In article <alpine.DEB.2.00.1208071455190.22744 at brioche.invalid.domain>,
Tothwolf <tothwolf at concentric.net> writes:
I never sought out to collect a 1400, it just found me
at the right time
and I had the means to haul it away. The manuals and boot tape (QIC
format) turned up later and I went back to pick those up as well.
Yeah, sometimes you're just the right person in the right place.
To me at least, the Octane seems more
"uncommon" than the 4D series... I
own 5 different models of 4D series machines, including one which is
housed in a large brown rack (all 5 machines came from the same place),
yet I've never seen an Octane in person.
Octanes are offered up regularly on ebay. Personal Iris a little less
often, but they still have been showing up with some frequency. What
is harder to find is the larger machines. Anything that can be easily
sent by a parcel carrier shows up with more regularity than something
that requires freight shipment. It's been a long while (multiple
years) since I've seen a deskside Onyx for sale on ebay. I lucked out
that a whole bunch of stuff was being surplussed from Boeing in St.
Louis all at the same time: Onyx 2 Reality Monster, Challenge XL, Onyx
XL, Crimson, Onyx deskside, spaceballs.
The 1x00, 2x00 and 3x00 used the same deskside
chassis, so the average
person just looking at the exterior of the computer wouldn't see much
difference between them. You 3100 being complete and fairly well populated
with boards might actually make a better working demonstration than an
earlier machine such as the 1400.
Yes, it's nice to have the "high end" of the line for demonstration
purposes, but it's also useful to have a low-end member of the line to
represent the range of the product at that time. Also, the 1x00
models were more like terminals and the 3x00 models were more like
workstations, so there are other differences besides performance and
capacity.
The real challenge with my 1400 I think will be the
hard drive. I pretty
much put my 1400 project aside when I discovered that the V170 hard
drive's head lock solenoid was stuck because I just don't have the means to
service the drive (oddly enough, the drive shows signs of previous service
work).
Yeah, archiving any perishable bits (PROMs, hard drives, floppies,
etc.) is always the most challenging part of any restoration, I think.
It's always what's on my mind first before I start doing anything else
with a machine. With later SGIs, the hard drives are commodity SCSI
drives, so archiving them isn't difficult.
Most museums would never even consider making the
repairs that this IRIS
1400 requires to get it fully functional.
Even the CHM has done restoration projects, but compared to the ones
they've done so far I expect an IRIS 1400 would be pretty far down on
their priority list. For me, it would be high up there as I'm focused
on graphics. LCM might do it, but even for them the IRIS 1400 is
getting a little far afield of their primary focus (minicomputer
timesharing).
--
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