Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

I got the chance of using an SGI Fuel in the early 2000's and also some O2's. I don't know exactly why, I never bought one, I don't even like proprietary or closed solutions but those 90's UNIX workstations... I have an unreasonable attraction to them.

I remember in mid 90's trying some of them for the first time. I've got really impressed by Sun sparcstations and IBM Power machines. Computers which you could spend the whole day programming with no threat to system stability, even after consecutive segfaults, impressed me. And it impressed even more knowing that in the UNIX world it has always been like that. Seeing a x86 again running windows felt mostly like a toy after that. Certainly one of the reasons that influenced me to use linux.

Those machines were expensive. In the range of a tens of thousands dollars. So, working on one of them was a symbol of status and success. Owning one of them, to me, was like owning an yacht or exclusive sports car.

One thing I like about cheap ARM SBC's these days is their performance... these machines have a performance, that I think, is similar to how those UNIX would feel. Linux is way more advanced than those old unices but the feeling is still there. I can install wmaker and get a very interesting nostalgic feeling.

Just to try it, I installed the latest CDE version on my experimental Debian 11 system. It is incredibly usable and performant. Being able to have a well integrated system, with everything needed for development was just another level in those days. While on the PC people rejoiced because of Delphi and Visual BASIC, you could write real GUIs in C with CDE and application builder. I'm not claiming it is better in any way, but it felt incredibly more powerful.

I letande 3d modeling on an SGI O2 back in the late '90s, and subsequently also got started with programming on it. I still remember the joy and rush when my programs compiled successfully, and then half the time wondering how the heck they would build in the first place. Not much has changed since. ;o)

I still have that O2, it's packed up in its original box in my apartment. I also have two of those old SGI flat panel displays, which was pretty amazing back then when flat panels where basically unheard of. I think one of them is broken though, sadly.

I've been meaning to boot it back into action, to see if any of my old "art" is still on there. If it even starts, that is.

Probably will not start. It requires a working clock chip to turn on and the battery is way past its expiration date.

There are plenty of tutorials on where to dig into the epoxy and add a cr2032 battery holder to fix it permanently.

Same deal with various SPARC machines (those will at least power on)

Thanks for your comment, I had no idea. Out of curiosity, do you know if it's dangerous or otherwise unadvisable to try and start it before making this modification?

I don't think anything bad happens, it just doesn't react to the power button and people mistakenly junk them.

The O2 shouldn't need a PSU capacitor replacement yet.

If you want to give the SCSI disk a better chance, place it flat on a table and rotate rapidly, then stop. You should feel the spindle spin.

Hardware of this era is still quite reliable so I don't think you will have problems.

It did in fact start back up again, but to what extent I don't know because it seems the power supply to the flat panel I have is fried. The O2 did play the guitar sound when starting though, and boy did it stir up memories!

The fan is also a lot louder than I remember. Thanks for the tips sir, I'll try to get the screens running to see if I can find any fun data on the drive.

My main memory from working on SGIs in the 90s was the mess with mixing 32 bit and 64 bit libraries and such. It's long enough ago that I don't remember the details, but I remember it always being a pain to compile stuff because of having both 32 and 64 bit stuff present on the system.

SGUG has a nice Discord chat, and we're porting current FOSS to IRIX.

We've recently ported Netsurf latest, which gives IRIX a working modern browser, and have a mail client (CLAWS) and a Discord client (Adium).

Here's the ports: https://github.com/sgidevnet/sgug-rse And here's the main user group page: http://sgi.sh

Thank you, I'll check it out! I did get the O2 started, but no screen because the power brick seems to be fried. Gonna see if I can score a new one, but otherwise I'll ask the user group to see if I can access the machine some other way. Many thanks!

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