On Monday 08 May 2006 10:00, Zane H. Healy wrote: ---snip--- I, too, only use their gear as a hobbyist. I've got at least one of almost every early box SGI produced: PI, Indigo, Indigo2, Indy, O2, Octane, Octane2, Crimson, Onyx RE2, Onyx IR - and I've tried to collect as many video options as I could: Cosmo, Cosmo/Compress, Sirius, etc. for each system and spare boards/modules for all of the above. I haven't had much trouble getting software updates - at least through IRIX 6.5.22. I signed up years ago as a Supportfolio member and member of the SGI User Group and I've obtained just about all of the software free. I just checked, and I have over 16GB of IRIX and IRIX related software (not counting probably 100-200 original IRIX and application CDs. (I lucked out - as my customers dropped SGI, they "donated" their software to me.) I just noted that the only current product I am missing was the latest version of Performer (3.2.2). I'm in the process of downloading it now - apparently with a lot of other folks. I typically get about 2-3MB/sec downloading from SGI - it's now running at 64KB! My guess is that everybody who saw SGI's bankruptcy notice is downloading all the current stuff at once. Yes, SGI's gear - even though "obsolete" - often will beat benchmarks of the latest nvidia and ati graphic boards (w/high resolution, and high levels of anti-aliasing turned on). SGI supported multiple displays all the way back to the Indigo's. My big mid '90s ONYX IR supports realtime video, eight (8) displays, OpenGL in silicon, scores of video "engines", etc., etc. Pretty amazing stuff! But shoddy management was able to "overcome" all of SGI's technical prowness and bring the company to bankruptcy. Even more important than the loss of technical excellence has been the human cost of SGI's mismanagement. Over the last few years, thousands of SGI employees, some of them my good friends, got laid off or quit SGI out of disgust. The human toll was enormous... Cheers, Lyle -- Lyle Bickley Bickley Consulting West Inc. Mountain View, CA http://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"

On Mon, 8 May 2006 13:16:17 -0700 (PDT) "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote: Seconded. Octane (ESSI, R12k 300 MHz, 2 GB RAM) in my case. At the moment I use some PeeCee crap with dual P III 800 MHz. The PeeCee has a lot more CPU power, but the Octane is still more responsive under load. Unfortunately the Octane consumes about 5 (fife) times more electical power then the PeeCee... -- tsch??, Jochen Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/

And thusly were the wise words spake by Teo Zenios Used to? ;) Anytime anybody brings up multitasking or how sluggish their computer is I can't help but bring up the Amiga... :) Cheers, Bryan

And thusly were the wise words spake by John Foust I don't think so... :) Do you have a personal website? Cheers, Bryan

----- Original Message ----- From: "Bryan Pope" <bpope at wordstock.com> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, May 08, 2006 8:13 PM Subject: Re: SGI.... machines I never had an SGI to compare my Amigas to (500/1200/2000HD). The other end of the spectrum would be my 68K Macs (if the CPU is doing something the OS goes out for lunch).

Zane H. Healy wrote: I don't know - I could forgive them the Linux side of it I think, because they still had the chance to produce some pretty cool software running on a reasonably efficient OS (provided the bloated Linux desktop environments were avoided, of course!) But the NT move - to a completely different OS that isn't even remotely UNIX-like, and known to not be the most efficient of systems (particularly under load) never made any business sense at all to me. Plus of course the fact that a company like SGI were supporting Microsoft lost them all respect I think! You're complaining about lack of OS updates on a classic computing list!? ;-) Yeah, they did some pretty cool stuff back in the day. I still want to find an O200 sometime as that was my first "serious" exposure to SGI (prior to that I'd just been playing around with Indys) - but it seems that the O200 machines were the black sheep of the family for some reason (at least, there don't seem to ever be any available unlike the rest of SGI's range) Depends what you use it for, I suppose. If your users are known then there's perhaps less of a case to require OS security patches - same if the machine's not hooked directly up to the 'net. If you're a programmer and the OS does what you need of it, there's not always a need to patch, either. I should really approach SGI in the UK from a museum standing and see if they've got anything they can throw our way before it's too late! cheers Jules

On 5/8/2006 at 10:01 AM David Griffith wrote: Try this one: http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB114708367971646497.html Cheers, Chuck