Hacker News Reader

Comment by lanthade | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of my favorite IT gear conversion when someone turned a SGI challenge into a mini fridge. I have a fondness for all things SGI (Irix era) due to labs full of Indys during my college years.

I was pretty surprised to find that the project documentation was uploaded to a modern website when I searched. I figured like many things of its era that it had been lost to web rot.

https://www.instructables.com/Convert-a-Silicon-Graphics-Ser...

View on HN

SGI nostalgia here, as well. There's also the Indigo espresso machine:

http://www.8bit-homecomputermuseum.at/computer/silicon_graph...

first thing that came to my mind! what a throwback!

When I think of SGI I think of numerous stories of screw-ups: like the professor who bought one without enough RAM, plugged it into the Ethernet and power for three years, didn’t use it, but it got hacked. Or the 1990s demo where Geoffrey Fox had two twin from eastern Europe try to run a program on a fashionable big SMO machine and it failed, and Fox said “Never buy a gigabyte of cheap RAM!”

Security wasn't exactly priority #1 with SGI. In our lab we wouldn't bother to remember root passwords because it was so easy to download some of many root exploits for IRIX.

In the early to mid 2000s I saw photos of an SGI Crimson that somebody gutted and turned into a very powerful (at that time) x86 gaming PC.

IIRC even SGI themselves had something like Octane case converted into beer tap and used that very successfully as a way to get people onto their stand at trade fairs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com