The IRIX 6.5.7M (sgi) source code | Hacker News Reader

The IRIX 6.5.7M (sgi) source code

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68 pointsreconnecting34 comments

For me personally, IRIX 6.x had one of the most beautiful (and colourful) GUIs ever.

For the curious, there is a guide (1) on how to run IRIX 6.5.22 in MAME.

Wow, look at those luxurious titlebars, windows edges, scrollbars, and tabs! So easy to use.

One other thing lost, their scrollbars kept an indentation of where the bar was until you let go, which was sometimes useful.

Not a fan of the busy backgrounds, but can’t win ’em all.

Does anyone have a screenshot of the window menu (right click on titlebar)? Been looking for the CUA hotkeys related to those window functions. Most still work but are not shown on Linux desktops for some reason.

They also loved italic!

Yeah, they were a few years ahead of cleartype/retina unfortunately.

> Wow, look at those luxurious titlebars, windows edges, scrollbars, and tabs! So easy to use.

That's just Motif: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(software)

Shame it wasn't under an open license to begin with (they relicenced it to LGPL waaay too late). We've been reimplementing it ever since.

Someone did a screen capture of a SGI "System Tour" app that explains how a lot of the UI worked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg8fiA9TrRk

What is the scrollwheel thing on the left side of some windows?

As I recall that changed the size of the (vector graphic) icons in the window.

Though it has been twenty-odd years since I last used an SGI box so open to correction!

Yes, it was essentially a "zoom" wheel.

A blend of nextstep and macos classic somehow.

I thought of BeOS for some reason.

For those interested, there is a lovely IRIX clone WM called MaXX. I've been using it for a couple months and have been quite happy with it on a remote dev machine. I believe it only runs on xorg currently.

1. https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/

That reminds me about some irc channel around 25 years ago where we had this odd guy running IRIX and occasionally sending us screenshots.

Most people were on Windows, some of us were running Linux, but IRIX seemed odd even to us, with our mainstream DEs like enlightenment or KDE or windowmaker :D

Unless it's true that they lost it, I really see no reason why HPE doesn't just release the official IRIX source code. It cannot be worth much at this point.

Maybe there's 3rd party code which SGI/HPE licensed? That's apparently why we can't have Operas Presto.

> Maybe there's 3rd party code which SGI/HPE licensed?

IIRC, this was one of the complication of open sourcing Solaris back in the day.

Yep, I recall one of the big components being libc i18n

An obvious source for 3rd party code is that it’s a real UNIX System V derivative, so the AT&T code would need to be cleared.

Even if there isn't any 3rd party code, the whole process of going through the codebase to confirm there really isn't any 3rd party code, and generally getting the legal department to sign off on it, is a lot of work in itself. My impression is that this kind of "historic source" release typically only happens if somebody sufficiently senior in the company cares enough to actively push it through. The default is that nobody does care that much, and it doesn't happen.

"Do nothing" has essentially zero downside for a big company that happens to have something of niche interest like this in its vaults.

third-party code is one thing, political correctness is another. What was acceptable in 90s brogrammer culture may not be considered acceptable by PR obsessed corporate types now.

To put this more charitably, the only reason to release something like this is to get some good PR, but if not carefully controlled, such a release could create more bad PR than good PR.

How?

I don't recall which product it was, it may have been Microsoft, that needed to sanitizes their code before releasing it. There where a lot of not so nice comments about other companies and oh so much swearing. Not really the type of language a company would have their name attached to.

Hm, it could be done with llm today. Or remove all comments

As a long-time AIX admin I'd LOOOOOVE to see some of the AIX source.

I used to be connected to the community where stuff like this was passed around. But that was a long, long time ago.

A partial but significant dump of 4.1 is easy to find. Probably leaked for/by Apple Network Server people.

https://github.com/Arquivotheca/AIX-4.1.3

Thanks - I downloaded the repo but it's only ~64MB zipped. No way that's all of AIX 4.1.3. :(

This leak has been floating around for years, and it's not even close to everything (i.e. no GUI pieces)

Then soon there will be a port for the N64!

Interesting that GitHub recognizes "Roff" as a language.

isn't this violating copyright?

Dunno but the repo is 4+ years old.

The mods do not seem to care about pirated software (or links to tons of it) being posted here, I have seen people doing it for years now.

brings back happy memories of my indigoII.

Is this real?

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