17 May
1997
17 May
'97
5:05 p.m.
You're stoked. I was at an auction a few weeks
back and there were four
of them, and I was hoping to get one but I had to leave before the
auctioneer got to them. I found out later they went for at least a $1000
each anyway, which I definitely would not have paid.
This one was free. It seems to be about ten years old, and was previously
doing ocean wave anaylsis or some such thing at the University of
Chicago. The disk (14" Fujitsu Eagle 424) has been parted out, and someone
raped some of the chips from the boards. Of course, I do not have IRIX
(the operating system) or any documentation.
It looks like I have another long term project!
Anyway, don't have any help for you. I heard that
the graphics for
Jurrasic Park were rendered on those though. Anyone care to back this up?
No doubt the movie was not done on IRISes - way too slow. Most likely the
movie people used MIPS based SGIs, with all of those fancy graphics
coprocessors. SGI adandonded Motorola 68K processors sometime in the
late-1980s, probably for the same reason Sun and HP did.
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net