25 Jun
2004
25 Jun
'04
7:09 p.m.
On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 09:58:34 -0400
"Jason McBrien" <jbmcb(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
<SNIP>
>I've never committed the crime of having anything to do with the SGI
>boxes that sport an Intel processor and run NT, though.
>(Aieeee!, huh? )
<SNIP>
I think those are going to be collectable machines. I've been looking
for a cheap one for a while. It's a really interesting architecture.
Custom memory bus (== EXPENSIVE memory modules) Custom system bus and
integrated video controller. These things were way ahead of anything
else at the time, unfortunatly for SGI the PC hardware market catches
up quickly and commodity PC hardware had the kind of bus speeds their
workstations had within a year (RAMBUS, BOO! HISS!) As vertically
marketed as they were they don't run anything other than Windows NT. I
think there's a version of Linux floating around for them, and odds
are NetBSD will at least boot on them (Horray for serial console! :)
Actually, I am somewhat interested in something like that. I've sold
the IBM RS/6000 box that I ran NT/PPC on, but could easily pick up
another such machine sometime. The problem I had with NT/PPC was that
there is nothing, completely and absolutely nothing, to run on it. I
wobbled around on the net (as an experiment) with the crippled IE2 that
they bundled with NT4 before shrugging and putting AIX back on the
machine. With an actual compiler on the box, it could actually be
useful for running code on. Being the weird person I am I'd probably
get another PPC box and bring it up again.
(** I'm probably one of the .0001% of people
who has seen a Windows
NT desktop on a PowerPC system)
I've got Visual Studio 5 for PowerPC if you're interested...