I had a surplus 4D/85 with full-height SCSI's that I had a lot of fun with. Someone bought it at an auction and couldn't use it because of the 30 amp service (with suicide cord) so I got it for free.
Of course the machine was password protected, but as was common practice in that day, for whatever reason, the tape backup had its own account and the password was "epat" (if I remember correctly), which I used to FTP the password file out into a PC and run the brute-force hash program "Jackpot" on, and lucky me, the root password was "tadpole".
I had no idea about the machine's history in the beginning, but soon found that it had come from the U.S. Army's HRED simulation lab in Orlando, and hadn't been wiped. It was full of VR simulation projects in various stages of development, email, notes, etc.
I played around with it for a while, but decided the enormous SCSI drives would be better used on my A2000 since I could afford the electricity to run it. Alas, the full-height drives were hard-sectored and I could not get them to format properly, but I managed to destroy the sensitive data which was just as well.
The irony is that this was 15 years ago, and last month I spent time in modern Army simulators that still represent the work that took place in that junk SGI(with much more capable hardware, of course).
I gave the machine (less the drives) away when I moved and Im sure it got scrapped. I wish I still had it today.
I have to agree, though- I liked IRIX too.
