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God that machine was terrible - underpowered and undercooled, which led to frequent overheating and component failures. When I first started at Sun, they put on
by jasoneckert 7mo ago
God that machine was terrible - underpowered and undercooled, which led to frequent overheating and component failures. When I first started at Sun, they put one of those on my desk as a joke on my first day (it was quickly replaced so that I could get some real work done).
- jeffbee 7mo agoYeah it was a real piece of junk, but I guess there's no accounting for nostalgia. People also like to restore the SGI Indy, easily the worst machine that SGI ever shipped. At one point decades ago there were a lot of these IPXs and their SCSI accessories on eBay and they were a decent source of project boxes because you could use the power supply and stick your project where the hard drive was supposed to be, with the wires coming out the SCSI port. It looks like the model 411 is still $30 or so on eBay but there are few.
- Keyframe 7mo agoHey, don't trash talk Indy like that. It has.. well, it is Web! and has VRML.. and it's your only option for N64 devkit. So, there's that. Overall you're right though. Entry level machine. I have one in working order, rarely has use next to Indigo2 MAX impact. I do have one Sparc, haven't been booted in ages. I have to check whether it's IPX or Classic. I'm even afraid to boot it up.
- JSR_FDED 7mo agoThe Indy was awesome. One client had 400 of them, as long as you didn’t take the lowest RAM entry level model they were excellent. Hardware was reliable, graphical desktop better than MacOS today, and very low support burden.
- justin66 7mo agoSo true. Keep in mind, OP said it was the worst machine SGI shipped, not the worst machine Sun shipped. SGI's worst machine could be fixed by adding some RAM. Sun's worst machines were completely unsalvageable.
- bilegeek 7mo ago> People also like to restore the SGI Indy Because the Indy (and O2) are actually attainable. Indigo2, Octane2, Tezro cost 2-3x minimum. Sometimes a Personal IRIS comes up for relatively cheap though.
- mzi 7mo agoAt work in the 90s we gave tons of old Sparcstation 10s away. They rapidly replaced all IPX and IPS at the computer clubs around Sweden. One Volvo was destined for Luleå and was really weighted down with a trunk full of pizza boxes.
- seanhunter 7mo agoTotally terrible. ONe place I worked we all had sparcs and the first thing that happened whenever anyone left is there would be this mad shuffle where everyone nicked everyone else's computer with the IPX being the prize for whoever wasn't there at the time or the new joiner. So I had the IPX for a while, even just using it as an x client for a remote build server it was horrible.
- jjgreen 7mo agoBut, but ... that cat https://anachrocomputer.github.io/ipxcat1m.jpg https://anachrocomputer.github.io/ipxcat1m.jpg
- MengerSponge 7mo agoClassic day 1 hazing, the Wimp Lo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d696t3yALAY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d696t3yALAY
- foobiekr 7mo agoI managed a lab of them. I _hated them_. They were unreliable, slow, and just absolutely miserable because they created endless complaints. We were rolling out labs of Windows machines. Except for the lack of terminal, they were better on every single axis for the common university lab use cases - mostly netscape/mosaic and applications.. I also managed NeXT slabs and cubes; they were vastly better than the sun boxes because we had installed HDDs in the cubes and extra memory. The only problem with them was the absolutely terrible, shit behavior when users accidentally browsed the AFS root... The only positive thing I can say about those Sun boxes is that _one_ behavior was better than NeXT. With NeXT, students would pull the power on them after wating four or five minutes of the beachball due to AFS I/O.
- sixothree 7mo agoI remember a lab with diskless systems where your disk quota was smaller than the kernel panic dump. So basically if you crashed a machine your account was instantly filled up and basically nothing would work. I believe it affected mail as well. Fun times.
- jeffbee 7mo agoA younger person who only knows the comparative merits of Windows, macOS, and Linux in this decade probably cannot imagine the relief felt by people when they were finally able to move their technical applications off unix boxes onto Windows NT workstations. The situation was so bad, the computers cost so much and worked so poorly, a Dell with a Pentium Pro was like a miracle, at the time.