. It was a pay-to-play environment, never intended to be put in the hands of enthusiasts. Even the C compiler was extra you had to pay for. By comparison, Sun workstations were _way_ more open than SGI's.