30 Apr
2002
30 Apr
'02
6:45 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Jason McBrien once stated:
Are Personal Irises good for anything? I've got two, a 25 and a 35 and
they seem to work but I don't have a monitor or keyboard for either. I'd
love to run IRIX or anything on them to round out my super-heterogeneous
network.
I used a Personal Iris 4D 35 at school. It came with IRIX 3.3.2 which
used NeWS (Network Window System) for the GUI which was quite fast (despite
being based on PostScript) and easily extensible, but that was the last
version of IRIX that supported NeWS. The next version, 4.0.x, dropped NeWS
in favor of the X Windowing System.
Now, outside the GUI, there weren't many other differences between 3.3.x
and 4.0.x (I think the machine I used ended up running 4.0.5). I'm not sure
what versions of IRIX past that would work, but if at all possible, skip the
5.x series of IRIX which sucked horribly.
Now, the hardware ...
I was not impressed with the hardware after four to five years of use.
The graphics board had to be replaced, the fan unit was replaced three
times, and the color monitor displayed graphics with a distinct shade of
green.
The ANSI-C compiler, however, rocked.
-spc (Good luck)