Re: New Year's Cleaning
On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:01 AM, Benjamin Scott dragonh...@gmail.comwrote: On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 9:50 PM, Tom Buskey t...@buskey.name wrote: I remember seeing a nice Macintosh emulator for Irix once. I remember trying to get the IRIX Doom port running on an Indigo, just for kicks. It crashed the system. I still remember all the pretty GUI graphics vanishing in an eye-blink, to be replaced with a plain blue text screen (hey, this sounds familiar!) with the message: PANIC: KERNEL FAULT ... and some kind of register dump. I thought for sure I was gonna be fired, but it rebooted okay. *phew* We ran it too. And the flight simultor with dogfighting. Everyone wanted the Onyx. Once upon a time there was a usenix post about SGI's transition from Irix 4.x (custom for each cpu/system) to 5.x (universal) and then engineering issues. It was a mini Mythical Man Month that I haven't been able to find since. Trivia: The original Doom's original map editor (used in-house at id Software to build the game) ran only on a Unix-like system. It was either an SGI or NeXT platform, I forget which. DOS PCs at the time barely had enough power to run the game; they couldn't edit it. NeXT. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: New Year's Cleaning
In fairness, I can testify that if you skip the graphics and just use the CD or audio player to play music, the system load is negligible. At least, that's how it was on the Indigo in the lab I worked in. True. But what the Byte Labs people were gaga over was the fact that all the audio magic was being done in software by the CPU (leaving little for doing mundane tasks like reading email). md ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: New Year's Cleaning
On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 9:00 AM, Jon 'maddog' Hall mad...@li.org wrote: True. But what the Byte Labs people were gaga over was the fact that all the audio magic was being done in software by the CPU (leaving little for doing mundane tasks like reading email). Oh, come now. I remember doing the same thing on my 486/80 with Extace and MOD files. $2000+ of advanced computational hardware, multi-tasking multi-user operating system, acting as a glorified jukebox. W ;-) -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: New Year's Cleaning
On 01/02/2011 08:20 AM, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote: whoever take's Tom's SGI is just going to have to jailbreak it. At one point NetBSD would run on those boxes. Or at least I mailed some out to the guy who said he'd do the port. :) -Bill -- Bill McGonigle, Owner BFC Computing, LLC http://bfccomputing.com/ Telephone: +1.603.448.4440 Email, IM, VOIP: b...@bfccomputing.com VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf Social networks: bill_mcgonigle/bill.mcgonigle ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: New Year's Cleaning
There are current ports to the Sun Ultra for NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Debian. Plus Solaris (though I think 10 would be a bit slow) and SunOS. I've run NetBSD and OpenBSD on Sun systems and they run well. I prefer ipf and pf for firewalls to iptables. I should have an extra 100T card for the Ultra if someone wants to use it for that. I'm still running a Sun LX with OpenBSD as an SSH gateway. I unboxed the SGI when I got it, configured it, and then put it away. It's interesting to see the Jurassic Park It's Unix desktop. For its time, the Indy was pretty cool. The IndyCam was unique until they came out with USB and webcams. On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Bill McGonigle b...@bfccomputing.comwrote: On 01/02/2011 08:20 AM, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote: whoever take's Tom's SGI is just going to have to jailbreak it. At one point NetBSD would run on those boxes. Or at least I mailed some out to the guy who said he'd do the port. :) -Bill -- Bill McGonigle, Owner BFC Computing, LLC http://bfccomputing.com/ Telephone: +1.603.448.4440 Email, IM, VOIP: b...@bfccomputing.com VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf Social networks: bill_mcgonigle/bill.mcgonigle ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: New Year's Cleaning
On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Bill McGonigle b...@bfccomputing.com wrote: whoever take's Tom's SGI is just going to have to jailbreak it. At one point NetBSD would run on those boxes. I thought, at some point or another, NetBSD ran on anything? ;-) -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: New Year's Cleaning
On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Tom Buskey t...@buskey.name wrote: For its time, the Indy was pretty cool. SGI was the Unix world's answer to the Apple Macintosh: Physical design is colorful, bold, almost artistic; all the OEM pieces work together very well; oh-so-pretty desktop GUI; utterly incompatible with anything third-party; way more expensive than everything else. ;-) Now, of course, with OS X, Apple has reclaimed that particular niche. There's a strange kind of symmetry there. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: New Year's Cleaning
Ben, SGI was the Unix world's answer to the Apple Macintosh: Physical design is colorful, bold, almost artistic; all the OEM pieces work together very well; oh-so-pretty desktop GUI; utterly incompatible with anything third-party; way more expensive than everything else. ;-) These machines started about the time that the team which designed the first of DECs MIPS workstations left DECwest and went to SGI. I believe the engineering manager's name was Tom Furlong, and he was very bright and a nice guy. I remember going to Byte Magazine Labs in Peterborough and seeing one of the SGI Indigos there. It was playing music from a CD, running a nice equalizer, doing some nice graphics etc. etc. and the people testing it were gaga over the audio. I watched it for a while and asked them what the machine could do while it was playing the music and doing the graphics. Not much was the answer. I told them I could buy a much cheaper CD player, and what I really wanted was a computer. md ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: New Year's Cleaning
On Monday, January 03, 2011 05:28:23 pm Benjamin Scott wrote: On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Tom Buskey t...@buskey.name wrote: For its time, the Indy was pretty cool. SGI was the Unix world's answer to the Apple Macintosh: Physical design is colorful, bold, almost artistic; all the OEM pieces work together very well; oh-so-pretty desktop GUI; utterly incompatible with anything third-party; way more expensive than everything else. ;-) Now, of course, with OS X, Apple has reclaimed that particular niche. There's a strange kind of symmetry there. I can remember seeing Jurassic Park and seeing all those SGI workstations all around the place, with a Connection Machine as a background prop. Coming from a Tandy 1000/Apple II world when I was young the graphics floored me. I think that shaped my mind that Unix was a high-end scientific and visualization operating system rather than the almost purely server world it's in right now. This also drove me to start using Linux as well. I remember Apple having a flavor of Unix in the early 90s. I used it only once and found it somewhat awkward to use. Going with a re-made NeXTStep was definitely the better choice. -Ryan ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: New Year's Cleaning
Ryan Stanyan ryan.stan...@gmail.com writes: On Saturday, January 01, 2011 12:06:20 pm Tom Buskey wrote: Both systems have CD and hard drives They booted up last time I used them. I don't remember the passwords. Knowing security on IRIX you don't have to worry about that :P You think you're being funny, but this sitution's now so common (and accepted) that there's a single-word, stigma-free term for it: whoever take's Tom's SGI is just going to have to jailbreak it. -- Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: New Year's Cleaning
On Saturday, January 01, 2011 12:06:20 pm Tom Buskey wrote: Both systems have CD and hard drives They booted up last time I used them. I don't remember the passwords. Knowing security on IRIX you don't have to worry about that :P ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
