Successful weekend reinstall of IRIX
Posted by wave_design@reddit | retrobattlestations | View on Reddit | 19 comments
Posted by wave_design@reddit | retrobattlestations | View on Reddit | 19 comments
Salt_Feed_5579@reddit
I have the same, but I need to power on hahaha.
madsci@reddit
Nice! I consider my Indigo2 to be the pinnacle of my vintage computer collection. I've just got the cheaper version, though, not the IMPACT.
ElectronicFault360@reddit
I used to have that system with video editing hardware and dual 21" monitors.
It made a great heater.
celestrion@reddit
Indigo Magic was such a great mix of just enough visual candy without getting in the way.
It's totally wild to me that in 30 years we've gone from a desktop environment with scalable vector icons that ran in 32MB to desktop environments hosting local web applications that fail to achieve the same performance with 1000x the memory and CPU power.
itsasnowconemachine@reddit
Interestingly, there is a leaked internal SGI memo[0] from 1993 about bloat in IRIX, as well as the author's response from ~6 months later[1], about how SGI responded to the bloat and other issues raised in the memo.
[0] http://www.sgistuff.net/software/irixintro/documents/irix-5.1.txt
[1] https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2016-ldi/reading/irix-bloat.txt
celestrion@reddit
Yep. IRIX 5 prior to 5.3 was not great, and that memo was well-known in IRIX circles during the era because most of us were on Usenet then. Like Tom said, though, SGI actually fixed things. 5.1 for Indy felt like a beta release, even apart from memory starvation, but things soon got much better.
5.3 was pretty-much peak efficiency for small (Indigo, Personal Iris, Indy R4x00PC) and old (Crimson, PowerSeries) systems. It was a gem apart from being a total security nightmare.
6.2 (as pictured) was a bit too heavy for lots of those systems (despite being officially supported on nearly everything R4000 or later), but it ran great on my Indigo 2 systems. A need for software support eventually pushed me to 6.5, but it never felt snappy on anything slower than an Octane.
xternocleidomastoide@reddit
FWIW Indigo Magic barely ran on 32MB
People were saying the exact same thing against it, as you're now indicting moderns systems of doing.
I swear there is a cycle in computing where what was then viewed as slow and bloated, becomes the fast and efficient past... LOL
celestrion@reddit
I used it on an Indy with 32MB. It was plenty usable, and way faster than NT on a similarly-configured PC workstation. And between it and its direct equivalent of a SPARCstation 5 running OpenWindows, the interactive experience was so stark as to be embarrassing.
People were, indeed, critical of it as being bloated compared to 4sight.
This really, really was not the prevalent opinion of IRIX in the mid 1990s. Yeah, an SGI needed more memory to get off then ground than a SPARCstation or DECstation, but the difference was that an SGI could actually feel responsive once the minimum requirements were met, which none of its competitors could.
blissed_off@reddit
Computing has gone backwards.
xternocleidomastoide@reddit
Ha ha. I got a free Maximum Impact R10K I2 when I was in college. I also got R8K and R4K IP modules. I had a blast testing the difference performances you would get from the different architectures. Irix was a fun unix, specially if you get all the developer goodies (EDO, or whatever it was called).
I do remember the system putting quite a bit of heat, specially from the graphics cage side of the case.
Luckily utilities were included in rent ;-)
wave_design@reddit (OP)
I finally got a chance this weekend to work on the 1996 Indigo2 I picked up. It originally belonged to Banned From The Ranch, a VFX house in the mid-to-late 1990s that provide motion graphics for films like Twister and Starship Troopers. This was an expensive configuration, the High Impact card was the first to offer texture memory—one whole megabyte by default.
I didn't get the original drives with the Indigo2, but I reinstalled IRIX 6.2 using a BlueSCSI card. It's wild that you can drive an entire Unix workstation off of a micro SD card, but it works!
ensoniq2k@reddit
That micro SD card is mopping the floor with HDDs from that era performance wise. I still remember when I used a compact flash memory card as HDD replacement but it was still lacking compared to an actual HDD. That's not the case anymore today with SD cards. I record my 4k 10bit videos exclusively on Samsung micro SD cards since they're cheap yet still plenty fast.
mdgorelick@reddit
I used to have one just like it minus the fancy graphics card. What a beautiful and elegant machine.
OutlandishnessOld29@reddit
Every time I see IRIX, I remember this scene.
itsasnowconemachine@reddit
https://old.reddit.com/r/itsaunixsystem/
ShortstopGFX@reddit
Have you run any 3D rendering software on it yet like Lightwave? I always was fascinated by these since these were used to render Donkey Kong Country.
wave_design@reddit (OP)
I'm going to work on adding 3D software to it soon.
I have a second Indigo2 in teal that currently runs Alias3 and SoftImage 2.66. I try to match the software on them to the time that they were manufactured.
chicaneuk@reddit
Nice! I too had an Indigo2 HIGH IMPACT but the power supply fried on it for some reason and I sold it for parts years and years ago :-/
spilk@reddit
nice. I haven't booted up my Indigo2 in a hot minute, I should dust it off. Mine is a non-IMPACT one with the green case (which I prefer to the purple, honestly). I've got the "Extreme" graphics and the 100Mbit ethernet card for it too.
IRIX 6.2 is a good sweet spot for these machines, so nice choice. Always bugs me when people just install last supported versions on these.