I appreciate the nostalgia, and will be trying the rs232 when I have the suitable connector to build the cable!

There were several SGI related shocks for me, with the underlying huge one being the level of thought that had gone into IRIX with respect to making a UNIX that could be used by non sys admins while also allowing a local site sys admin to do the sort of things you were doing there. Stuff like a standard GUI panel to setup emailing the sys admin when the system crashed and so on - it was a deeply practical system.