Can SGI’s enthusiast community bring IRIX back to life?

https://tedium.co/2023/05/27/sgi-irix-revival-efforts/

by ecliptik • 3 years ago

159 178 3 years ago

rsync• 3 years ago

"The network came to life in 2016 in response to some downtime Nekochan was having, and soon became the permanent home for the community at large."

My understanding was that the administrator of Nekochan felt compelled to abide by, and be fully compliant with, GDPR ... and concluded that it was either impossible or too time consuming to achieve.

Rather than expose himself to the (perceived) legal risk, he chose to take Nekochan offline.

Do I have that about right ?

SMP-UX10• 3 years ago

It's generally agreed upon that was an excuse. He had volunteers in the community ready to step up and had been accepting PayPal donations for years. Nekonoko is like most of us eccentric. I guess he kinda just gave up.

jamesy0ung• 3 years ago

That was an interesting article. I spend way too much time fiddling with ancient unixes, mostly Amiga Unix and Tru64. Slightly irrelevant to IRIX, but someone on the fun with virtualization got 5.1 running in the free es40 emulator. I haven't really fiddled with IRIX because I don't have any SGI boxes but the UI on the desktop looks kinda nice and it's some pretty cool hardware and capabilities.

bilegeek• 3 years ago

Notably, HP Enterprise hasn’t really done anything with SGI’s legacy assets since acquiring the company in 2016.

Sadly, they don't really HAVE much; Rackable shredded[1] all of their old SGI docs circa 2010. The only reason the Indy works in MAME is because SGI released docs for porting Linux to it.

At least one person is working on O2 support in MAME[2][3]. But it's a tooth-and-nail fight against lost knowledge.

[1]https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-3098-post-21822.html

[2]https://nitter.unixfox.eu/TheMogMiner/status/151532020941397...

[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMPm0Sz6u_0

mrweasel• 3 years ago

It does make you a bit concerned that HPE may have lost or misplaced the Irix source code.

So far we've been pretty lucky that the stewards of old legacy operating systems have been at least somewhat careful not to lose the source code, still much is lost, and rebuilding the binaries is a challenging exercise in it self.

SMP-UX10• 3 years ago

They probably have some kind of source code for it. There exists source leaks out there, fwiw. But as far as people who understand and can work with it? All gone.

genjii931• 3 years ago

You can buy Irix source code CDs on eBay. They are not cheap.

HeckFeck• 3 years ago

I had a hunt online and there is definitely source code out there, but unfortunately the interesting stuff like 4dwm, the display stack and OpenGL is not present - understandably, because those where what gave SGI their edge.

Cf: this slightly inflammatory reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/IRIX/comments/132hsko/irix_source_c...

wenc2• 3 years ago

SGI hardware was beautiful -- the boxes were just colorful molded plastic (and rubber?) yes, but they had a transcendence about them. You knew upon looking that they weren't normal PCs but "workstations", a cut above what us plebeians could afford.

While SGI boxes were beautiful, IRIX itself was... not. It had a Motif look which looked outdated, even compared to OS/2.

SMP-UX10• 3 years ago

I rather think Motif looks fine. People complain but eye candy is wasted resources.

MrBuddyCasino6• 3 years ago

„The cathedral of Notre Dame is eye candy, all houses should be maximally efficient concrete boxes“ is a hive drone mindset and unbefitting of a species that needs beauty to flourish, or else remains spiritually stunted.

forgotmypw172• 3 years ago

I agree, as far as my workstation goes, it's like putting eye candy on a hammer.

I use this: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

GauntletWizard• 3 years ago

Not-so-Common Desktop Environment is a modern attempt at the style. I don't end up using it, but it reminds me wonderfully of a time when computers were made by and for people.

https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

WesolyKubeczek• 3 years ago

There are things that Motif got right and things that better be killed with fire.

Things they got right: contrast. Shapes. I don’t need my glasses to use this stuff.

Things they got wrong: over the top 3D look. Fonts are shit. Italics in menus? Ragged bitmap italics? Gotta be fucking kidding me.

kickingvegas• 3 years ago

Oof. IMHO back in the day all the Unix implementations of Motif were terribly clumsy. You know who did a really great, coherent implementation of Motif that had nothing to do with the Unix folks back then? GeoWorks for the PC. Go figure.

nullc• 3 years ago

Not just wasted resources, a lot of modern eye candy actually makes the computer harder to use. For example, the recent 'flat' appearances make selected, unselected, and entirely-non-button areas look almost indistinguishable! Or animations that cause visible slowness locally and make remote display over any media slower than tens of megabits per second unusable.

A computer is a tool, most tools are not sleek, they have buttons and dohickies, sharp edges that do work, etc. There is nothing wrong with polishing something up, sure, but it has to be strictly secondary to usability.

The high contrast 3d look in motif wasn't because its creators had bad taste. They may well have also had bad taste, but the appearance served a utilitarian purpose. :)

DonHopkins2• 3 years ago

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

The X-Windows Disaster

[...]

The Motif Self-Abuse Kit
X gave Unix vendors something they had professed to want for years: a standard that allowed programs built for different computers to interoperate. But it didn’t give them enough. X gave programmers a way to display windows and pixels, but it didn’t speak to buttons, menus, scroll bars, or any of the other necessary elements of a graphical user interface. Programmers invented their own. Soon the Unix community had six or so different interface standards. A bunch of people who hadn’t written 10 lines of code in as many years set up shop in a brick building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was the former home of a failed computer company and came up with a “solution:” the Open Software Foundation’s Motif.
What Motif does is make Unix slow. Real slow. A stated design goal of Motif was to give the X Window System the window management capabilities of HP’s circa-1988 window manager and the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows. We kid you not.
Recipe for disaster: start with the Microsoft Windows metaphor, which was designed and hand coded in assembler. Build something on top of three or four layers of X to look like Windows. Call it “Motif.” Now put two 486 boxes side by side, one running Windows and one running Unix/Motif. Watch one crawl. Watch it wither. Watch it drop faster than the putsch in Russia. Motif can’t compete with the Macintosh OS or with DOS/Windows as a delivery platform.
[...] X will not run in these 4 bit overlay planes. This is because I’m using Motif, which is so sophisticated it forces you to put a 1" thick border around each window in case your mouse is so worthless you can’t hit anything you aim at, so you need widgets designed from the same style manual as the runway at Moscow International Airport. My program has a browser that actually uses different colors to distinguish different kinds of nodes. Unlike a PC Jr, however, this workstation with $150,000 worth of 28 bits-per-pixel supercharged display hardware cannot display more than 16 colors at a time. If you’re using the Motif self-abuse kit, asking for the 17th color causes your program to crash horribly. [...]

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif....

MOTIF ANGST PAGE
If you have any ANGSTFUL Motif code, comments, documentation, or resources, please share them with me! Here is some of the stronger stuff I've found. Note: this is only for official Open Software Foundation Motif inspired Angst. If you're experiencing TCL/Tk That Only Looks Like Motif But Doesn't Suck Angst, then you should stop whining and fix the problem yourself, if somebody else hasn't already.

/* Note that the text callbacks are "weird" in that they expect values in the callback structure to be set inside the callback proc to determine what actions need to be taken after the callbackproc returns. In particular, the XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct's 'doit' slot is always set to True, and must be set to False if the callbackproc doesn't want the action to be taken. To do this, Set_Call_Data_For_XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct() is called by Wcb_Meta_Callbackproc() after the callback lisp code is evaluated, and the values bound to these settable variables are set inside call_data....

Another inconsistency with the Text widget is that some callbacks on this widget return XmAnyCallbackStruct's (XmNactivateCallback, XmNfocusCallback, XmNvalueChangedCallback), whereas XmNlosingFocusCallback, XmNmodifyVerifyCallback, and XmNmotionVerifyCallback return XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct. In the code below, we look at the 'reason' slot of the call data, (which is present in both XmAnyCallbackStruct and in XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct) to determine the kind of callback that occured and we only bind the values that are appropriate for that kind of callback. Information about which slots are valid for particular callback was taken from the documentation on the XmText(3X) widget, and verified against the Motif 1.1 source -- this is valid for both XmText and XmTextField widgets... */

    static LVAL s_CALLBACK_CUR_INSERT, s_CALLBACK_NEW_INSERT, s_CALLBACK_START_POS, s_CALLBACK_END_POS, s_CALLBACK_TEXT;
    static void Lexical_Bindings_For_XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct(bindings_list,
                                    lexical_env,
                                    call_data,
                                    client_data)
         LVAL bindings_list; /* a list of symbols to which values from XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct are bound */
         LVAL lexical_env;  
         XtPointer call_data;
         LVAL client_data;  /* XLTYPE_CALLBACKOBJ */
    {
      extern LVAL true;
      register LVAL s_bindname;
      XmTextVerifyCallbackStruct* cd;

      /* How long can this go on???? */
    }

[...]

pram• 3 years ago

This is a general problem with old OS nostalgia and most UNIX variants: there’s literally nothing interesting to do with most of them. Not only that, but what you can do is not radically different from how things are still done.

I worked with stuff like AIX and Solaris for years but like why would I ever bother with them again. What am I going to do, install DB2 for fun?

jasonwatkinspdx• 3 years ago

For some people that is their idea of fun.

Myself I'd never put the effort in, but I have fond memories of telnetting into the Indigo my brother's college roommate had in their dorm room, so when people do this nostalgia retro stuff and post it on the web I enjoy browsing it for a bit.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 years ago

That depends on whether or not your a casual DB2 enthusiast who plays with it only when it's available, or if you're a hardcore DB2 enthusiast willing to restore an AS/400 just for the fun of it, really.

weinzierl3• 3 years ago

AIX? You'll spend an hour or so to set up the network so it'd even boot.

For the youth: The AIX machine I remember did not even boot without a proper network. They featured obscure key combos, a tiny LCD screen and even more obscure beep codes to let you configure the network parameters. Only then they would boot into a proper OS.

arp2424• 3 years ago

I see these sort of efforts more as archaeology than anything else. Asking "what sort of interesting things can you do with it?" is like asking if we can do anything interesting with stuff we dig out of Flag Fen or Pompeii.

em-bee2• 3 years ago

in the 90s i was collecting unix hardware. most of what i actually used at the time (AIX and IRIX in my case. i had a sun box too, but i was mostly running linux on it[1]), but now when i look at that collection, all i can say is that it looks cool. i like the design of the boxes (i am a big fan of the pizzabox format, and of more unusual shapes like cubes instead of the common tower),

but when i think of using them, i am asking myself, what am i going to do with these old systems? on some i can install linux, ok, that's nice, but then all i got is linux in a nice looking box. even at the time, when i had scored an apollo domain workstation that was acting as a door stop in a university library. it had a very interesting networking system. i looked around on it for a while but then i just left it sit there.

i'd probably be more happy if i could find a modern case designer that makes PC cases look like the sun or sgi boxes of old.

[1]i have joy, i have fun, i run linux on a sun

badsectoracula• 3 years ago

there’s literally nothing interesting to do with most of them

A friend of mine made a 6dof shooter recently[0][1] for IRIX and O2 for a retro platform game jam.

[0] https://nuclear.itch.io/deeprunner

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-zUOuBWFZY (older build but shows the O2)

ofrzeta4• 3 years ago

At least you can use the internet opposed to 8-bit computers (without hardware extensions). On IRIX you even have Mozilla 1.7.12 although I fear that many websites will be unusable with that browser. And a terminal, ssh, gnu toolchain. What else do you need? :)

jaredhallen• 3 years ago

I wonder if it would make sense to also build a modern equivalent of the UI/UX on the Linux kernel? It supports MIPS AFAIK.

coredog64• 3 years ago

I beg to differ. I regret giving up my O2 w/ 1600SW display, but I actually used it for something that is difficult to replicate even today. The AV input/output board allows for capture of s-video output (good for digitization of old VHS tapes).

I also used the SPDIF input on my Octane (connected to a Philips DCC player) to digitize a bunch of my old cassette tapes. Many of those tapes don’t have commercial digital releases.

Keyframe2• 3 years ago

I recently (restored/put to work) showed an SGI Indy at our office to young ones. Apart from cool case, it was mostly "yeah, looks like any ol' linux desktop we have" which is right, of course... but 30 years ago!

I also have rose-tinted glasses now on IRIX and SGI since I worked on those machines for better part of 90's and early 2000's in VFX (both VFX work and software for it). There was mystique about those daylight robbery machines that made you feel you could and should achieve more. There's nothing like that today anymore, except maybe getting a DGX - Carmack even mentioned something similar ( https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1398519867280609282... ) which I can definitely relate to from SGI era.

jeffbee4• 3 years ago

OS nostalgia is stupid but application nostalgia makes sense. If you happen to have applications for IRIX that would be expensive or impossible to replace, then keeping IRIX on life support is reasonable. For example I happen to have a licensed copy of PTC Pro/ENGINEER for IRIX/MIPS. There's no other way to use it. This is the same reason I keep Win2k virtual machines hanging around. That is the only way I can still run my copy of AutoCAD R12.

rocket_surgeron• 3 years ago

It’s down right now because the hard drive failed last December after 27 years of operation but the NTP server for my home network used to be and will be again a Digital AlphaStation 200 4/233 running Tru64 UNIX connected to a PPS serial GPS puck.

Why? Why not!

helsinkiandrew• 3 years ago

SGI hardware was beautiful

What I remember most was the startup chime - in an era when piezo electric speakers would be the norm the SGI startup chime was incredibly rich and extravagant.

colechristensen• 3 years ago

Apparently they had lots and lots of noises that had to be turned off in university computer labs because it was so obnoxious. Like cliche hacker movie levels of noises but worse. I heard some stories as a student working in engineering IT.

fsckboy• 3 years ago

SGI boot chimes https://youtu.be/1zjuyLXsmew?t=30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZLwZhmkW8Y

housemusicfan• 3 years ago

IRIX was what an OS is supposed to look like: functional. In fact, things took a major turn for the worse when we pushed the engineers aside and let the avant-garde artists take over.

What I do know is that children and smooth-brains alike in the 1990s could figure out Windows 9x and Mac OS 7 with little effort as "ugly" as they were. Even CDE, the ugliest girl in the village, was still usable.

I have a genius-level IQ (it's been tested) and I cannot figure some of this new shit out. It's often poorly thought out and illogical. Modern OS design has turned into a virtual escape room, where the puzzle has now become accomplishing basic tasks but you get to take an acid trip with animations and hamburger buttons along the way.

Findecanor• 3 years ago

It had its own variant of Motif with a more stylish, polished look that made it stand out as being SGI and not just any Unix/X11 system.

ChuckNorris894• 3 years ago

SGI hardware was beautiful -- the boxes were just colorful molded plastic (and rubber?) yes, but they had a transcendence about them.

They were also insanely expensive, affordable to only the wealthiest of established companies. A basic SGI workstation would cost as much as a sports car, and professional workstation as much as a house. At those prices they had better damn be beautiful and well built.

In the early '00s ugly beige boxes with Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs running BSD, Windows NT and Linux started wiping the floor with those beautiful SGI workstations at only a fraction of the price, that it made SGI basically irrelevant overnight. It was a bloodbath. The only market they held onto for a little while were supercomputers and compute workstations for wealthy customers that were running massive simulations like oil & gas for which money was no abject.

The VFX team of the original Matrix movie from 1999 was grateful they could save huge amounts of time and money by running their rendering pipeline on networked commodity Dell workstations with off the shelf Intel CPUs.[1] That was one of the last nails in SGIs coffin.

[1] "Manex Visual Effects used 32 Dell Precision 410 Dual P-II/450 Processor systems running FreeBSD as the core CG Render Farm. Charles Henrich, the senior systems administrator at Manex, says, "We came to a point in the production where we realized we just did not have enough computing power on our existing SGI infrastructure to get through the 3-D intensive sequences. It was at that point we decided on going with a FreeBSD based solution, due to the ability to get the hardware quickly as well as the reliability and ease of administration that FreeBSD provides us. Working with Dell, we purchased 32 of these systems on a Wednesday, and had them rendering in production by Saturday afternoon. It was truly an amazing effort on everyone’s part, and I don’t believe it would’ve been possible had we chosen to go with any other Operating System solution."

https://www.freebsd.org/press/press-rel-1/

1827163• 3 years ago

You could get a whole network of PCs for the price of one workstation. And PCs had better development tools as well, such as IDEs.

agumonkey3• 3 years ago

wow I never had a chance to know what pipeline was used. p-II/450 DELL feels so "average". I wonder what renderer they used ... bmrt ? renderman ? mentalray ?

jacquesm3• 3 years ago

I actually loved IRIX for a couple of very simple reasons: it mostly got out of the way of the applications and it 'just worked', reliabily, month after month. After many years of using many IRIX boxes as workstations and as servers I realized we'd never seen a machine crash, uptimes were in the years unless we rebooted a machine on purpose. Very solid hardware, very solid software and for the times on the workstations amazing graphics. The lack of eye candy in the OS was an asset to me. I still set up my terminals the way the default terminal in IRIX looked because it feels like home to me.

Linux has some of these properties today so that's what I'm using now.

ChuckNorris894• 3 years ago

it 'just worked', reliabily, month after month.

IRIX users would beg to differ. Towards the end of SGI's life, IRIX has a amassed a laundry list of bugs labeled critical that weren't getting fixed and the list was getting bigger, prompting many of the staff to leave SGI and many SGI customers to switch to BSD or Linux, further driving more nails into SGI's coffin.

Daub• 3 years ago

IRIX also supported Photoshop natively.

zorked• 3 years ago

I remember IRIX as that operating system that had an amazing number of exploits, and they went unpatched for so long. It looked like there wasn't a buffer that they wouldn't overflow...

mtillman• 3 years ago

The SGI O2 was my first professional computer. I still customize my bsd desktop env to look like Irix and find it far better looking than the modern default look. I also use Screen font on my older Mac because it looks great. The SGI workstations never had the best performance but they looked great to me and never crashed in my experience. Closed source was simply not the way forward for me.

wombatpm• 3 years ago

In grad school I ended up managing a small cluster of SGI machines in our department. After setting up two new machines the time was wrong. I fixed it. Hours later it’s off by 12 minutes. Back and forth I go for a week thinking SGI has crappy clocks.

Found out SGI machines seek out each other and elect a TimeMaster based on up-time, clock changes. Turns out we had a machine that predated all of the new ones that had not been restarted in 2 years that had incorrect time.

Definitely workhorse machines.

Torwald• 3 years ago

I still set up my terminals the way the default terminal in IRIX looked because it feels like home to me.

Screenshots, config file, etc anything, please share.

Hatrix• 3 years ago

I had an SGI Indy for a while. The main thing I remember is the weight. Some of those old computers felt like they were full of lead.

DonHopkins2• 3 years ago

https://yarchive.net/risks/sgi_irix.html

PERFORMANCE UPDATE

"Indy: an Indigo without the 'go'". -- Mark Hughes

"X and Motif are the reasons that UNIX deserves to die." -- Larry Kaplan

The performance story is just as bad. I was tempted to write simply, "Try to do some real work on a 16 megabyte Indy. Case closed.", but I'll include some details.
In May, I listed some unacceptable Motif performance measurements. Just before 5.1 MR, someone reran my tests and discovered that the performance had gotten even worse. Some effort was expended to tune the software so that instead of being intolerable, it was back to merely unacceptable performance.
We no longer report benchmark results on our standard system. The benchmarks are not done with the DSO libraries; they are all compiled non-DSO so that the performance in 5.1 has not declined too much.
Before I upgraded from 4.0.5 to the MR version of 5.1, I ran some timings of some everyday activities to see what would happen. These timings were all made with the wall clock, so they represent precisely what our users will see. I run a 32 megabyte R4000 Elan.

     Test                4.0.5   5.1      % change
     ----                -----   ---      --------

    C compile of a       25 sec  35 sec   40%
    small application

    C++ compile of a     68 sec  105 sec  54%
    small application

    Showcase startup,    13 sec  18 sec   38%
    May report file

    Start a shell        <2 sec  ~3 sec   ~50%

    Jot 2 MB file        <2 sec  ~3 sec   ~50%

>What's most frightening about the 5.1 performance is that nobody knows exactly where it went. If you start asking around, you get plenty of finger-pointing and theories, but few facts. In the May report, I proposed a "5% theory", which states that each little thing we add (Motif, internationalization, drag-and-drop, DSOs, multiple fonts, and so on) costs roughly 5% of the machine. After 15 or 20 of these, most of the performance is gone.

Bloating by itself causes problems. There's heavy paging, there's so much code and it's so scattered that the cache may as well not be there. The window manager and X and Toto are so tangled that many minor operations like moving the mouse or deleting a file wake up all the processes on the machine, causing additional paging, and perhaps graphics context swaps.
But bloat isn't the whole story. Rocky Rhodes recently ran a small application on an Indy, and noticed that when he held the mouse button down and slid it back and forth across the menu bar, the (small) pop-up menus got as much as 25 seconds behind. He submitted a bug, which was dismissed as paging due to lack of memory. But Rocky was running with 160 megabytes of memory, so there was no paging. The problem turned out to be Motif code modified for the SGI look that is even more sluggish than regular Motif. Perhaps the problem is simply due to the huge number of context swaps necessary for all the daemons we're shipping.
The complexity of our system software has surpassed the ability of average SGI programmers to understand it. And perhaps not just average programmers. Get a room full of 10 of our best software people, and you'll get 10 different opinions of what's causing the lousy performance and bloat. What's wrong is that the software has simply become too complicated for anyone to understand.

weinzierl3• 3 years ago

I don't remember if it was IRIX but from the SGI I worked on the one thing that left a lasting impression was the GUI. From what I remember it was a truly vector based UI where you could scale everything arbitrarily without ugly pixel artifacts. This, for me, was living in the future. I thought every system will be like that in a year or two. Also, while I did't witness it in person at that time my machine had this flashy mousepad that showed a impression of a video running in a window. That was outrageous. Admittedly the UI was a bit minimalist compared to flashy OS/2 but at least it had smooth lines compared to the 32x32 pixel icon charm.

sokoloff• 3 years ago

For many years I preferred the SGI 1600SW LCD as my monitor after being introduced to them at work.

At the time, it was quite impressive (110dpi) and now is probably bested by a randomly-chosen $100 LCD at Microcenter.

lowbloodsugar3• 3 years ago

If it had a Reality Engine in it nobody was looking at fucking Motif for long, they were looking at dinosaurs or aliens. Unless they were in a dinosaur movie, and then they were looking at that bullshit 3D ux.

hulitu4• 3 years ago

While SGI boxes were beautiful

And 30 years after them nobody is able to do something at least at the same level of design. Today the level is at "RGB LEDs and transparent case".

Design has died.

ChuckNorris894• 3 years ago

Before shitting too much on current workstation designs, check how much an SGI workstation would cost back then. Onyx started at 100k USD in 2000's money without adjusting for inflation. For that kind of cheese, they'd better be designed by Gucci.

agumonkey3• 3 years ago

it's more than that, digitalization means 'objects' taking space are a problem, macbookair/tablets and soon VR is the floor.

avidphantasm2• 3 years ago

It’s worse that that. Workstations have died. I would argue there is no such thing as a PC workstation. To me, workstation implies a high-end machine with hardware and software developed by the same vendor. Apple still does that. Does anyone else? Oracle?

znpy• 3 years ago

I guess the boxes were compensating for the desktop ui, and according to your comments, they were successful :)

angrygoat• 3 years ago

We had a few ex-mining company workstations at the computer club at university – I remember that the metal security bar through the Indigo workstation could be pulled out and waved at one's fellow users, usually in good fun. :)

They were fun machines to play around on; even when we first got them c ~ 1999 PCs with a graphics card were catching up, but there was just something solid about them. I miss those days of *NIX workstations.

tarsinge• 3 years ago

I was a kid in their prime but thanks to making-of, documentaries and magazines it’s so ingrained I still get the aura these machines and OS are above my poor consumer-grade 2023 laptop, and my work is toying compared to what real adults pros are doing on these, even though I’m near 40.

gamedna• 3 years ago

Motif was everywhere and it sucked. Sun/SGI/etc. SGI/IRIX unfortunately used it as the default, but you could change it fairly easily.

ofrzeta4• 3 years ago

Solaris had OpenLook if I am not mistaken.

coldtea4• 3 years ago

While SGI boxes were beautiful, IRIX itself was... not. It had a Motif look which looked outdated

I only used IRIX-themed window managers in Linux, back in the 90s, but I absolutely love that clean look

agumonkey3• 3 years ago

While SGI boxes were beautiful, IRIX itself was... not. It had a Motif look which looked outdated, even compared to OS/2.

That is true, and it gave a super confusion feeling about seeing stuff like Maya running on it, which was peak software IMO (I mean, algebra friendly reactive DAG based, complex geometry rendering, including near real time constrained physics simulation.. with server/client split and noob-moldable/scriptable UI). So even if the DE felt lagging, you never cared much.

tinus_hn• 3 years ago

The O2 actually came with a blow up model to play around with.

jasoneckert• 3 years ago

I loved both SGI hardware and IRIX itself. There was a tremendous amount of effort put in to make it a desktop-friendly UNIX, and it showed. Services (NFS, networking, web services, etc.) were easy to configure using desktop apps, and the locations of system and user files was more intuitive than SunOS or NeXTSTEP.

SGI was my favourite UNIX until OS X, and I still have an SGI Fuel (with all the Nekochan extras) that I boot up each time I need a nostalgia kick:

https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/IRIX.png

https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/SGIFuel.jpg

oppositelock• 3 years ago

A completely disagree with you on IRIX.

I'm biased, because I did work with IRIX at SGI and I did in fact touch some kernel code as well.

What I miss from IRIX, that no other system has yet replicated: 1) Realtime mode. RTLinux doesn't count. In IRIX, you could run your own code at a higher priority than the scheduler itself (this was called hard realtime), and you'd give it time slices when you could, or a core or two. 2) Frame scheduling. When rendering 3D, you could have the scheduler connected to the monitor refresh rate to make you less likely to miss a frame boundary.

Yes, Motif was very plain, and X11 was a hot mess to work with, but the thing had capabilities which are still hard to find.

riceart• 3 years ago

What I miss from IRIX, that no other system has yet replicated: 1) Realtime mode. RTLinux doesn't count.

FWIW, SGI didn't seem to agree.

From SGI's own whitepaper: "In addition, REACT for Linux adds unique capabilities including sgi-shield and kbar that were not available on IRIX. The Linux based platform delivers better real-time performance than SGI Origin running IRIX with realtime extensions: 30µs guaranteed interrupt response time versus 50µs for Origin."

https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/565/463/operating_syst...

Without REACT extensions, Irix realtime facilities aren't any different than the scheduling policies of Linux (this is akin to bypassing the normal scheduler).

https://nixdoc.net/man-pages/IRIX/man5/realtime.5.html.

I have a soft spot for Irix from the early 90s, and it had some clever accomodations for the technology at the time, but things have moved on and advanced.

grumpyprole• 3 years ago

Irix had vector icons that could be dynamically scaled. At the time I thought it was much more futuristic than Windows.

imoverclocked4• 3 years ago

I wonder if anything could be purchased or similar from HP. Seems like a lot of work to rebuild something that might still be available somewhere.

SMP-UX10• 3 years ago

Got millions?

imoverclocked4• 3 years ago

Nope. Maybe it could be a charitable donation though?

pantalaimon• 3 years ago

The article says that rackable, the previous owner, binned all of the old stuff in 2010

imoverclocked4• 3 years ago

I saw that. Sometimes things have a way of surviving those kinds of events though. It's also possible that just by getting the rights to the stuff, they can piece together portions that would otherwise be inaccessible. eg: someone held onto a source tarball somewhere but doesn't want to come forward because of potential legal retribution. People hold onto mementos even if by accident in the shuffle of life. Maybe someone has an old book in storage or something?

The article also mentions that they are unsure if they can legally reverse engineer it. Getting the rights to Irix would definitely solve that problem too.

sillywalk3• 3 years ago

TLDR; Some of the folks at Irixnet [0] wish to raise $6500 "going towards the goal of technical documentation that might someday lead to a new kernel." based on Irix 5.3 (32 bit)

I wish them luck, or for HPE to just find the source code and public-domain it, along with MPE/IX.

[0] https://irixnet.org/

lowbloodsugar3• 3 years ago

Was so glad when we got PC based N64 dev kits instead of the bullshit Indys.

nologic012• 3 years ago

Why is there "corporate disinterest" in the SGI niche? Or who is occupying it today?

One would think that a high-end graphics workstation (with the looks to scream "creative") running Linux would be a viable proposition?

I suppose game and movie studios, architecture, design and engineering shops etc. all somehow cope with more generic solutions and some combination of local and cloud compute but clearly cutting corners in the overall experience and productivity.

There is usually an upmarket segment that offers that something extra (dully compensated) but somehow not in this area...

jamesfmilne• 3 years ago

PCs are "good enough" to do the job, the same reason they killed off these beasts back in the first place.

The software I work on started life on SGI, but has been on Linux PCs for the last 20 years.

For the top end, we use big servers with 6-8 GPUs, but they sound like jet aircraft nowadays so they live in a machine room.

https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/baselight/overview_bl....

nologic012• 3 years ago

Yes, that is my exactly my experience too, but the task of innovators is to prove that "good enough" is just not good enough and that we have a need that we didn't know - for which we are willing to pay a premium :-)

The underlying driver always involves the economics of cost of development versus market size and in the past this was ruthless for specialized vendors. But today, e.g., NVIDIA is riding high on what are extremely specialized chips, presumably on the assumption of massive adoption.

So its not clear if we are still in the regime of commoditized computation that destroyed the Unix workstation era or maybe the category will be reinvented.

jeffbee4• 3 years ago

At the moment that the PC killed off Unix workstations, the PCs were already radically better. We were all just waiting for application vendors to port to Windows NT. When my SGI was replaced by a dual Pentium Pro it was a little shocking how much faster it was.

cmacleod4• 3 years ago

Since HPE don't seem to care about IRIX, they could get get some positive publicity by just open-sourcing it. :-/

In the nineties I was a university sysadmin. We were mostly a Sun shop but we had a handful of Indy workstations - beautiful machines.

de6u99er• 3 years ago

It would require some heavy modernization to make it acceptable.Not sure if it could still be called Irix after such an effort.

jtode• 3 years ago

Let us pray the answer is no. As Tina Turner once said, we don't need another Unix.

That's how the song goes right?

does_rips• 3 years ago

RIP Tina Turner

ThinkBeat4• 3 years ago

I did a lot of programming in C and assembler on SGIs back when they were the hot thing.

Coming from assembler on the x86 cpus, MIPS felt wonderful. The hardware was solid. I never had any issues with IRIX.

It was fast.

That is probably more due to the hardware than anything else. Though it was faster than Solaris or SunOS I cant remember what the SUN serveres were running at the time.

Good memories. I have looked at buying used SGI. I think they have some proprietary ports to make life more difficult.

chasil• 3 years ago

Your opinion of MIPS assembler is not universally held.

https://www.jwhitham.org/2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-hav...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607119

lowbloodsugar3• 3 years ago

I mean honestly, having written games entirely in RISC assembly, and a significant amount of MIPs assembly code, that first guy is just, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, a whiney bitch.

I mean he complains that you "just have to know" things. Er, yeah. That pretty much sums it up. Want to do cool stuff? You have to know things. And sometimes there isn't a manual, and you have to find those things out yourself. Here's Todd Meynink's article on playing movies on the MIPS N64. https://ultra64.ca/files/other/Game-Developer-Magazine/GDM_S...

ThinkBeat4• 3 years ago

That is fine and I would not have expected anything else. No matter the topic for life in general and IT some people like one thing and other people prefer other choices.

Is it not great that we have options to suit different people?

I wish we had far more options mysef.

ThinkBeat4• 3 years ago

What UNIX brands are still under active development?

IBM AIX Oracle Solaris. HP/UX Darwin / macOS (?) BSD: Net,Open,Dragon, ++++

and then UNIX like: Linux.

Did I miss any?

badrabbit• 3 years ago

Didn't Oracle kill Solaris several years ago? I'd be using it if it or openSolaris were still maintained.

OpenIndiana and other illumos distros are alive too.

ThinkBeat4• 3 years ago

I see now that I was wrong. Sorry about that. I went by the Google summary that listed it as "current". It appears 2018 was the last release. It does appear on the Oracle page for it that they are still selling licenses. Which this being Oracle I find plausible. Or the page is misleading, with this being Oracle I find plausible.

JdeBP• 3 years ago

People are still actively working on Illumos. The last change was yesterday morning.

* https://illumos.org

People are still actively working on MirBSD. There's a CVS commit account that can be followed on the FediVerse.

* http://www.mirbsd.org

It's DragonFly BSD, not Dragon BSD, and the irony of that is that you missed FreeBSD, which is of course still going.

* https://dragonflybsd.org

* https://freebsd.org

As is GhostBSD, which tracks FreeBSD.

* https://ghostbsd.org

HardenedBSD is still going. Shawn Webb regularly talks about it on the FediVerse.

* https://hardenedbsd.org

dark-star2• 3 years ago

I was a member of IRIXnet. The leaders/admins/mods of that site acted like entitled kids rather than actual enthusiasts. One didn't feel welcome there at all.

I have no idea who runs the forums/website now, but if it's still the same person there are more welcoming places, like the SGI User's Group (https://sgi.sh)

SMP-UX10• 3 years ago

Ah yes the same people who run that "more welcoming place" dog piled and harassed the guy on Reddit leading to two of them getting permabanned from Reddit for violating the content policies regarding harassment, doxxing and more.

Sometimes, people are bad the whole way round. Lesser of two evils may be necessary.

dark-star2• 3 years ago

Sorry, I have not witnessed that. Personally, I was only attacked by an admin on one of these two forums.

It's okay to have some bad people, every community has those. But problems do arise if these people are the people in charge.

gjvc• 3 years ago

dire-ix

contingencies• 3 years ago

  $ telnet any-irix-box-ever.com
  login: lp

  irix:$

ofrzeta4• 3 years ago

For people who like the IRIX look and want to re-create that experience on Linux there's the MaXX Desktop

https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/

kmbfjr2• 3 years ago

My coworkers and I would spend hours in the art department at a TV station playing the tank battle game.

n3storm• 3 years ago

XFCE Desktop was based on CDE, Iris Desktop and I love moving panels and drawers

alberth• 3 years ago

“It’s a UNIX system”.

Jurassic Park.

https://youtu.be/JOeY07qKU9c?start=38

otabdeveloper4• 3 years ago

Hopes and prayers they can't.

ecliptik• 3 years ago

I worked with SGI workstations at UCSD around 2005-2007 where the School of Medicine had some Indigo2, Onyx, and Indys[1]. They ran a custom OpenGL software called Anatomic VisualizeR© that displayed full 3d models of a human body, scanned slice-by-slice [2].

My boss at the time offered me $2000 if I could port it from Irix to Linux, but my C skills weren't that great and I don't think they ever did.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20060830114648/http://meded.ucsd...

2. https://web.archive.org/web/20060503041524/http://meded.ucsd...

lockhouse• 3 years ago

Who would have ever predicted back in the 90s that Apple of all companies would be the last commercial UNIX workstation vendor.

My money back then would have been on Sun or SGI for sure.

User23• 3 years ago

During the mid 90s you could have been excused for thinking the company’s name was “Beleaguered Apple Computer” that phrase was used so often in the trade press.

eesmith• 3 years ago

You'll like this Google N-gram plot for 'beleaguered Apple' at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=beleaguered+Ap... with a clear peak at 1997.

Hmm... I wonder what happened in 1997. ;)

rabite• 3 years ago

SGI was sabotaged by obvious corporate espionage by Microsoft -- the executive that urged the abandonment of SGI's generations-ahead GPU platform and MIPS for Intel gear had done the same thing to HP prior, and left for a long sinecure at Microsoft after he was done.

kloch• 3 years ago

Classic SGI demo video from 1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk

I remember when my dad brought a VHS copy of this home. I couldn't believe the high-res smooth color graphics.

irix_solaris• 3 years ago

I have a few old SGI Irix systems (Indy's) as well as SGI Solaris (V100's).

Systems are no charge (only pay shipping and handling ACT NOW!!) from the NYC or Philly area. (Some systems are near Philadelphia.)

Also some SGI Monitors.

Now these systems would probably come without the hard drives (but they easy to get).

Now what I need to know is is there a way to get the data off the hard drives hooking up to a Mac. (I have no time to google and figure this out although I could so if anyone has some tips or links separate from wanting the system(s) let me know).

I am not ready to dispose of these immediately (I'd as I'd to retrieve from storage where they currently located). One of the V100's (might be a higher model actually I don't even remember) ran for over 10 years straight w/o a reboot (when colo de-racked).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Fire

To get these you need to be a 'goodfella' meaning a hacker who will put them to good use (student ok; business ok just let me know up front you think they are cool).

The Indy's were fwiw in this 1994 Michael Douglas movie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disclosure_(1994_film)

(I don't mean the ones I have I mean it was cool they were in that movie as in many other movies as others have pointed out).

As I recall I have at least 2 of each model and maybe more.

MilStdJunkie• 3 years ago

I managed to score an Indigo back in the early nineties by basically stalking the SOCOM military subcon auctions we would have semi-occasionally in our neck of the woods. Incredibly - I didn't realize what kind of deal I had scored until many years later - it was bought for preteen money, and that machine was my nafs for more or less my entire early adulthood. Especially that HUGE monitor. Ooooh I remember getting the NaN Blender kit in 1998, it came with a beautiful book and a handwritten letter from Ton himself. I remember animating my first spinning cubes. It went to college with me, my first apartment, I practically sang it to sleep.

I guess, what I am trying to say, short version is that I wouldn't be employable in any way without that old Indigo. Circa 1995 I was a Medieval-Renaissance studies student, who could cook real good . . but I also could make *NIX systems bark, shake, and lie down. Thus the crusty old dude from the electronics firm gave me a job while I was still in my apron, because no one else on his team knew how to make HP-UX talk to a modem. Thanks old Indigo. You were a great computer. <snif/>

Can SGI’s enthusiast community bring IRIX back to life?

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