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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

This is a general problem with old OS nostalgia and most UNIX variants: there’s literally nothing interesting to do with most of them. Not only that, but what you can do is not radically different from how things are still done.

I worked with stuff like AIX and Solaris for years but like why would I ever bother with them again. What am I going to do, install DB2 for fun?

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> there’s literally nothing interesting to do with most of them

A friend of mine made a 6dof shooter recently[0][1] for IRIX and O2 for a retro platform game jam.

[0] https://nuclear.itch.io/deeprunner

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-zUOuBWFZY (older build but shows the O2)

This looks pretty sweet. Do you know if it supports the SpaceOrb 360?

in the 90s i was collecting unix hardware. most of what i actually used at the time (AIX and IRIX in my case. i had a sun box too, but i was mostly running linux on it[1]), but now when i look at that collection, all i can say is that it looks cool. i like the design of the boxes (i am a big fan of the pizzabox format, and of more unusual shapes like cubes instead of the common tower),

but when i think of using them, i am asking myself, what am i going to do with these old systems? on some i can install linux, ok, that's nice, but then all i got is linux in a nice looking box. even at the time, when i had scored an apollo domain workstation that was acting as a door stop in a university library. it had a very interesting networking system. i looked around on it for a while but then i just left it sit there.

i'd probably be more happy if i could find a modern case designer that makes PC cases look like the sun or sgi boxes of old.

[1]i have joy, i have fun, i run linux on a sun

For some people that is their idea of fun.

Myself I'd never put the effort in, but I have fond memories of telnetting into the Indigo my brother's college roommate had in their dorm room, so when people do this nostalgia retro stuff and post it on the web I enjoy browsing it for a bit.

I think the point being that you can still telnet into someone's Linux box (if it runs telnet....) and it would look exactly the same as 25 years ago. I find it difficult to be nostalgic for something you not only recognize but recognize as clearly inferior. Though, I also have fond memories of a friend who had his private SGI workstation on his desk at my first work :)

I beg to differ. I regret giving up my O2 w/ 1600SW display, but I actually used it for something that is difficult to replicate even today. The AV input/output board allows for capture of s-video output (good for digitization of old VHS tapes).

I also used the SPDIF input on my Octane (connected to a Philips DCC player) to digitize a bunch of my old cassette tapes. Many of those tapes don’t have commercial digital releases.

> I actually used it for something that is difficult to replicate even today. The AV input/output board allows for capture of s-video output (good for digitization of old VHS tapes).

This isn’t at all difficult today. You can buy a S-video to USB interface from Wal-Mart for $25. 20 years ago they were more expensive but still easy to get.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Composite-RCA-S-Video-To-USB-Conv...

I see these sort of efforts more as archaeology than anything else. Asking "what sort of interesting things can you do with it?" is like asking if we can do anything interesting with stuff we dig out of Flag Fen or Pompeii.

AIX? You'll spend an hour or so to set up the network so it'd even boot.

For the youth: The AIX machine I remember did not even boot without a proper network. They featured obscure key combos, a tiny LCD screen and even more obscure beep codes to let you configure the network parameters. Only then they would boot into a proper OS.

Car analogy time:

A mate of mine has an absolutely beautiful old Austin 12 which turns 100 years old this summer. It actually drives surprisingly like a modern car, modulo things like no syncromesh so you have to double-declutch - it doesn't have the "funny" pedal layout of a Ford Model T, for example - and its 1800cc engine still produces most of its 27bhp taking it to a top speed absolutely flat out downhill and homesick of about 50mph, not that you'd want to with its cable-operated brakes. Most of the mechanicals would be familiar to anyone who'd worked on any sort of car.

You could take that 100-year-old car and daily it, around town. It is a joy to drive, and everyone wants a good look at it. It's clearly a thing of beauty made in a way that nothing will ever be made again. However!

Pretty much every time you go to drive it you need to fiddle with the carburettor, or do something to the magneto, or take the spark plugs out and give them a clean, or prime something, or oil something, or generally fettle some part. You've got to set the throttle, the choke, and the magneto timing *juuuuust* right before you swing the starting handle or it'll break your wrist. The cooling system either overheats or doesn't heat up enough and the only way to tell is it doesn't run properly and sometimes steam comes out - for both conditions.

I love driving it. I also love old OSes like AIX and SunOS. I've even run 2.11BSD on a real PDP11!

Here's the thing, though. I have Linux on my desktop, and a 25-year-old Range Rover parked outside. They're both a bit old-fashioned with some clunky bits of styling that you wouldn't have these days. They're a bit crude mechanically (it has a 1960s V8 boat engine under the bonnet!? It has a *monolithic* kernel under the bonnet?!) but they both start on the button, run all day without having to get out and fiddle, and they're comfortable to sit at for long period and actually *get shit done*.

No-one stops to turn and gawp as you go past though.

Back in the day, we had AIX running on RS/6000 and it was never connected to any kind of network. Didn't even have networking hardware. It served serial terminals. I'm certain that AIX did not, in general, require a network to boot, but rather your system was configured that way.

i must have been lucky, because my AIX box was working fine on ethernet. the most "fun" i had was once when it didn't boot, i had to mess with ed to fix some configuration (that i must have messed up myself before) to get it to run again. vi experience came in handy.

I believe ours were also RS/6000's but I'm not sure because it was a long time ago. Those were rented machines with an expensive per-hour service contract. My company didn't want to pay for the setup so we did it ourselves. Totally possible the machines were misconfigured deliberately to make us pay for the setup service or maybe they were just in the state the previous customer had let them and that didn't fit our network.

Anyways my point was more that with this old tech you'll probably spend a lot of time on boring details before you'll even get to the fun part, like running DB2.

Funny you should say that. I used to collect old machines (owned a SPARCstation, Mac SE, etc.) and at one point I inherited an IBM RS/6000 with no user manual. I was AIX-curious but I never figured out how to get it to boot. (I didn't connect it to Ethernet)

(this was in the early 2000s when the Internet was still nascent, and I didn't have any IBM experts in my circle)

I don't recall any problems booting without a network. You used SMIT to configure the networking as opposed to direct networking commands.

I recently (restored/put to work) showed an SGI Indy at our office to young ones. Apart from cool case, it was mostly "yeah, looks like any ol' linux desktop we have" which is right, of course... but 30 years ago!

I also have rose-tinted glasses now on IRIX and SGI since I worked on those machines for better part of 90's and early 2000's in VFX (both VFX work and software for it). There was mystique about those daylight robbery machines that made you feel you could and should achieve more. There's nothing like that today anymore, except maybe getting a DGX - Carmack even mentioned something similar ( https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1398519867280609282... ) which I can definitely relate to from SGI era.

> showed an SGI Indy at our office to young ones. Apart from cool case, it was mostly "yeah, looks like any ol' linux desktop we have" which is right, of course

Except unlike current Linux, the SGI workstations didn't have screen tearing and had HW accelerated GUIs working out of the box. Shots fired! :D

OS nostalgia is stupid but application nostalgia makes sense. If you happen to have applications for IRIX that would be expensive or impossible to replace, then keeping IRIX on life support is reasonable. For example I happen to have a licensed copy of PTC Pro/ENGINEER for IRIX/MIPS. There's no other way to use it. This is the same reason I keep Win2k virtual machines hanging around. That is the only way I can still run my copy of AutoCAD R12.

> OS nostalgia is stupid

I feel sorry for you if you didn't experience it directly. It was a magical time.

It's difficult to imagine how you arrived at this conclusion about me after reading my comment.

At least you can use the internet opposed to 8-bit computers (without hardware extensions). On IRIX you even have Mozilla 1.7.12 although I fear that many websites will be unusable with that browser. And a terminal, ssh, gnu toolchain. What else do you need? :)

It’s down right now because the hard drive failed last December after 27 years of operation but the NTP server for my home network used to be and will be again a Digital AlphaStation 200 4/233 running Tru64 UNIX connected to a PPS serial GPS puck.

Why? Why not!

That depends on whether or not your a casual DB2 enthusiast who plays with it only when it's available, or if you're a hardcore DB2 enthusiast willing to restore an AS/400 just for the fun of it, really.

I wonder if it would make sense to also build a modern equivalent of the UI/UX on the Linux kernel? It supports MIPS AFAIK.

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