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I have an SGI Octane in storage. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to find the pics I took of it back in 2003. Here's the whole setup, including SGI-branded Sony Trinitron monitor The beige box on the right is an external SCSI CD-ROM drive, since the Octane had no room for an internal one. It's got a 64-bit MIPS R12000 CPU @300mhz w/640MB RAM  Not pictured: the support I had to add to the underside of the desk to stop it from sagging under the weight of a 19" CRT and an 80 lbs SGI workstation. edit: this particular Octane only has the SE graphics, meaning the (2nd generation?) entry-level 3D graphics hardware with no texture memory. Doc Block fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Jan 12, 2016 |
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Jan 12, 2016 03:41
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Doc Block posted:I have an SGI Octane in storage. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to find the pics I took of it back in 2003. Here's the whole setup, including SGI-branded Sony Trinitron monitor Also found a screenshot I took. Again, from 2003. 
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Jan 12, 2016 03:48
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Barnyard Protein posted:i threw out two octanes two years ago and i regret it. daddies, hug ur boxen tight. don't let them go. RIP ur SGI octanes RIP SGI
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Jan 12, 2016 03:59
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Just checked, and I still have my IRIX 6.5.20 installation & software CDs that came with the Octane.  edit: all 8 billion of them 
Doc Block fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jan 12, 2016 |
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Jan 12, 2016 04:22
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Used to have a Sun SparcStation IPX too, but I never even booted it. Don't remember if it's still in storage with the Octane or if I sold it.
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Jan 12, 2016 04:53
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My Octane is like having a jet engine on your desk. Fans running at full bore the instant you hit the power switch, etc.
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Jan 13, 2016 08:06
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moosemanmoo posted:did the hardware engineers just really not consider or care about things like variable rpm fans w/ ambient temperature sensors? it's not like they weren't making a stupidly expensive vertically integrated product The Octane was introduced in 1997. Nobody cared about making computers quiet in 1997, especially not one that cost more than a car.
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Jan 14, 2016 00:40
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faxlore posted:I have a SGI ATH-101 keyboard that I have no use or want for and I don't want to just throw it away, I'll send it to someone for shipping costs. What connector? edit: my Octane has PS/2 ports and I already have two SGI keyboards with PS/2 connectors, so give it ti someone else. Doc Block fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Jan 14, 2016 |
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Jan 14, 2016 21:26
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eschaton posted:it can always be adapted into a USB device I thought those adapters just mapped pins and the device still had to know how to speak both PS/2 and USB. edit: either way, I've already got two SGI-branded PS/2 keyboards for my Octane so I'm set. Give 'em to the other guy that was asking.
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Jan 15, 2016 00:31
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Dug up some better pics of MY OCTANE. I think I took these before I had hooked it up or some damned thing. System module is on the left. Graphics hardware is on the right. Between the big system fan on top and the power supply on the bottom is an empty spot for a PCI card cage.  System module. MIPS R12000 CPU is under the big heatsink on the left  SE graphics hardware. No texture memory  
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Jan 17, 2016 04:44
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eschaton posted:certainly you can max it out for cheap these days Looks like a few hundred dollars and good timing on eBay. I'd be tempted if the Octane wasn't in storage in another state. I'm going back to AZ soon, hopefully I'll be able to pick it up and bring it home. Hopefully the NVRAM battery isn't dead. What a brilliant idea to store hardware information required for licensing etc. in battery-backed RAM instead of an EEPROM or flash. Will SGI machines even boot if the NVRAM is dead? Never mind that the battery is actually buried inside the NVRAM so it's non-replaceable.  atomicthumbs posted:make sure you don't touch the completely loving idiotic contact pads for the gold-plated bristle connectors Definitely. "Oh, you accidentally brushed the contact pads? Well, at least you can use that $10k MXE graphics card as a frisbee." Doc Block fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Jan 17, 2016 |
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Jan 17, 2016 06:16
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I would think it'd make more sense for them to at least use replaceable batteries if for no other reason that to make their own support costs lower. Instead of having to replace the system module for a customer if the battery died, they could just replace the battery. It's frustrating because the IC SGI used for the NVRAM/RTC in Octanes has a variant that's identical except it takes an external battery.
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Jan 17, 2016 17:26
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Pinstripes OS X was the best because you'd look away from your Mac and still see the stripes.
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Jan 18, 2016 04:36
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:they figured if they put engineering into Windows NT hardware the way they did their proprietary unix stuff, they could sell Windows NT at the prices the old machines commanded. Kinda. It was mostly the fault of "Chainsaw" Rick Belluzzo, who gutted HP's propriety Unix and CPU development, then went to SGI and did the same thing, both times in favor of Windows NT boxes running on Intel CPUs (Itanium, LOL). He then went on to work at Microsoft, which wasn't fishy at all, no sir. Doc Block fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 04:36
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eschaton posted:and they did this after a few other vendors had already tried and failed miserably at it like Intergraph It didn't help that Microsoft was intentionally wasting SGI's time by working with them on a joint graphics API effort that they had no intention of finishing, in addition to their work on Direct3D. "Naw, it won't matter if we basically give nVidia and Microsoft our 3D patents, fire most of our high-end 3D graphics hardware team, then sell what's left of them to nVidia!" edit: it'd be interesting to see how different things would've been if Rick Belluzzo had never worked at SGI. Doc Block fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 09:31
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SYSV Fanfic posted:What computer can I get today that will be fetishized in 20 years despite being overpriced garbage. I don't have the mid six figgies to dump on a $2,000 trash can. Something with a processor architecture that will have lost out to Intel during that time.
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Jan 22, 2016 22:57
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I miss my se/30. So many lovely little homemade HyperCard games, lost like tears in the rain.
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Jan 28, 2016 08:25
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There were almost no BeOS applications (in part because developing for BeOS was a pain), there were large sections of the OS that were unfinished, and driver support was nonexistent (just getting the GUI to switch over to the VESA 2.0 video driver if you didn't have one of the 2 video cards with a native driver was a pain; otherwise it defaulted to a generic VGA driver with 640x480x16 colors). But they had a nifty multithreaded GUI (that was a pain to develop for IIRC) but demoed well thanks to their kernel's quasi-real-time scheduler (video keeps on smoothly playing while you drag the window around OMG!!!). It was kinda admirable that they kept going after so many obstacles, but it was never gonna happen. Doc Block fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 02:57
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The GUI and a lot of other aspects were very different than Unix, in addition to varying degrees of POSIX support. Aside from the POSIX stuff, the APIs were in C++, not C. The system design used a local client-server model, so (conceptually, at least) there was an Application Server that your application was connected to that handled your application's requests like acquiring resources, etc. They tried hard to make the OS kernel as pure of a microkernel as possible, IIRC. Its file system, BeFS, was 64-bit and could have files of any size that could be represented by a 64-bit integer (at a time when Windows users were using FAT32 and had to live with its 2GB max file size limit). BeFS was really heavy on metadata, like using MIME types to determine file type instead of file extensions, having custom tags, and stuff like that. The GUI was multithreaded. As I mentioned before, that plus the quasi-real-time scheduler that gave high priority to the GUI meant that BeOS always felt relatively snappy and responsive even under load (which was a big deal in the late 90s and early 2000s). The UI itself, while following most desktop UI conventions of the time, was friendlier than Windows, and leaned more towards Mac OS Classic in visual design IMHO.
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Jan 30, 2016 01:01
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Can't run it on any of the Macs released after Apple bought NeXT instead of Be. So, like, from the G3 onward, if memory serves.
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Jan 30, 2016 01:16
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gil amelio hired steve jobs to advise apple on how to move forward and make the company a viable competitor again when the decision was made to buy an operating system, the final two contenders IIRC were Be and NeXT was anyone surprised that steve jobs told them to buy his own company? edit: in fairness, NextStep/OpenStep was a far better operating system and was actually complete instead of being a work in progress like BeOS. Doc Block fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Jan 30, 2016 |
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Jan 30, 2016 02:57
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could've sworn that steve was brought on as a consultant before apple bought next but IIRC gassee wanted $275 million for be (apple offered $200 million), so apple told him to eat poo poo and then bought next for ~$415 million instead 
Doc Block fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Jan 30, 2016 |
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Jan 30, 2016 03:43
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graph posted:jlg is good because he made that verge guy meltdown about his spikey bracelet probably the best thing gassee has done since his famous (rumored), "Oh, I guess they're for the emotionally handicapped too." line when he saw steve jobs park in a handicapped parking spot. Doc Block fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Jan 30, 2016 |
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Jan 30, 2016 03:45
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IIRC wasn't Craig Federighgihi the head WebObjects guy at NeXT, but then when Apple switched it from Objective-C to Java he noped the gently caress out and quit, only to get rehired later? edit: according to Wikipedia, basically. He quit in 1999 when Apple made WebObjects Java-only, then came back in 1999 to work on OS X. Doc Block fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Jan 30, 2016 |
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Jan 30, 2016 07:13
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:the webobjects java stuff started in 1996 WebObjects was a descendent of Enterprise Objects, an Objective-C framework meant to make it easy for enterprise desktop apps to connect to databases and such. WebObjects kept the Objective-C stuff initially but also added Java support. Supposedly, a lot of the things that made WebObjects great for the time were made possible by Objective-C's dynamism, and apparently when they made it Java from top to bottom they removed things even Java WebObjects people liked. Or so I've been told, I never used WebObjects. According to Wikipedia, Federighi was head of Enterprise Objects at NeXT, and stayed on after the Apple buyout until 99. So about the time Apple stopped caring about WebObjects.
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Jan 30, 2016 19:16
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what I meant was that Apple stopped caring about selling it to people
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Jan 30, 2016 19:53
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Both hard drives have been wiped. Has Windows NT... [more] ... sticker on the front.
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Jan 30, 2016 23:38
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yeah, I think the prob with the n64 re: speed was having ridiculously small texture memory cache.
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Feb 1, 2016 18:54
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who needs gran turismo when you have Nights Into Dreams on your sega saturn, retard
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Feb 1, 2016 22:56
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all this mips chat is making me want to get a little mips dev board
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Feb 2, 2016 02:13
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IIRC the GPU in the N64 was a much lesser version of SGI's RealityEngine and the early N64 devkits required Onyx workstations. Also, LOL that when SGI introduced graphics hardware for the Indy that could do 3D acceleration, said 3D hardware was rendered obsolete by the R5000 CPU (which could do 3D faster in software than the XZ graphics board). So people might've gotten really good performance when using Onyx as a devkit, but yeah, they weren't getting it on an Indy. edit: IIRC none of the graphics hardware available for the Indy could do hardware-accelerated texture mapping. Doc Block fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Feb 2, 2016 |
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Feb 2, 2016 03:21
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poo poo. I let the blue smoke out of my old Atari Jaguar, which is kinda an old computer (right?) Found it when I was going through my closet and decided to hook it up and play AvP. Used a wall wart I thought would work, and instead fried it. Turns out the wall wart was 9V AC instead of 9V DC And, of course, people on eBay want $150+ for their Jaguars. Goddamnit.
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Feb 5, 2016 01:51
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I got my Jaguar for about $50 and now people want $150 for them on ebay. $50 gets you the empty plastic shell or a "Like New L@@K" empty Jaguar box. edit: the local "retro" game shop didn't have any Jaguars. Doc Block fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 02:07
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Apparently fried Jaguars are a common problem. Mostly from people trying to use center-positive wall warts (aka all of them these days) instead of center-negative like the official Jaguar wall wart. Common enough that there are people selling Jaguar repair kits online that specifically contain the voltage regulators and capacitors that get blown up by a center-positive wall wart. Guess I'll try my hand a SMT soldering and see if I can repair it. Doc Block fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 02:11
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maniacdevnull posted:They didn't have like a diode or something to prevent that? apparently not. but mine blew because I inadvertently fed it AC instead of DC.  it's an Atari 2600 wall wart, and my brain stopped at the "9V" on the sticker and said "good enough!" Wish my brain had continued reading, because it actually says "9V AC". I even tested the plug with my multimeter, but it was in DC mode so it read 0V. so I thought the wall wart was dead but decided to try it anyway apparently center-negative used to be a thing because The Internet says a sega genesis v1 wall wart will work for jaguars. I'm almost certain that I've got the official jaguar power brick somewhere
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Feb 5, 2016 16:10
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yeah, that's my next step if I can't find the damned jaguar wall wart. one other problem is the official jaguar wall wart is 9V DC center negative and rated for up to 1.2 amps. dunno if the jag actually needs that much, but it could be a problem since modern wall warts are usually only rated for 300-600mA.
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Feb 5, 2016 18:06
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That's a good idea. If I can't find my jaguar wall wart tonight I'll def hit up eBay for guitar pedal power supplies.
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Feb 5, 2016 18:27
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Raluek posted:arent you in the bay area? hsc at one time (last checked in 2013) had a whole box of them for a few bucks. ebay might be an easier option though no, I live out in western colorado
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Feb 7, 2016 09:14
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The voltage regulator in my Jaguar literally popped, LOL
Doc Block fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 04:37
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Got the dumb old Jaguar to (mostly) work again.   audio doesn't work (yet) and I might need to resolder the cartridge connector since it has trouble getting past the game verification boot check. edit: tables, sorry Doc Block fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Feb 12, 2016 |
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Feb 12, 2016 17:51
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