Irix OS

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After repeat­ed­ly ignor­ing my phone mes­sages and emails, a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of SGI final­ly answered the phone when I called Fri­day, and gave me the answer to the ques­tion I’ve been look­ing for:

An Irix 6.5.22 license is avail­able to me at US$600.

The sad part is that I’ll prob­a­bly pay it. I have this old Indigo2 Impact sit­ting here use­less because I don’t have a user­name or pass­word for it, and because I don’t have the patience or resources to attempt a brute-force pass­word hack. I could buy a set of CDs from eBay, but all of those are clear­ly labeled as sold with­out license, and when it comes down to it, I don’t want to have a machine with an unli­censed OS. I’m fun­ny that way.

I know that I could put Lin­ux on it, but phaugh! I’m not sure why I’d get this cool piece of hard­ware and not have the orig­i­nal (or at least a new­er impli­men­ta­tion of the orig­i­nal) OS on it. Besides, the fun of hav­ing an SGI (even an ancient one) is to run crazy graph­ics apps on it. The SGI uses old round Mac-style ser­i­al ports and there’s a Wacom tablet at work that my boss would prob­a­bly let me take home for free since there aren’t any Macs around old enough to make use of it and every­one but me hates pen tablets any­how. And has promised me a copy of Pho­to­shop for the SGI that he’s got lay­ing around (if he did­n’t throw it away when he cleaned his base­ment). It’s sup­posed to be an old ver­sion, like ver­sion 3 or some­thing like that, but I learned Pho­to­shop back when it came out and fell in love with it at ver­sion 2.5, so I think for an old com­put­er to did­dle with, an old ver­sion of Pho­to­shop would be great.

Nonethe­less, $600 for a hob­by machine seems like a lot. But I got my RS/6000 for $350 and put anoth­er $50 into the oper­at­ing sys­tem, then a lot of time and ener­gy track­ing down a $20 Microchan­nel Archi­tec­ture Net­work adapter, only to dis­cov­er that there aren’t any non-com­mer­cial NAT pack­ages for AIX. And yes, I did indeed toy with the idea of spend­ing 2 grand on fire­wall soft­ware to rem­e­dy that, and I’ve thought about dump­ing hun­dreds of dol­lars on IBM’s native C com­pil­er too. I haven’t done those things, but I’m told that the $600 Irix pack­age includes a lot of devel­op­ment tools, and all the hard­ware I’ve got I’ve got­ten for free, includ­ing a com­pat­i­ble monitor.

What is it my dad always used to say? The dif­fer­ence between men and their boys is the price of their toys.

What I’d like to do next actu­al­ly is replace this chest of draw­ers I have with a com­bi­na­tion com­put­er rack/workbench and comic/magazine shelf. This will require some care­ful plan­ning and a lot of mea­sur­ing, but these draw­ers are most­ly use­less any­how and I think I’d be bet­ter off if I could use my clos­et for some­thing oth­er than hid­ing computers.

On the oth­er hand, com­put­ers are noisy. Maybe they should stay behind a door anyway.

Mer­cy—Moby

Published by splicer

3 Replies to “Irix OS”

  1. $600! I’m assum­ing the
    $600! I’m assum­ing the machine had a license for Irix at one time, could­n’t you dig that up and get the OS for a media fee?

    It might be worth post­ing on Craigslist to see if any­one’s got media to sell, or hit­ting weird­stuff down in the valley. 

    Heck, some­one’s sell­ing an O2 on CL with cam, key­board and mouse for $120 — with Irix 6.3!

    I have the same love of exot­ic, non-PC hard­ware. I don’t know how exot­ic it is these days, but I have a Sun Ultra 10 with 128 megs, Cre­ator graph­ics, 2 eth­er­nets, SCSI, kbd, mouse and mon­i­tor that a client gave me sit­ting in my garage. I’m debat­ing set­ting it up, but I’d prob­a­bly need to get more mem­o­ry to use it as a home serv­er with Solaris 9. I could throw NetB­SD on it, since it’s going to be a text-mode sys­tem, but I’d like to get some expe­ri­ence with a recent ver­sion of Solaris.

  2. The machine *has* Irix on it
    The machine *has* Irix on it now, but I don’t have the root (or any oth­er) pass­word. I also have no proof of license or ser­i­al num­bers or any­thing like that, so the upgrade over­lays won’t do me any good.

    Those O2s are pret­ty cool look­ing machines. Maybe I should scarf that one up. Irix 6.3 is a revi­sion from around 1997, I think, and Irix for what­ev­er rea­son suf­fered from major Y2K issues. But then I’d only need an upgrade, which would have to be less than $600. Like­ly less than $480, for that matter.

    And yeah, go with Solaris there. If you want anoth­er BSD sys­tem, why not just go with some gener­ic home­built PC hard­ware? I want my exot­ic hard­ware run­ning as shipped, or at least as shipped with some upgrades.

    All the damn Lin­ux­heads keep ask­ing me “why don’t you put Lin­ux on that RS/6000 of yours?” and nev­er mind the ker­nel hack­ing I’d need to do to get a Microchan­nel PPC sys­tem run­ning, it would be like get­ting a 1967 Mus­tang and putting the engine from a Cor­ro­la into it.

  3. Well, in my case, I’m
    Well, in my case, I’m look­ing to move my Lin­ux stuff over to FreeB­SD, so run­ning NetB­SD on my Sun would allow me to make my sys­tems look a lit­tle more like each other.

    The more I play with FreeB­SD and NetB­SD the more I like them, again. I start­ed out run­ning BSDi and BSD machines, and they just feel right. There’s a lot less cruft than on Lin­ux box­es, being able to use CVSup to bring a machine up to cur­rent is handy, and per­for­mance is good. I just with they’d sup­port a jour­nalling filesys­tem, since run­ning fsck on a sys­tem that lost pow­er is a pain.

    …Although I final­ly freed up a UPS for my lin­ux box…

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