On Thu, 31 Mar 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote: It's an "FPGA computer" it's hyper-neat, if you ask me. :-) He's got all kinds of interesting little hardware bits. It stokes a bit of nostalgia for the 90's when there was all manner of strange dohickeys and frodads for sale for Amigas and STs. I was too poor to buy any of it, or an SGI of my own. I think when you have geek lust for something as a kid or teen, but can never get your hands on it, it makes it even more "special" to you as an adult (where other folks just see some old obsolete junk). I got a deal on mine for $1000 about two years ago. The owner didn't think the machine was in working condition. It turns out it was a decked out full-quad rig that came from a California special effects house. It wouldn't post or boot. I knew I could sell the CPU boards alone for more than $1k, so I bought it. As it turned out, the only problem was that someone had juggled the boards on the system as they decommissioned it (probably to remove a special board the still wanted), and in so doing didn't properly re-seat everything. At the time, similar systems were going for $4k to $10k on ebay. I've had an Indigo and I've worked on Octanes quite a bit but never had one of my own. The problem with both of them (and my Tezro) is how huge and loud they are. If I ever buy a house, I'm going to modify a closet to put this crap into so I don't have to hear it. That's the main thing that holds me back from using them more. I use my Indys more than my O2 or my Tezro because of the noise. Still, the Tezro can do full HD (1920x1080) graphics in 24 bit color. It also has a DVI interface that doesn't require a special 13W3 monitor or huge 13W3 -> VGA sync-on-green adapter or a special keyboard & mouse like the Indigo (which is a wonderful design, otherwise). Mine doesn't. I'm on Nekochan.net quite a bit and I don't see any chronic issues with the Tezro power supplies. However, I can confirm the issues with the Fuel. Fortunately, there are pretty easy hacks to replace the PS on a Fuel. I've got mixed feelings about the Fuel, but it's still a fun machine. If it wasn't for the noise, the O2 would probably be my favorite. It's one of those completely designed-from-scratch true hardware-Unix-workstations with some neat ideas (like the ICE co-processor and the outstanding A/V option). The unified memory architecture of the O2 was also really neat. The first time I saw someone use an O2 to super-smooth zoom down on a 16000x16000 satellite image I was very impressed. -Swift

On Thu, 31 Mar 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote: ... but even more flexible. The Crusoe could do some FPGA-alike things, but it wasn't a full FPGA. The one in the MiST is probably a Xilinx Spartan or something like that. Pretty fancy stuff. It's impressive that it can reproduce the entire Amiga 1200 down to every operational component. Very cool. I've never been inside any NASA building. The closest I've come is to drive by the Johnson Space Center in Houston when I was in high school. One thing that impacted me a lot when I was younger was when I'd visit or see video of any kind of place where technical or scientific work was going on, I paid a lot of attention to the computers people used. I noticed right away that pointy-haired-boss and bean-counters used one type, and the folks with a brain used a different type. So, right away I wanted to know what was special and cool about the guy in the corner with the purple computer. It's all just a jedi-mind-trick, I know, but it's just something that I've realized was very influential to me at the time. I don't think I ever even put hands on an O350. I've seen a bunch of o them for sale, though. They have a Craylink setup, IIRC. So, that's neat. Nice! You must have a truck or cargo van with a lift or something. You mention a lot of really heavy rigs. I love these little guys. I've had a couple myself. These are really the premier IRIX server for the money if you don't need a framebuffer. I like Challenge boxes, but the O200 racked a lot easier than any Challenge I've seen. I had an XL for a while, too. I wanted one of these two sooooo bad when they came out. The Crimson was also very cool because it _was_ crimson (in color). SGI was about the company that cared about that kind of industrial design in the 1990's. That and the fact that their machines were underrated vis-a-vis Sun. I couldn't believe how much better of a value the Indy and Indigo 2 were compared to Sun. They'd usually come with crap 8-bit graphics and some inferior sound device. For quite a while they had zilch for Z-buffered 3D while SGI ate their lunch, yet all my geek buddies still thought Sun was something special. They did some cool things, just not as cool as SGI was doing at the time. It wasn't until Jurassic Park came out that some folks started to appreciate the power of SGI boxes. "This is Unix. I know this!" Hey! You've had more Indy's than me! :-) My friend Greg Douglas used to run Reputable Systems in Boulder. He's the only one I know of who has had more SGIs that you or I ;-) I saw his warehouse when Reputable.com was going strong. It was a little slice of heaven. I used one of these when I worked at IBM for a while. I wasn't very popular with the AIX / Power folks, but what did they want me to use some RS/6000 or Intellistation running AIX.... no thanks. CDE < && != Indigo Magic. IMHO and YMMV of course :-) I never had an Octane, but I did have an Octane2 for a few weeks until the noise drove me insane and I got rid of it. It had low-end graphics anyhow. Bummer. They rocked pretty hard. I'm still seeing pristine O2+ rigs going for $400-$800. If it wasn't for the CRM graphics being limited to 1280x1024 it'd still be my favorite. That sounds too awesome for words. Don't ruin it telling me about the bureaucracy or how none of it's funded, now. I'm trying to live in the past, dang it. :-) That's one thing that's amazing about the Tezro. You have a ccNUMA based memory design with a true crossbar architecture. The thing is a real little supercomputer. You could write MPI code on it and shoot it over to an O3k and it'd run like a champ. All that, and it runs on 110 as a deskside unit. It's just LOUD. I've even gone so far as to try to get more efficient fans from audio gear to replace the chassis fans. However, it's turned out to be a pain because of the fan sensors. Maybe one day I can 3D print some specially shaped carbon-fiber fan blades and shrouds and cut the noise. :-) Yeah, I definitely just keep my gear on when I need it. I also use a Baytech RPC-10 to control power on my machines in the garage (and a serial console server for lights-out). I can turn most of them on and off from remote. A huge one. I credit the rise of so-called "hackerspace" clubs/shops to this issue. We want to keep these old gems, but uhhh.. where? So, folks get together and pile all the junk in one big warehouse on the stinky side of town. The only problem is that here in Denver, the ones I've seen don't take care of them and people are careless & abusive of the gear. I can't have my beautiful blue cases scratched up. :-) I'm right there with ya. I live in Denver and I work a decent IT job. I can't buy a house anywhere near where the work is. The wing-tips got em' locked up as investments. I'll be happy to rent space in the tent city once I'm too old to be of any use to my corporate masters. I just hope my savings will be enough to buy bread (or cat food?) when I'm elderly. All my talk of "what I'm gonna do when I get a house" is a pipe-dream. Like the rest of us, I'll be lucky to have a place to plug my computer in as our glorious future arrives. I used to administer one of those a long time ago at a telco. They used it for fraud detection for their calling cards. It had a little SPARC box to help control & bootstrap it. UNICOS (it was 10.x IIRC) was weird stuff, sometimes but still fun. I've replaced a lot of NIDEC power supplies with Sony ones in my Indys. Those are the main ones I've had issues with. However, my IMPACT Indigo^2 box had one die, too. You can. They are electrically compatible, but the problem is that the Fuel mobo doesn't use a standard ATX connector. One needs only to hand-build a converter. It's not hard, you just need pin-outs. They are on Nekochan somewhere. I've never had a Fuel. I was a bit put off by them at first because they reminded me of the way Sun started making the UltraSPARC machines like PeeCees. They basically looked like a PC with a different CPU (rather than something cool and different ala a SPARCstation). However, after seeing all the cool hardware you can make work in a Fuel, and considering you could get a near-silent 500W PS and replace the noisy one with some small effort, I've considered getting one, but once I got the Tezro, well... That's actually part of the reason why I got the Tezro. I knew it'd make me stop lusting for a Fuel and a decent Rocktane^2 and thus save me money overall. :-) -Swift

On Thu, 31 Mar 2016, ethan at 757.org wrote: Killer pics. What is that octagonal structure (room?) behind the machines? Dude, *please* tell me that was your office. Huh, I wish they had a gaming fest like that in my area. That sounds like a good time. Well, it was a forbidden fruit thing for me. I never got to touch that one. IMO, you are right on all points. I wished they would have allowed the 4-way R10k boards to work in tandem, because you'd have got 24 CPUs that way. IIRC, you could use dual R4k's or dual R10k's for a maxxed out version (12-way). Overall, they look a bit cooler and fit with the SGI motif better, too (purple / blue). The Reality Engine was also a killer system for caves. I built one for the DOE years ago using a similar setup. With the full kit they had genlocks, SVideo, a frame grabber, ridiculously overspec'd sound I/O, etc... When you look at the rear of an Onyx you definitely start thinking "This thing is built for fun and interesting media work." Small world, eh? Well, he is an awesome guy. He lives close to me and we'd go to computer swap meets in Golden together sometimes when he ran Reputable. I haven't talked to him in a few years. The first time I ever saw Quake III running at impressive framerate was at Greg's place on a Rocktane^2. Yep. Sadly they are both gone, now. Hey! Maybe that's what we can do in retirement rather than work at Wendy's: Setup a hobby computer store online that sells nothing but old hobby junk. Wouldn't be the first, but it sounds better than flipping burgers. Then again, I'm not sure my eyes are going to last that long... I was obsessed with getting a Galileo board, myself. I wanted one and an Indy to go with it so very badly when they were new. <long story> I have a story about that board. I used to live in Amarillo, Texas for a while. There was this computer store there, called "Thoroughbred Computers" (I'm pretty sure that was it). It was the main computer store in town during the mid 1990s. It was like a Frys or Microcenter, but smaller and with elitist PeeCee guys (kind of an oxy moron eh?) staring at you from across a dirty service counter like you were a scum covered turd for asking to see that SIMM module or Cyrix 586 board. The guy who owned it had big dreams of doing 3D & video production. So, he bought a bevy of SGIs. He had a couple of Indys and a couple of Indigo^2 machines. One of the Indy's had a Galileo board in it. He also had a Toaster 4k, rig. I got the feeling that the guy who owned the joint was a real tool. His trophy wife, of course, wanted to run the 3D & video production studio (in cow-town Texas.... great idea eh?). The only problem for the both of them was that they only had PeeCee dweebs working there. When they started having some Unix issues, they didn't know what to do. When I say Unix issues, I mean like how to add the default route or re-install the OS. So, they contact this professor at Amarillo College (a Jr college where I schooled). He was one of about 3 Unix savvy people in town at the time. He was busy building a ranch outside of town and didn't want to consult for them but he gave them my name. "This kid knows Unix. He can do what you need." So, they came to me to do some basic stuff. I was in college at the time and I was so jealous they probably thought I was from Mars because of how green I was around them. Still, it was a chance to put hands on some new Unix metal and I was 200% game for it. I came in and chatted with the owner's wife and to say that she was clueless is being gentle. It's a wonder this woman could dress herself without help, she was pure arm-candy only. They had zero chance of success and I was irritated that those beautiful machines were going to waste, but what could I do? About six weeks after that incident, it turns out that this owner had incorporated the computer shop so he could better hide how much he was stealing and not paying taxes, et al. There was some other criminal and general scumbaggery going on, but I can't remember everything. The cops wanted to know where the guy was and wanted to arrest him. So, *poof* he skips town and nobody can find his goat smellin' hide. They never did, as far as I know. The bank decided it didn't know WTF it was going to do with a ton of crap PC hardware (nice at the time, though) and four glorious SGI machines. So, they auctioned them off lickety-split off folding tables in the front of the store (indoors at least). I went to the auction with $1200 bucks. I'd borrowed $400 from my grandmother. I think I was 19 or something (I'm 41 now). All the SGI's went for more or slightly more than that. I was so disappointed. I guess I should have mowed some more lawns or something... Even more weird, one of the crooked-owner's sycophant business-disciples buys up some of the gear, including a Apollo Domain/OS workstation. He had decided to start one of these new things called an ISP to give people access to this thing called Internet. You know, you load Trumpet Winsock and you are good to go! (as long as your PPP setup is working). The Apollo workstation needed to be a DNS, SMTP, POP3, NNTP, server and run routed (modem channel banks used RIP routing). He didn't know the first thing about Unix or TCP/IP, since the only thing he'd been trained in was how to steal, effectively. So, this new scumbag who learned at the feet of his master (kind of like a Sith and Sith Lord, actually), decides HE also needs a Unix guru and goes back to Professor Haiduke for help. Prof blows the job off and sends it to me again (he wanted to get his new place settled and get outta the business, I think, but he was smart). I worked at this little rinky dink ISP (it was called "Genesis") for about 3 months. Then I come in one day, and this lawyer (the place was inside of a law office and some of the lawyers managed parts of the biz... different long story) comes up to me and says "Swift we've been keeping an eye on the folks here and it turns out you are the only one who isn't trying to steal money from the business and pay personal expenses with it." These guys had been stealing money from our general revenue and paying for child support, truck payments, BMW payments, etc... Soooo, they were fired and I found myself running a dial-in ISP solo for a while. That's how I became a "real" sysadmin, as opposed to a nutty student Unix zealot. The only reason the ISP existed was because scumbag 2.0 had convinced a rich widow that he could use the Internet / web to find the killer of her son who was an LAPD officer killed while on duty, and these lawyers all managed her trust funds or whatever rich people have for that kind of thing. Needless to say, it all fell apart when I started telling folks the truth. However, the lawyers thought having a SprintLink T1 to the office was the greatest thing ever so they paid my crappy salary until I moved to Norway after the T1 contract expired. Now, as for those SGIs, well the head scumbag (2.0) of the ISP, before he was shown the door, told me he knew one of the folks who bought the SGIs. It turned out they had the Indy with the Galileo board. They also had problems booting one of the machines due to something dumb they'd put in their inittab (a :wq at the bottom - nice vi skills). So, I negotiated that I'd fix that machine if they'd give me the Gallileo board from the spare Indy they had. I didn't even have an Indy! They didn't even know what it was for, and they agreed. They were doing 3D with Alias, so they didn't care much about video. It took me two or three more years (I moved to Norway for a while after that) to get a machine to put it in. However, by Jove, I got *something* caught up to the crooked owner dude or if he just started over scamming somewhere else... </long story> Very cool. I can see those challenge S boxes up there. Too bad the cases fade so much faster than the normal Indys. I would also have liked it if they'd have had more badges for them. Yay! Go NASA! NASA and a few DOE (NIST, NREL, etc..) branches are about the only good parts left to our poor bought-and-sold gubment. Hmm, I never thought of using home automation gear for that and I even used to work on home automation controllers (Colorado vNet before they folded). Doh! Good idea! Hopefully they didn't beat it up too bad. Cool. School them youngsters. Next work-from-home gig I hook up with, I might have to do just that. I dearly love Colorado, but that doesn't mean I can't move to some tiny agri-town and live in a converted machine-shop or something. I'll be buggerized if I'm going to give 2x the cost of a house to a bank for a mortgage on a place that's already twice as expensive as it should be for what I'm buying. It'd get real time call data and then if it detected that a calling card was being used in two geographically dispersed areas too close together time-wise, then they'd figure it was a stolen card and freeze the account. The Cray was the only thing that could handle all those data streams. It was at MCI in Colorado Springs, years ago. It had a zillion network interfaces, too. -Swift

I'm an SGI guy too! In college I worked as a sysadmin for a lab running a Challenge, and Indigo and Indy desktops. I have a nice O2 with a 1600SW, and just got an Octane that seems to have a bad graphics board. In the past I had an Indy and an Indigo with ELAN graphics. I'd love to have a Tezro, or even a Fuel, but they're hard to come by! On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 9:41 AM, devin davison <lyokoboy0 at gmail.com> wrote: -- Ben Sinclair ben at bensinclair.com

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Swift Griggs <swiftgriggs at gmail.com> wrote: I want to say it was a Challenge L, but could be misremembering. It was big, not the S! -- Ben Sinclair ben at bensinclair.com

Sent from my iPhone A raspberry pi 2 fits in an even smaller box, and is a lot cheaper...

On 3/31/2016 1:38 PM, ethan at 757.org wrote: FPGA's can match the TIMING and HARDWARE BUGS better, if given half a chance.

That depends. If you have a very good functional specification of a processor, you can build a behavioral model that will execute the same code. But it won't match the bugs (since those probably aren't in the spec) and it certainly won't match the timing. You can match timing and bugs, but for that you'd need to have access to the original design, at the gate level or close to it. That is occasionally possible (for example, the CDC 6600 design data exists to that level of detail). But it is quite rare to find that. In fact, even a functional spec good enough to do an FPGA behavioral model is rare. Most of the time you find yourself reverse engineering things from vague descriptions, just as emulator software programmers do. The PDP-11 FPGA designs I have seen are examples of this. paul

On Thu, 31 Mar 2016, ben wrote: Yes, and you can control the floppy insert/eject operations all from the joystick rather than needing a computer console etc... Are you talking about folks taking tile based 2D games and running algorithms to 3D-ize them into "new games" ? I'm wondering why you connect this and the MiST ? Just curious. Nice! I never even thought about someone setting up an FPGA to do that. The same would be cool for old LISP machines or a Thinking Machines emulator. That'd be really interesting. -Swift

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 2:53 PM, ben <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote: dps8m emulator: Multics MR12.6: Serenity Valley Engineering (Channel d.h000) Load = 12.0 out of 90.0 units: users = 12, 03/31/16 1503.6 pdt Thu l Anthony u Password: You are protected from preemption until 15:03. Anthony.User logged in 03/31/16 1503.7 pdt Thu from ASCII terminal "none". Last login 03/20/16 1119.4 pdt Sun from ASCII terminal "none". You have mail. r 15:03 3.424 60 lisp * (print "Multics rulez; UNIX droolz") "Multics rulez; UNIX droolz" t -- Charles

On Thu, 31 Mar 2016, Geoffrey Oltmans wrote: I think mine was just shy of 200 bucks or so. I don't think I could get a fully maxxed out A1200 for that, but who knows; maybe, so. This is what I struggled with, too. Why buy yet another piece of kit when I can run UAE and other emulators with ease (and all on my main workstation) ? For me, the reason is a bit specific to my situation. For one, the MiST is _tiny_ it's about the size of a box of strike-anywhere kitchen matches (I used to shoot these out of my BB gun, dunno why that came to mind, sorry). Another reason is that I like to use a KVM on my workstation at home. I find that if a machine isn't on my KVM, it doesn't get much use. So, being that the MiST is HD15 VGA + USB kb & mouse, that suited my KVM rig perfectly. I had a little 5-port USB power supply down there, too. So, I was able to plug the MiST into that without burning another power-socket or needing a thick cable. The emulation is also a bit better in some cases. I can run demos on my MiST that have significant problems with UAE (glitchy graphics display). I also enjoy console games (heck any games for that matter, including pinball). So, the MiST emulates some big platform names there. Unfortunately, there is no Neo Geo or SNES support, yet. However, I have a feeling that'll come. Folks are already discussing those. So, i see it as kind of a "super-emulator" that has the additional benefits of working with my KVM console rig (and my monitor), without having to burn a bunch of space. Still you are completely correct, you could setup all the same OS's using pure software emulators, and use one of those USB-to-ancient-joystick converters to get that little feature. Using the MiST is a weird experience. To me, it's more exciting than firing up an emulator, but less than putting hands on the real metal. YMMV, but I see your points, for sure. I thought a lot of the same things. However, given it's size, it won't junk up my place anymore which is my main concern. Given the cost, if I get tired of it... well it was just $180 or so, and someone will buy it. -Swift