Running 9front on an emulated SGI Indy via MAME | Hacker News Reader

Running 9front on an emulated SGI Indy via MAME

posixcafe.org

123 pointstodsacerdoti20 comments

This is great to see -- I used to have an SGI Indy/O2 (I think!) The last time I looked there were no comment Irix emulators out there. Somewhere I've still got a giant load of CDs of Irix 6.2 and some rather niche scientific software, now perpetually licensed abandonware, mostly related to medical imaging or crystallography. I think it's hard to appreciate just got unique the platform was in its time, and it found lots of high end uses, from video editing and computer graphics to science.

It's also a bit like Mac OS 9 and CDE had a hybrid child. Somewhere there's an alternative timeline in which it took over and the world had OS X about ten years earlier than it actually did.

Is that software preserved anywhere like Archive.org?

Definitely get that software uploaded, and ideally LLM'd (whats the proper word) - the medical inmaging stuff might be really interesting to teach on.

The crystalography stuff sounds interesting as well.

I first went to school (Mesmer Animation Labs, Seattle (later became UW's animation department) and learned on INDYs, O2s and a couple Octanes. I chose Softimage over Alias|Wavefront (Maya) at the time.

I wish I still had my .DAT tape of my work - but those machines were beautiful.

Later, when I worked on a big Animation Studio's HQ build - we threw hundred-thousand dollar rack-sized SGI cabinets in the trash.... :-(

If it was medical imaging, I think it would likely have been the O2, not the Indy. But I believe Irix 6.3 was the earliest for the O2.

Was it a pizza box or a mini tower?

Oh hey that's my blog. I'm glad people found it interesting. Happy to answer any questions about this project or 9front in general.

Hey, do you happen to use Matrix for comms, or frequent any 9front-related matrix channels?

No. Matrix is not usable on plan 9, to my knowledge, so the people that care tend to use IRC or our own 9p-based home-grown chat system known as gridchat. Those that don't seem to have settled on discord. (Unsurprisingly, it seems most committers fall into the first camp).

Here's a good summary of the places people tend to cluster: https://inbox.vuxu.org/9front/AB8856CD6456E7C4532F41567DBE7D...

(This message was posted using netsurf on 9front)

> No. Matrix is not usable on plan 9, to my knowledge

I think it's a bit of a shame because Matrix the communication protocol lends very nicely to distributed systems, and I believe it may actually play cool with 9p.

There is #plan9:matrix.org

It's a plan9 system. I know this! ^_^

Fyi, 9front is a Plan9 fork.

9front is _the_ plan9 fork. The only one with an active contributor team, new software being written for it etc. Though its a fairly loosely coupled open source community where people tend to pull in patches and run their own stuff anyway.

If you are interested in 9, look at 9 front

That's not completely true, there is also 9legacy (http://9legacy.org/index.html) but yeah one is living the other one in ~maintenance-mode.

9legacy is that patch set. 9front is an actual distribution, no?

cinap once asked me

"how did you not go insane working from home?"

"who says I didn't" came my reply

that was back in the days before video calls.

Gloriously useless :)

The indy kernel is (or was?) the only big endian kernel of 9front, which is a useful thing to have.

I'm surprised it doesn't support POWER - old Macs have to be more available than SGI kit.

(Though I'll also agree with sibling comment - if the goal was "test BE support on readily available hardware" I'd 100% use Raspberry Pis, since ARM has a BE mode. NetBSD supports it, for instance.)

I’m surprised none of the 9front guys have explored big endian mode on raspberry pi. They don’t seem like they’d be turned off by the perversity of it.

But they must do something with SPARC, right?

There is a SPARC compiler and linker but no kernel. So far no one has had the interest to get some old SPARC hardware and do the hacking. There is a SPARC instruction emulator on the system that I used to test some libc modifications recently.

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