There's a joke in there somewhere. The leading history archive center building was donated by SGI to Computerhistory.org, now all the boxes they moved out of Moffett field they may have to move right back in. John A.

Lyle Bickley wrote: It's good to hear. It's a relatively hard brand to get hold of in the UK, plus boxes usually show up stripped of memory and hard disk (and of proprietary keyboards in the case of older models). A few years back the company I was working for at the time did a few projects in partnership with SGI because it was 'showcase' type work; I used to hear tales of obselete kit getting thrown out at SGI and even the employees weren't allowed to rescue it from the crusher. Wow, that's pretty awesome. They did some very cool stuff - I was in the game too late to see the earlier stuff and only worked with the Origin 200 / 2000 hardware. At the museum we've gained a 4D/25, pair of Indigos, various Indys and an Indigo2 - but I'd love to get hold of some of the larger / older systems. It's not much to show for a company who's name lots of people have heard of. (I haven't, however, tried contacting SGI UK directly in a museum capacity and see if I can resuce anything - which might be worth a try) I'm glad someone's got it - even if it is presumably copyrighted to hell and back right now! :) Initial glance and that looks like a useful resource! It might be worthwhile for Ian to contact Weta Digital in NZ (Lord of the Rings fame) - they had a *huge* amount of SGI hardware when I saw it a few years ago and their machine room was most impressive (lots of blue ;) They may well be interested in supplying some details / photos though for posterity. Might make for an interesting article / feature. (unfortunately according to http://www.top500.org/sublist/Site.php?id=2343 it looks like they might have gone the IBM route in the last couple of years) cheers Jules

I am getting seriously teased. I used SGI's off and on from 1988 to 1994. I saw an original SGI at the Siggraph 1984. I was even a informal system manager for a year. Still, I own no such system. Anybody having an SGI in the northeast area they don't care much for anymore, give me a note. John A.

Chuck> On 11/9/2005 at 9:32 AM Lyle Bickley wrote: Chuck> That seems to fit the SGI pattern--buy it, then sell it. Could be worse. There's the Lucent pattern: buy a company. Buy another just one like it. Then run both into the ground, and shut them down. paul

Zane H. Healy wrote: Why not get an Onyx2? They've come down in price a lot. I was thinking of picking one up myself. Peace... Sridhar

Zane H. Healy schrieb: I don't have room anymore either since I put a Challenge XL in the only room I have for computers. Apart from the amount of electricity it eats (I of course can't keep it running full time) the power supplies keep dying. If I remember correctly I already blew four or five and since I only have a few more spares and not enough knowledge of electronice to fix them I am a bit worried... I know that those machines are supposed to run continuously but it can't be quite normal that every other time I power it up one of the supplies dies. Any hints? Is there a way to fix those things or to prevent them cheers Sebastian

Sridhar Ayengar schrieb: Well... that could be the cause. I'm running the machine off a 16A fuse although it is designed for 25A IIRC. Of course the fuse could blow on power up but I didn't expect that to do any damage to the power supplies... maybe that was a very bad idea(tm)? After losing supplies with the original configuration (24 CPUs, ~18 SCSI channels, 1.5GB RAM) I stripped the machine to a fairly minimal configuration (something like 4 cpus, 512mb ram, no extra scsi). The problem didn't go away. Once it boots (and doesn't blow as soon as I turn it on) it runs without problems. And since it worked in that exact configuration for years for the previous owner (continuously powered on though) I expect it to be fully working. He also said that he often had to replace the power supplies after power cuts, so it might just be normal... Sebastian

Zane H. Healy wrote: Pretty much all of their stuff is impressive! (barring the last handful of years). Very good quality, and some pretty slick software too... Yep, Sun seemed to get it right and actually encourage individuals to use their software and hardware. SGI on the other hand remained pretty elitist about things (perfectly within their right to do so I guess, it's just a shame) Maybe they were paying royalties to various people on every copy of IRIX sold, or the codebase had just got too ragged after so many years and a ground-up rewrite was needed anyway to keep performance up on modern hardware... I suppose there are all sorts of reasons. I don't know why, I don't feel so bad about losing IRIX to Linux, providing the SGI toolset's all still there. NT-on-SGI is another matter, same with non-MIPS hardware... Trivia: what was the downhill skiing game available on the Indy? It featured some sort of egg-shaped character and I think was probably an OpenGL demo. I vaguely remember it entertaining people at my old work... cheers Jules

der Mouse wrote: The latter sentence was more my point - I'm sure Sun could do a lot more too (after all, full schematics of all their older systems would sure be nice :) But Sun do seem to have freely allowed people to dispose of their hardware rather than trying to take it all back and crushing it, and put some pretty useful info on their website, and made an effort to allow people to easily get hold of copies of their OS - quite different from SGI's approach. Which is a pity when there used to be things like the SGI 'Antics and mayhem' web pages around - at one point it was obviously a very liberal company to work for... cheers J.