14 ms·

Can SGI’s enthusiast community bring IRIX back to life?

159 points by ecliptik 3y ago

rsync 3y ago
"The network came to life in 2016 in response to some downtime Nekochan was having, and soon became the permanent home for the community at large." My understanding was that the administrator of Nekochan felt compelled to abide by, and be fully compliant with, GDPR ... and concluded that it was either impossible or too time consuming to achieve. Rather than expose himself to the (perceived) legal risk, he chose to take Nekochan offline. Do I have that about right ?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- SMP-UX 3y ago
  It's generally agreed upon that was an excuse. He had volunteers in the community ready to step up and had been accepting PayPal donations for years. Nekonoko is like most of us eccentric. I guess he kinda just gave up.
jamesy0ung 3y ago
That was an interesting article. I spend way too much time fiddling with ancient unixes, mostly Amiga Unix and Tru64. Slightly irrelevant to IRIX, but someone on the fun with virtualization got 5.1 running in the free es40 emulator. I haven't really fiddled with IRIX because I don't have any SGI boxes but the UI on the desktop looks kinda nice and it's some pretty cool hardware and capabilities.
imoverclocked 3y ago
I wonder if anything could be purchased or similar from HP. Seems like a lot of work to rebuild something that might still be available somewhere.
- SMP-UX 3y ago
  Got millions?
  - imoverclocked 3y ago
    Nope. Maybe it could be a charitable donation though?
    - thombat 3y ago
      Generally the problem for a company is being entirely sure that the OS codebase is theirs to donate. Are there any third party components, if so were they correctly classified so that now they'll be filtered out of the code dump? (And was that classification updated in the obsolete source if subsequent deals affected it?) Probably so, but if you're wrong then it will likely cost. So your legal dept will advise that the safest and cheapest option is not to release it. (I was at Symbian when much of that was open sourced: a paralysingly large effort that still left a lot of critical components closed)
      - imoverclocked 3y ago
        3rd party dependencies are a good point. Though we are talking about a 35 year old OS whose last incremental update was 16 years ago and last major release about 25 years ago. We are also talking about a non-profit inheriting the codebase. Seems like the lawyers could probably figure something out given these constraints. Irix did a lot of things in-house and the value of the OS is not generally in commonly available components. I suspect that any 16-25 year-old 3rd-party components that are of any value have modern equivalents which are open-source and probably better in most ways. I would think there is a way of putting the burden of sorting through these issues onto the non-profit receiving the rights much as the burden was passed to HP through an acquisition in the first place.
        avidphantasm 3y ago
        None of this will deter a patent or license troll from suing…
bilegeek 3y ago
> Notably, HP Enterprise hasn’t really done anything with SGI’s legacy assets since acquiring the company in 2016. Sadly, they don't really HAVE much; Rackable shredded[1] all of their old SGI docs circa 2010. The only reason the Indy works in MAME is because SGI released docs for porting Linux to it. At least one person is working on O2 support in MAME[2][3]. But it's a tooth-and-nail fight against lost knowledge. [1]https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-3098-post-21822.html https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-3098-post-21822.html [2]https://nitter.unixfox.eu/TheMogMiner/status/1515320209413971971#m https://nitter.unixfox.eu/TheMogMiner/status/151532020941397... [3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMPm0Sz6u_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMPm0Sz6u_0
- mrweasel 3y ago
  It does make you a bit concerned that HPE may have lost or misplaced the Irix source code. So far we've been pretty lucky that the stewards of old legacy operating systems have been at least somewhat careful not to lose the source code, still much is lost, and rebuilding the binaries is a challenging exercise in it self.
  - SMP-UX 3y ago
    They probably have some kind of source code for it. There exists source leaks out there, fwiw. But as far as people who understand and can work with it? All gone.
    - brirec 3y ago
      TFA suggests that there haven’t been any source code leaks or publications of later versions, such as the mentioned 5.3.
      - SMP-UX 3y ago
        6.5.5 and 6.5.7. My guess? They probably wanna test the waters before committing to that.
      - cryu 3y ago
wenc 3y ago
SGI hardware was beautiful -- the boxes were just colorful molded plastic (and rubber?) yes, but they had a transcendence about them. You knew upon looking that they weren't normal PCs but "workstations", a cut above what us plebeians could afford. While SGI boxes were beautiful, IRIX itself was... not. It had a Motif look which looked outdated, even compared to OS/2.
- SMP-UX 3y ago
  I rather think Motif looks fine. People complain but eye candy is wasted resources.
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    „The cathedral of Notre Dame is eye candy, all houses should be maximally efficient concrete boxes“ is a hive drone mindset and unbefitting of a species that needs beauty to flourish, or else remains spiritually stunted.
    - SMP-UX 3y ago
      What I meant was that who wants 500 plus megs of RAM dedicated solely to transparency and pretty special effects on the desktop? Idiots that's who. Edit: You might not see the problem if you have a computer with 32 GB of RAM and I certainly do. However I like to ensure that responsiveness is first up. IRIX Motif is 2D accelerated and very snappy as it's multi threaded and designed for power users. I've never used KDE but remember Windows Aero? Metro? What about macOS's Aqua UI? They use tons of resources and often times when the computer is just a couple years old it becomes unusable with the typical system bloat that occurs. What I'm basically trying to say is that visual effects that aren't well designed aren't worth the resources they take up. Functionality over aesthetics any day.
      - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
        I‘d agree to that. Aesthetics need not be wasteful, minimalism can be beautiful if done right and be very efficient, as the whole APL ecosystem shows. Its just that Motif attempts neither baroque opulence nor restrained elegance, its just carelessly ugly, and that is a sin against life.
sillywalk 3y ago
TLDR; Some of the folks at Irixnet [0] wish to raise $6500 "going towards the goal of technical documentation that might someday lead to a new kernel." based on Irix 5.3 (32 bit) I wish them luck, or for HPE to just find the source code and public-domain it, along with MPE/IX. [0] https://irixnet.org/ https://irixnet.org/
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
Was so glad when we got PC based N64 dev kits instead of the bullshit Indys.
nologic01 3y ago
Why is there "corporate disinterest" in the SGI niche? Or who is occupying it today? One would think that a high-end graphics workstation (with the looks to scream "creative") running Linux would be a viable proposition? I suppose game and movie studios, architecture, design and engineering shops etc. all somehow cope with more generic solutions and some combination of local and cloud compute but clearly cutting corners in the overall experience and productivity. There is usually an upmarket segment that offers that something extra (dully compensated) but somehow not in this area...
- jamesfmilne 3y ago
  PCs are "good enough" to do the job, the same reason they killed off these beasts back in the first place. The software I work on started life on SGI, but has been on Linux PCs for the last 20 years. For the top end, we use big servers with 6-8 GPUs, but they sound like jet aircraft nowadays so they live in a machine room. https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/baselight/overview_bl.php https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/baselight/overview_bl....
  - nologic01 3y ago
    Yes, that is my exactly my experience too, but the task of innovators is to prove that "good enough" is just not good enough and that we have a need that we didn't know - for which we are willing to pay a premium :-) The underlying driver always involves the economics of cost of development versus market size and in the past this was ruthless for specialized vendors. But today, e.g., NVIDIA is riding high on what are extremely specialized chips, presumably on the assumption of massive adoption. So its not clear if we are still in the regime of commoditized computation that destroyed the Unix workstation era or maybe the category will be reinvented.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    At the moment that the PC killed off Unix workstations, the PCs were already radically better. We were all just waiting for application vendors to port to Windows NT. When my SGI was replaced by a dual Pentium Pro it was a little shocking how much faster it was.
de6u99er 3y ago
It would require some heavy modernization to make it acceptable.Not sure if it could still be called Irix after such an effort.
cmacleod4 3y ago
Since HPE don't seem to care about IRIX, they could get get some positive publicity by just open-sourcing it. :-/ In the nineties I was a university sysadmin. We were mostly a Sun shop but we had a handful of Indy workstations - beautiful machines.
jtode 3y ago
Let us pray the answer is no. As Tina Turner once said, we don't need another Unix. That's how the song goes right?
- does_rips 3y ago
  RIP Tina Turner
ThinkBeat 3y ago
I did a lot of programming in C and assembler on SGIs back when they were the hot thing. Coming from assembler on the x86 cpus, MIPS felt wonderful. The hardware was solid. I never had any issues with IRIX. It was fast. That is probably more due to the hardware than anything else. Though it was faster than Solaris or SunOS I cant remember what the SUN serveres were running at the time. Good memories. I have looked at buying used SGI. I think they have some proprietary ports to make life more difficult.
- chasil 3y ago
  Your opinion of MIPS assembler is not universally held. https://www.jwhitham.org/2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-have-known-and.html https://www.jwhitham.org/2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-hav... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607119
  - lowbloodsugar 3y ago
    I mean honestly, having written games entirely in RISC assembly, and a significant amount of MIPs assembly code, that first guy is just, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, a whiney bitch. I mean he complains that you "just have to know" things. Er, yeah. That pretty much sums it up. Want to do cool stuff? You have to know things. And sometimes there isn't a manual, and you have to find those things out yourself. Here's Todd Meynink's article on playing movies on the MIPS N64. https://ultra64.ca/files/other/Game-Developer-Magazine/GDM_September_2000_Achieving_Full-Motion_Video_on_the_Nintnedo_64.pdf https://ultra64.ca/files/other/Game-Developer-Magazine/GDM_S...
  - ThinkBeat 3y ago
    That is fine and I would not have expected anything else. No matter the topic for life in general and IT some people like one thing and other people prefer other choices. Is it not great that we have options to suit different people? I wish we had far more options mysef.
ThinkBeat 3y ago
What UNIX brands are still under active development? IBM AIX Oracle Solaris. HP/UX Darwin / macOS (?) BSD: Net,Open,Dragon, ++++ and then UNIX like: Linux. Did I miss any?
- _8j50 3y ago
  Didn't Oracle kill Solaris several years ago? I'd be using it if it or openSolaris were still maintained. OpenIndiana and other illumos distros are alive too.
  - ThinkBeat 3y ago
    I see now that I was wrong. Sorry about that. I went by the Google summary that listed it as "current". It appears 2018 was the last release. It does appear on the Oracle page for it that they are still selling licenses. Which this being Oracle I find plausible. Or the page is misleading, with this being Oracle I find plausible.
- JdeBP 3y ago
  People are still actively working on Illumos. The last change was yesterday morning. * https://illumos.org https://illumos.org People are still actively working on MirBSD. There's a CVS commit account that can be followed on the FediVerse. * http://www.mirbsd.org http://www.mirbsd.org It's DragonFly BSD, not Dragon BSD, and the irony of that is that you missed FreeBSD, which is of course still going. * https://dragonflybsd.org https://dragonflybsd.org * https://freebsd.org https://freebsd.org As is GhostBSD, which tracks FreeBSD. * https://ghostbsd.org https://ghostbsd.org HardenedBSD is still going. Shawn Webb regularly talks about it on the FediVerse. * https://hardenedbsd.org https://hardenedbsd.org
dark-star 3y ago
I was a member of IRIXnet. The leaders/admins/mods of that site acted like entitled kids rather than actual enthusiasts. One didn't feel welcome there at all. I have no idea who runs the forums/website now, but if it's still the same person there are more welcoming places, like the SGI User's Group (https://sgi.sh https://sgi.sh)
- SMP-UX 3y ago
  Ah yes the same people who run that "more welcoming place" dog piled and harassed the guy on Reddit leading to two of them getting permabanned from Reddit for violating the content policies regarding harassment, doxxing and more. Sometimes, people are bad the whole way round. Lesser of two evils may be necessary.
  - dark-star 3y ago
    Sorry, I have not witnessed that. Personally, I was only attacked by an admin on one of these two forums. It's okay to have some bad people, every community has those. But problems do arise if these people are the people in charge.
    - SMP-UX 3y ago
      I understand. Raion of the pre-2021 era was prone to making a lot of edgy and offensive jokes. He made a joke about me being Indian and I kinda just went "really bro?". He expressed regret when I talked to him in 2022 about it. I'm just not able to excuse a bunch of grown men attempting to call him a criminal for urbex or hold his past against them forever.
gjvc 3y ago
dire-ix
contingencies 3y ago
$ telnet any-irix-box-ever.com login: lp irix:$
ofrzeta 3y ago
For people who like the IRIX look and want to re-create that experience on Linux there's the MaXX Desktop https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/ https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/
kmbfjr 3y ago
My coworkers and I would spend hours in the art department at a TV station playing the tank battle game.
n3storm 3y ago
XFCE Desktop was based on CDE, Iris Desktop and I love moving panels and drawers
alberth 3y ago
“It’s a UNIX system”. Jurassic Park. https://youtu.be/JOeY07qKU9c?start=38 https://youtu.be/JOeY07qKU9c?start=38
fit2rule 3y ago
[dead]
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Hopes and prayers they can't.
ecliptik 3y ago
I worked with SGI workstations at UCSD around 2005-2007 where the School of Medicine had some Indigo2, Onyx, and Indys[1]. They ran a custom OpenGL software called Anatomic VisualizeR© that displayed full 3d models of a human body, scanned slice-by-slice [2]. My boss at the time offered me $2000 if I could port it from Irix to Linux, but my C skills weren't that great and I don't think they ever did. 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20060830114648/http://meded.ucsd.edu/edcom/vr/lab.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060830114648/http://meded.ucsd... 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20060503041524/http://meded.ucsd.edu/edcom/virtual_reality.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060503041524/http://meded.ucsd...
lockhouse 3y ago
Who would have ever predicted back in the 90s that Apple of all companies would be the last commercial UNIX workstation vendor. My money back then would have been on Sun or SGI for sure.
- User23 3y ago
  During the mid 90s you could have been excused for thinking the company’s name was “Beleaguered Apple Computer” that phrase was used so often in the trade press.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    You'll like this Google N-gram plot for 'beleaguered Apple' at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=beleaguered+Apple&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=1&case_insensitive=true https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=beleaguered+Ap... with a clear peak at 1997. Hmm... I wonder what happened in 1997. ;)
- rabite 3y ago
  SGI was sabotaged by obvious corporate espionage by Microsoft -- the executive that urged the abandonment of SGI's generations-ahead GPU platform and MIPS for Intel gear had done the same thing to HP prior, and left for a long sinecure at Microsoft after he was done.
kloch 3y ago
Classic SGI demo video from 1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk I remember when my dad brought a VHS copy of this home. I couldn't believe the high-res smooth color graphics.
irix_solaris 3y ago
I have a few old SGI Irix systems (Indy's) as well as SGI Solaris (V100's). Systems are no charge (only pay shipping and handling ACT NOW!!) from the NYC or Philly area. (Some systems are near Philadelphia.) Also some SGI Monitors. Now these systems would probably come without the hard drives (but they easy to get). Now what I need to know is is there a way to get the data off the hard drives hooking up to a Mac. (I have no time to google and figure this out although I could so if anyone has some tips or links separate from wanting the system(s) let me know). I am not ready to dispose of these immediately (I'd as I'd to retrieve from storage where they currently located). One of the V100's (might be a higher model actually I don't even remember) ran for over 10 years straight w/o a reboot (when colo de-racked). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Fire To get these you need to be a 'goodfella' meaning a hacker who will put them to good use (student ok; business ok just let me know up front you think they are cool). The Indy's were fwiw in this 1994 Michael Douglas movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disclosure_(1994_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disclosure_(1994_film) (I don't mean the ones I have I mean it was cool they were in that movie as in many other movies as others have pointed out). As I recall I have at least 2 of each model and maybe more.
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
I managed to score an Indigo back in the early nineties by basically stalking the SOCOM military subcon auctions we would have semi-occasionally in our neck of the woods. Incredibly - I didn't realize what kind of deal I had scored until many years later - it was bought for preteen money, and that machine was my nafs for more or less my entire early adulthood. Especially that HUGE monitor. Ooooh I remember getting the NaN Blender kit in 1998, it came with a beautiful book and a handwritten letter from Ton himself. I remember animating my first spinning cubes. It went to college with me, my first apartment, I practically sang it to sleep. I guess, what I am trying to say, short version is that I wouldn't be employable in any way without that old Indigo. Circa 1995 I was a Medieval-Renaissance studies student, who could cook real good . . but I also could make *NIX systems bark, shake, and lie down. Thus the crusty old dude from the electronics firm gave me a job while I was still in my apron, because no one else on his team knew how to make HP-UX talk to a modem. Thanks old Indigo. You were a great computer. <snif/>

159 points by ecliptik 3y ago

"The network came to life in 2016 in response to some downtime Nekochan was having, and soon became the permanent home for the community at large." My understanding was that the administrator of Nekochan felt compelled to abide by, and be fully compliant with, GDPR ... and concluded that it was either impossible or too time consuming to achieve. Rather than expose himself to the (perceived) legal risk, he chose to take Nekochan offline. Do I have that about right ?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SMP-UX 3y ago
It's generally agreed upon that was an excuse. He had volunteers in the community ready to step up and had been accepting PayPal donations for years. Nekonoko is like most of us eccentric. I guess he kinda just gave up.

jamesy0ung 3y ago

That was an interesting article. I spend way too much time fiddling with ancient unixes, mostly Amiga Unix and Tru64. Slightly irrelevant to IRIX, but someone on the fun with virtualization got 5.1 running in the free es40 emulator. I haven't really fiddled with IRIX because I don't have any SGI boxes but the UI on the desktop looks kinda nice and it's some pretty cool hardware and capabilities.

imoverclocked 3y ago

I wonder if anything could be purchased or similar from HP. Seems like a lot of work to rebuild something that might still be available somewhere.

SMP-UX 3y ago
Got millions?
- imoverclocked 3y ago
  Nope. Maybe it could be a charitable donation though?
  - thombat 3y ago
    Generally the problem for a company is being entirely sure that the OS codebase is theirs to donate. Are there any third party components, if so were they correctly classified so that now they'll be filtered out of the code dump? (And was that classification updated in the obsolete source if subsequent deals affected it?) Probably so, but if you're wrong then it will likely cost. So your legal dept will advise that the safest and cheapest option is not to release it. (I was at Symbian when much of that was open sourced: a paralysingly large effort that still left a lot of critical components closed)
    - imoverclocked 3y ago
      3rd party dependencies are a good point. Though we are talking about a 35 year old OS whose last incremental update was 16 years ago and last major release about 25 years ago. We are also talking about a non-profit inheriting the codebase. Seems like the lawyers could probably figure something out given these constraints. Irix did a lot of things in-house and the value of the OS is not generally in commonly available components. I suspect that any 16-25 year-old 3rd-party components that are of any value have modern equivalents which are open-source and probably better in most ways. I would think there is a way of putting the burden of sorting through these issues onto the non-profit receiving the rights much as the burden was passed to HP through an acquisition in the first place.
      - avidphantasm 3y ago
        None of this will deter a patent or license troll from suing…

bilegeek 3y ago

> Notably, HP Enterprise hasn’t really done anything with SGI’s legacy assets since acquiring the company in 2016. Sadly, they don't really HAVE much; Rackable shredded[1] all of their old SGI docs circa 2010. The only reason the Indy works in MAME is because SGI released docs for porting Linux to it. At least one person is working on O2 support in MAME[2][3]. But it's a tooth-and-nail fight against lost knowledge. [1]https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-3098-post-21822.html https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-3098-post-21822.html [2]https://nitter.unixfox.eu/TheMogMiner/status/1515320209413971971#m https://nitter.unixfox.eu/TheMogMiner/status/151532020941397... [3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMPm0Sz6u_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMPm0Sz6u_0

mrweasel 3y ago
It does make you a bit concerned that HPE may have lost or misplaced the Irix source code. So far we've been pretty lucky that the stewards of old legacy operating systems have been at least somewhat careful not to lose the source code, still much is lost, and rebuilding the binaries is a challenging exercise in it self.
- SMP-UX 3y ago
  They probably have some kind of source code for it. There exists source leaks out there, fwiw. But as far as people who understand and can work with it? All gone.
  - brirec 3y ago
    TFA suggests that there haven’t been any source code leaks or publications of later versions, such as the mentioned 5.3.
    - SMP-UX 3y ago
      6.5.5 and 6.5.7. My guess? They probably wanna test the waters before committing to that.
    - cryu 3y ago

wenc 3y ago

SGI hardware was beautiful -- the boxes were just colorful molded plastic (and rubber?) yes, but they had a transcendence about them. You knew upon looking that they weren't normal PCs but "workstations", a cut above what us plebeians could afford. While SGI boxes were beautiful, IRIX itself was... not. It had a Motif look which looked outdated, even compared to OS/2.

SMP-UX 3y ago
I rather think Motif looks fine. People complain but eye candy is wasted resources.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  „The cathedral of Notre Dame is eye candy, all houses should be maximally efficient concrete boxes“ is a hive drone mindset and unbefitting of a species that needs beauty to flourish, or else remains spiritually stunted.
  - SMP-UX 3y ago
    What I meant was that who wants 500 plus megs of RAM dedicated solely to transparency and pretty special effects on the desktop? Idiots that's who. Edit: You might not see the problem if you have a computer with 32 GB of RAM and I certainly do. However I like to ensure that responsiveness is first up. IRIX Motif is 2D accelerated and very snappy as it's multi threaded and designed for power users. I've never used KDE but remember Windows Aero? Metro? What about macOS's Aqua UI? They use tons of resources and often times when the computer is just a couple years old it becomes unusable with the typical system bloat that occurs. What I'm basically trying to say is that visual effects that aren't well designed aren't worth the resources they take up. Functionality over aesthetics any day.
    - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
      I‘d agree to that. Aesthetics need not be wasteful, minimalism can be beautiful if done right and be very efficient, as the whole APL ecosystem shows. Its just that Motif attempts neither baroque opulence nor restrained elegance, its just carelessly ugly, and that is a sin against life.

sillywalk 3y ago

TLDR; Some of the folks at Irixnet [0] wish to raise $6500 "going towards the goal of technical documentation that might someday lead to a new kernel." based on Irix 5.3 (32 bit) I wish them luck, or for HPE to just find the source code and public-domain it, along with MPE/IX. [0] https://irixnet.org/ https://irixnet.org/

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

Was so glad when we got PC based N64 dev kits instead of the bullshit Indys.

nologic01 3y ago

Why is there "corporate disinterest" in the SGI niche? Or who is occupying it today? One would think that a high-end graphics workstation (with the looks to scream "creative") running Linux would be a viable proposition? I suppose game and movie studios, architecture, design and engineering shops etc. all somehow cope with more generic solutions and some combination of local and cloud compute but clearly cutting corners in the overall experience and productivity. There is usually an upmarket segment that offers that something extra (dully compensated) but somehow not in this area...

jamesfmilne 3y ago
PCs are "good enough" to do the job, the same reason they killed off these beasts back in the first place. The software I work on started life on SGI, but has been on Linux PCs for the last 20 years. For the top end, we use big servers with 6-8 GPUs, but they sound like jet aircraft nowadays so they live in a machine room. https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/baselight/overview_bl.php https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/baselight/overview_bl....
- nologic01 3y ago
  Yes, that is my exactly my experience too, but the task of innovators is to prove that "good enough" is just not good enough and that we have a need that we didn't know - for which we are willing to pay a premium :-) The underlying driver always involves the economics of cost of development versus market size and in the past this was ruthless for specialized vendors. But today, e.g., NVIDIA is riding high on what are extremely specialized chips, presumably on the assumption of massive adoption. So its not clear if we are still in the regime of commoditized computation that destroyed the Unix workstation era or maybe the category will be reinvented.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  At the moment that the PC killed off Unix workstations, the PCs were already radically better. We were all just waiting for application vendors to port to Windows NT. When my SGI was replaced by a dual Pentium Pro it was a little shocking how much faster it was.

de6u99er 3y ago

It would require some heavy modernization to make it acceptable.Not sure if it could still be called Irix after such an effort.

cmacleod4 3y ago

Since HPE don't seem to care about IRIX, they could get get some positive publicity by just open-sourcing it. :-/ In the nineties I was a university sysadmin. We were mostly a Sun shop but we had a handful of Indy workstations - beautiful machines.

jtode 3y ago

Let us pray the answer is no. As Tina Turner once said, we don't need another Unix. That's how the song goes right?

does_rips 3y ago
RIP Tina Turner

ThinkBeat 3y ago

I did a lot of programming in C and assembler on SGIs back when they were the hot thing. Coming from assembler on the x86 cpus, MIPS felt wonderful. The hardware was solid. I never had any issues with IRIX. It was fast. That is probably more due to the hardware than anything else. Though it was faster than Solaris or SunOS I cant remember what the SUN serveres were running at the time. Good memories. I have looked at buying used SGI. I think they have some proprietary ports to make life more difficult.

chasil 3y ago
Your opinion of MIPS assembler is not universally held. https://www.jwhitham.org/2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-have-known-and.html https://www.jwhitham.org/2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-hav... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607119
- lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  I mean honestly, having written games entirely in RISC assembly, and a significant amount of MIPs assembly code, that first guy is just, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, a whiney bitch. I mean he complains that you "just have to know" things. Er, yeah. That pretty much sums it up. Want to do cool stuff? You have to know things. And sometimes there isn't a manual, and you have to find those things out yourself. Here's Todd Meynink's article on playing movies on the MIPS N64. https://ultra64.ca/files/other/Game-Developer-Magazine/GDM_September_2000_Achieving_Full-Motion_Video_on_the_Nintnedo_64.pdf https://ultra64.ca/files/other/Game-Developer-Magazine/GDM_S...
- ThinkBeat 3y ago
  That is fine and I would not have expected anything else. No matter the topic for life in general and IT some people like one thing and other people prefer other choices. Is it not great that we have options to suit different people? I wish we had far more options mysef.

ThinkBeat 3y ago

What UNIX brands are still under active development? IBM AIX Oracle Solaris. HP/UX Darwin / macOS (?) BSD: Net,Open,Dragon, ++++ and then UNIX like: Linux. Did I miss any?

_8j50 3y ago
Didn't Oracle kill Solaris several years ago? I'd be using it if it or openSolaris were still maintained. OpenIndiana and other illumos distros are alive too.
- ThinkBeat 3y ago
  I see now that I was wrong. Sorry about that. I went by the Google summary that listed it as "current". It appears 2018 was the last release. It does appear on the Oracle page for it that they are still selling licenses. Which this being Oracle I find plausible. Or the page is misleading, with this being Oracle I find plausible.
JdeBP 3y ago
People are still actively working on Illumos. The last change was yesterday morning. * https://illumos.org https://illumos.org People are still actively working on MirBSD. There's a CVS commit account that can be followed on the FediVerse. * http://www.mirbsd.org http://www.mirbsd.org It's DragonFly BSD, not Dragon BSD, and the irony of that is that you missed FreeBSD, which is of course still going. * https://dragonflybsd.org https://dragonflybsd.org * https://freebsd.org https://freebsd.org As is GhostBSD, which tracks FreeBSD. * https://ghostbsd.org https://ghostbsd.org HardenedBSD is still going. Shawn Webb regularly talks about it on the FediVerse. * https://hardenedbsd.org https://hardenedbsd.org

dark-star 3y ago

I was a member of IRIXnet. The leaders/admins/mods of that site acted like entitled kids rather than actual enthusiasts. One didn't feel welcome there at all. I have no idea who runs the forums/website now, but if it's still the same person there are more welcoming places, like the SGI User's Group (https://sgi.sh https://sgi.sh)

SMP-UX 3y ago
Ah yes the same people who run that "more welcoming place" dog piled and harassed the guy on Reddit leading to two of them getting permabanned from Reddit for violating the content policies regarding harassment, doxxing and more. Sometimes, people are bad the whole way round. Lesser of two evils may be necessary.
- dark-star 3y ago
  Sorry, I have not witnessed that. Personally, I was only attacked by an admin on one of these two forums. It's okay to have some bad people, every community has those. But problems do arise if these people are the people in charge.
  - SMP-UX 3y ago
    I understand. Raion of the pre-2021 era was prone to making a lot of edgy and offensive jokes. He made a joke about me being Indian and I kinda just went "really bro?". He expressed regret when I talked to him in 2022 about it. I'm just not able to excuse a bunch of grown men attempting to call him a criminal for urbex or hold his past against them forever.

gjvc 3y ago

dire-ix

contingencies 3y ago

$ telnet any-irix-box-ever.com login: lp irix:$

ofrzeta 3y ago

For people who like the IRIX look and want to re-create that experience on Linux there's the MaXX Desktop https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/ https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/

kmbfjr 3y ago

My coworkers and I would spend hours in the art department at a TV station playing the tank battle game.

n3storm 3y ago

XFCE Desktop was based on CDE, Iris Desktop and I love moving panels and drawers

alberth 3y ago

“It’s a UNIX system”. Jurassic Park. https://youtu.be/JOeY07qKU9c?start=38 https://youtu.be/JOeY07qKU9c?start=38

fit2rule 3y ago

[dead]

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

Hopes and prayers they can't.

ecliptik 3y ago

I worked with SGI workstations at UCSD around 2005-2007 where the School of Medicine had some Indigo2, Onyx, and Indys[1]. They ran a custom OpenGL software called Anatomic VisualizeR© that displayed full 3d models of a human body, scanned slice-by-slice [2]. My boss at the time offered me $2000 if I could port it from Irix to Linux, but my C skills weren't that great and I don't think they ever did. 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20060830114648/http://meded.ucsd.edu/edcom/vr/lab.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060830114648/http://meded.ucsd... 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20060503041524/http://meded.ucsd.edu/edcom/virtual_reality.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060503041524/http://meded.ucsd...

lockhouse 3y ago

Who would have ever predicted back in the 90s that Apple of all companies would be the last commercial UNIX workstation vendor. My money back then would have been on Sun or SGI for sure.

User23 3y ago
During the mid 90s you could have been excused for thinking the company’s name was “Beleaguered Apple Computer” that phrase was used so often in the trade press.
- eesmith 3y ago
  You'll like this Google N-gram plot for 'beleaguered Apple' at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=beleaguered+Apple&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=1&case_insensitive=true https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=beleaguered+Ap... with a clear peak at 1997. Hmm... I wonder what happened in 1997. ;)
rabite 3y ago
SGI was sabotaged by obvious corporate espionage by Microsoft -- the executive that urged the abandonment of SGI's generations-ahead GPU platform and MIPS for Intel gear had done the same thing to HP prior, and left for a long sinecure at Microsoft after he was done.

kloch 3y ago

Classic SGI demo video from 1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk I remember when my dad brought a VHS copy of this home. I couldn't believe the high-res smooth color graphics.

irix_solaris 3y ago

I have a few old SGI Irix systems (Indy's) as well as SGI Solaris (V100's). Systems are no charge (only pay shipping and handling ACT NOW!!) from the NYC or Philly area. (Some systems are near Philadelphia.) Also some SGI Monitors. Now these systems would probably come without the hard drives (but they easy to get). Now what I need to know is is there a way to get the data off the hard drives hooking up to a Mac. (I have no time to google and figure this out although I could so if anyone has some tips or links separate from wanting the system(s) let me know). I am not ready to dispose of these immediately (I'd as I'd to retrieve from storage where they currently located). One of the V100's (might be a higher model actually I don't even remember) ran for over 10 years straight w/o a reboot (when colo de-racked). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Fire To get these you need to be a 'goodfella' meaning a hacker who will put them to good use (student ok; business ok just let me know up front you think they are cool). The Indy's were fwiw in this 1994 Michael Douglas movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disclosure_(1994_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disclosure_(1994_film) (I don't mean the ones I have I mean it was cool they were in that movie as in many other movies as others have pointed out). As I recall I have at least 2 of each model and maybe more.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

I managed to score an Indigo back in the early nineties by basically stalking the SOCOM military subcon auctions we would have semi-occasionally in our neck of the woods. Incredibly - I didn't realize what kind of deal I had scored until many years later - it was bought for preteen money, and that machine was my nafs for more or less my entire early adulthood. Especially that HUGE monitor. Ooooh I remember getting the NaN Blender kit in 1998, it came with a beautiful book and a handwritten letter from Ton himself. I remember animating my first spinning cubes. It went to college with me, my first apartment, I practically sang it to sleep. I guess, what I am trying to say, short version is that I wouldn't be employable in any way without that old Indigo. Circa 1995 I was a Medieval-Renaissance studies student, who could cook real good . . but I also could make *NIX systems bark, shake, and lie down. Thus the crusty old dude from the electronics firm gave me a job while I was still in my apron, because no one else on his team knew how to make HP-UX talk to a modem. Thanks old Indigo. You were a great computer. <snif/>