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I used an Indigo2 with a pair of 21" Sony 13w3 monitors (one rebadged as Sun, one as CGI) as my desktop for a couple years. When I finally had reason to swap i

by mst 2y ago

I used an Indigo2 with a pair of 21" Sony 13w3 monitors (one rebadged as Sun, one as CGI) as my desktop for a couple years. When I finally had reason to swap it out for a more normal system, it went down to London to become a CPAN testers smoke testing machine until the hardware finally gave out. Fantastic piece of kit. I especially liked that when we had a few weeks of power blips if I came home to see 'power brownout detected' as a console log entry (it always survived them fine itself) that was a useful indicator to go through all my x86 kit and bring the casualties back up.

steeeeeve 2y ago
I can't even imagine how awesome that would have been. Honestly.
- mst 2y ago
  That was in ... '04 ish? And, yes, it was indeed awesome. As with all my desktops since time immemorial, its purpose was to provide an X11 environment that I used to ssh to everything else, so I never really stressed the machine itself. This isn't (I think, memory fuzzy at this remove) a screenshot from that box, but it'll give you a feel for what one of my monitors would be displaying - https://trout.me.uk/sc2.jpg https://trout.me.uk/sc2.jpg Zero use of any of the shiny, just treating it as a solid old school workstation - the closest I had to a complaint was that it took me a little while to adjust to the level of fan noise. With a remote browser instance to deal with the billion tons of JS I wouldn't at all mind going back to that setup today. But it served valiantly in its subsequent life, so I feel I treated it with the respect it deserved. (also because nobody really cared about that sort of kit at the time the Indigo2 and the monitors were cheap pickups off ebay, I'm not sure I've ever had better "bang for the buck" from building out a work setup)
emchammer 2y ago
What graphics option did you have? Two 13W3 outputs?
- maybeben 2y ago
  you can do two solid/high impact boards on indigo 2. each will be a separate X display

by mst 2y ago

steeeeeve 2y ago

I can't even imagine how awesome that would have been. Honestly.

mst 2y ago
That was in ... '04 ish? And, yes, it was indeed awesome. As with all my desktops since time immemorial, its purpose was to provide an X11 environment that I used to ssh to everything else, so I never really stressed the machine itself. This isn't (I think, memory fuzzy at this remove) a screenshot from that box, but it'll give you a feel for what one of my monitors would be displaying - https://trout.me.uk/sc2.jpg https://trout.me.uk/sc2.jpg Zero use of any of the shiny, just treating it as a solid old school workstation - the closest I had to a complaint was that it took me a little while to adjust to the level of fan noise. With a remote browser instance to deal with the billion tons of JS I wouldn't at all mind going back to that setup today. But it served valiantly in its subsequent life, so I feel I treated it with the respect it deserved. (also because nobody really cared about that sort of kit at the time the Indigo2 and the monitors were cheap pickups off ebay, I'm not sure I've ever had better "bang for the buck" from building out a work setup)

emchammer 2y ago

What graphics option did you have? Two 13W3 outputs?

maybeben 2y ago
you can do two solid/high impact boards on indigo 2. each will be a separate X display