Any SGI fans?

[TeamBlackFox]

Sorry for my absence, I've been busy working as a datacenter tech and unfortunately it's been taking up a lot of my time.

Anyways I picked up an SGI Fuel with 4GB RAM, an R14000 at 600mhz, three SCSI drives and a DVD drive. I also have an Octane and a Personal Iris. These all run IRIX which is probably the best variant of UNIX of its time. Not only was it used in a lot of computer animation in movies but the MIPS architecture seems to be the most efficient architecture in terms of mhz vs Flops. According to some bench marks the SGI Fuel with a 700mhz R16000 is equivalent to a 3Ghz Pentium 4. Yes I know that's old hardware but SGI stopped production of these machines in 2006 so it fits.

[TeamBlackFox]

Iggy it's definitely worth taking a look at. If you want to get a nice and cheap one look for an SGI O2 or an Octane off ebay or nekochan.net

[TeamBlackFox]

Jeff,

It won't smoke at all, You may have issues with the picture coming in on some monitors but most monitors support the sync on green protocol it uses.

Iggy,

Onyx 350s are rack mount and on the high end of it, they have up to 1ghz quad cores. Same for the Tezro. If you have the space there are the Origin and Onyx 3000s, bigger than a fridge. Those are clusters. Also most SGIs have craylink which allows you cluster them with a low latency, 3.2 gigabit connection. If you cluster a few SGI Onyx , Octanes or other high end ones you can have a monster of a machine.

If anyone wants one I have one I don't mind selling, but its heavy as hell so shipping is not a good idea.

[TeamBlackFox]

Iggy,

I live outside of DC in the Northern Virginia area.

I've a Personal Iris 4D/35+ in storage with a friend,that's the one I was looking to sell. It has 64mb RAM, a 676mb SCSI drive and I have a nice keyboard and optical mouse for it. Its about on par with a 486 at 66mhz from what I have seen.

[TeamBlackFox]

I dunno where you'd find Octane caddies... you could try Nekochan.net

Also I PM'd you Iggy

[TeamBlackFox]

I fully agree we should definitely consider porting MorphOS to it as the hardware is pretty cheap and nice it seems.

[TeamBlackFox]

Iggy,

While I can't compare it to PowerPCs, Phoronix did some tests against ARM a bit ago I can't find the article though

[TeamBlackFox]

Here is the one I was looking for. Too bad its on Linux and not a real UNIX: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyOTE

[TeamBlackFox]

Iggy,

For regular desktop use a Fuel can't be beat in brawn to price ratio. That's why I got my sexy redhead.

[TeamBlackFox]

What's your budget on an SGI I'll ask around.

[TeamBlackFox]

The Fuel can only take one CPU.

For that budget the Octane is probably your best bet. If you want a real beast of a machine, look for an Onyx 350, an Onyx 2 or a Tezro. Those usually go for up to 800 with quad CPUs. Check nekochan.net for the best deals.

But keep in mind no modern browsing will happen on these machines due to Firefox having weird dependencies. They're good for the arts, heavy lifting for coding and scientific applications  and of course the wow factor.

Of course I'd love to see IRIX get opened up but the community seems not willing to even try. I'd like to write a letter to the CEO though if I could get some people to support it.

[TeamBlackFox]

I'll be drafting a letter then and I'll post it here. I'll be sending it via certified mail and email as well.

[TeamBlackFox]

Steven,

I plan to use mine as a hobby desktop, some hacking, development, perhaps some animation/arts stuff if I get the itching, they and NeXT were the main players in bringing CGI to the big screen in the 1990s. They also feel fast because MIPS is very efficient, my Fuel seems to hold its own against my tablet (A Nexus 7) granted the Nexus 7 has a quad core ARM CPU and the Fuel has a single core MIPS, but I was able to run emulators on both with comparable speed/playability.

[TeamBlackFox]

So in response to the fact that SGI has no plans for IRIX as of 2013 December I went ahead and drafted a letter to their CEO. I have copied the letter below. And no, I'm not mentioning the GPL. I'd rather it stay proprietary than be GPL'd, so only permissive software licenses are mentioned here:

$DATE

$NAME
$ADDRESS

Attn: Mr. Jorge Titinger

I am writing to you today as a fan, user and supporter of the discontinued product line, IRIX, to propose the act of you and your company Silicon Graphics International would be to opening the source code of IRIX to the community under a permissive software license.

As your company is no longer vending or supporting IRIX as of December 2013 and have ceased development of it prior to this in 2006 of the product, the IRIX fans like me and those of fan sites such as NekoChan.net are facing some issues with use of the product as it ages and lags behind other UNIX variants. As it appears Silicon Graphics International has no further commercial plans for the product, me and several others of the community would love to see IRIX released under a permissive software license such as the MIT, BSD 2-clause or ISC license so we may continue development as a community. I do understand as the CEO and President of SGI you do not directly deal with this matter, but other members of the community have consistently asked your support and sales department with no success, due to a lack of power in those areas.

Releasing the code to IRIX would be a beneficial move for your company, especially under a permissive software license, as this means the community would update and add code, and your company would be free to incorporate that code into proprietary solutions where releasing the code otherwise would be impractical or bad for business. In addition the decision would make headlines across news sites where UNIX fans gather, and would generate attention for your company in a positive manner.

In conclusion I ask that you please consider this matter carefully, and hopefully, you will help make it happen for the community. Thank you for your time and attention while reviewing this letter.

Kind Regards,
$SIGNATURE
$NAME

[TeamBlackFox]

I hauled in a new SGI today - an O2 running an R5k at 160mhz. Spent 3 hours trying to setup a net install server under FreeBSD and finally gave up, gonna have a friend of mine burn me his copy of IRIX instead. Correction on my Fuel - it only has 2GB ram. I mistyped and noticed.

Also with the SGI got a sun Ultra 5 and a 1084s monitor. I'm an addict..

And I have a SGI o2 motherboard / system module of unknown specs with no ram. I don't suppose anyone here needs a spare O2?

@Iggy

Gonna fire up my Octane as soon as I get it out of storage. If it works I'll pm with a price when I have it.