13 Jul
2003
13 Jul
'03
3:35 p.m.
ClassicCmp story: when I was at my university (Florida International
University, Miami, FL), studying computer science, I managed to get in
league with a professor (Dr. Milani) to let me take independent study with
him, and use the computers in his lab; see, it was sort of the elite lab
on campus, the only one outfitted with the then 'super cool' Silicon
Graphics Indy and Indigo 2 machines. I'd always jonesed for having one of
these, even though they're now outdated for any 'real' work besides
terminal duties. I'd run across many on ebay (they're super cheap now),
and even saw a prototype Indy at 'Weird Stuff' in but never got around to
buying one. See, I'm the kind of classic cmp collector that lets the
computer come to him, with the off exception (Timex Sinclair 2068 was
ebay bought).
Some of my cohorts (Miwa and Gouku) from my days at the University,
decided to stay on there working as SysAdmins for the campus computers.
They told me that every so often, as systems come to the end of their
life, they usually get torn into, all the useful recyclables get extracted
(memory and hard drives if they're of any usable size), and their now
lifeless corpses get sent to 'surplus'. This is where a gentleman gets
their university serial number, marks them as 'gone' from inventory, and
they usually get bought out in lots at auctions held every so often. My
guess is for metal scrap or some other ill end.
These same cohorts go by the surplus building regularly and walk by the
soon to be scrapped systems looking for gems to be rescued. At one point,
they ran into an SGI system and mentioned it to me, knowing I was
interested. However, because of delayed in communication, by the time we
mobilized to acquire the system it was gone. Bummer! "Keep an eye out
and grab'em when you see any SGI's." I told them, and they said
"ok".
About a year later, they message me on IRC and say 'Hey, guess what we got
you.' I was happy beside myself. When we arrange for the 'drop' at the
university campus parking garage: In the trunk of the car they had TWO
SGI's for me: an Indigo 2 and an Indy!
On the torn stickers affixed to their shells they had their names,
Frontier and Pioneer. These were two of the systems from my lab! The lab
had been dismantled a few years after a graduated for office space and the
systems moved to another room/lab. With much glee I transferred them to
my car and ran off as fast as I could before lighting would strike me,
with so much luck on my side.
I've got them at home; the Indigo 2 had a padlock on it, which I made
short work of with a dremel. Opened it up, and it has all of its memory
and harddrive- 32Megs and a 1G drive! The Indy had its drive, but no
memory. I tried to boot the Indigo 2, but no luck; it would die trying to
repair the boot drive. I had a spare scsi drive and a Indy compatible
cdrom drive, and a copy of Irix 6.5. I tried to make the Indigo 2 boot
with that, but there was no love- aparently the scsi card has some
problems and the cdrom keeps on timing out and resetting the scsi bus.
I had some spare ram that would work in the Indy, put a replacement drive
in it, and after some false starts (didn't know the boot disk had to be
SCSI Id 1 on Indys) managed to get most of Irix onto it. Its running
quite nicely given its near 9 years of age.
So onto the real question here: The outsides are in great shape, but it
appears there were some fears of theft in the new lab and they put those
aluminum anchors that you thread the cable through and padlock on one end
so the equipment doesn't 'Walk away'. I'd like to try and remove this
without damaging the case.
Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? There seems to be a rubber
like material between the aluminum anchor and the computer itself, and I
was thinking of poking at it with a razor blade or the like. Looking for
better alternatives, though.
Louis