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Control Data 9100 / SGI Iris Indigo

H

HoJoPo

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At the computer recycling non-profit I volunteer at, we had a Control Data 9100 series machine come in, which appears to be a rebranded SGI Iris Indigo.

The computer is complete, no external peripherals, has a floppy drive and two hard drives installed. I didn't have a chance to test it out this weekend, but I'll see if it powers up next weekend. I assume the keyboard is PS/2 and the VGA monitor output requires sync-on-green support, like other SGI machines (I used to have a couple of Indys.)
 
Congrats. The floptical option was not a common item.

You will require an SGI proprietary keyboard and mouse to use the machine. While it's still $50 my recommendation is to buy the Iris to PS/2 adapter as sourcing the proper peripherals will easily cost three times as much.
You are also correct about the Video being Sync on Green. In your current state however you can plug a serial console into serial port 1 and you can work with a text session.
 
Is it an Indigo or a Personal IRIS? I've got one of the CDC rebadged Personal IRIS machines, but I was unaware that they rebadged the Indigo. Can you post pics? The CDC rebadged machines are not very common.
 
legalize said:
Is it an Indigo or a Personal IRIS? I've got one of the CDC rebadged Personal IRIS machines, but I was unaware that they rebadged the Indigo. Can you post pics? The CDC rebadged machines are not very common.
Click to expand...

It's definitely an Iris Indigo, squat short case with the floppy / hard drives on the right hand side. Looks just like the front/rear pics in the Indigo Wikipedia article, except branded for Control Data 9100 series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indigo

I was tinkering around with an SGI VWS 540 on Saturday and didn't get to check out the CDC 9100.
 
Is it the same purple plastic but with a different plastic attached badge or decal? The Personal IRIS rebadged by CDC has a different paint scheme, being black instead of dark purple.
 
NeXT said:
I've seen a Tandberg Data in black and I think a Control Data unit once before that was in that brown Maroon color that the Personal Iris used.

Edited: I was wrong. They did come in at least the same Indigo color with a different silkscreen - https://hardware.majix.org/computers/sgi.indigo/indigo3k.shtml
Click to expand...

Yes, it's purple with 9100 series silk screened below the Control Data logo like the one above. Since it has a VGA output as well as 13w3, and the 9100 instead of 910, I wonder if it has an IP20 processor module instead of IP12?
 
The presence of a VGA port alongside the 13W3 means it has the Entry Graphics which is the lowest option SGI offered before being completely headless.
 
I'll take some pictures next Saturday. I did power it on, but it didn't boot... turns out it doesn't have any RAM. It does have a blinking yellow light on the CPU board. And there is a large bare aluminum heat sink over the CPU, I think that it's either an R4000 or R4400. Both SCSI hard drives spun up and seemed to initialize as well, platters spinning at least.
Unfortunately, we don't have a set of 4 matched parity 72 pin SIMMs on hand...
 
Control Data 9100 pictures

Control Data 9100 pictures

Here's some pictures of the Control Data 9100.
IMG_20191207_132656284.jpg
IMG_20191207_132712464.jpg
IMG_20191207_132731313.jpg
IMG_20191207_132748776.jpg
IMG_20191207_132836458.jpg
IMG_20191207_132926771.jpg

I should have found somewhere with better light for the back panel, the flash over exposed the picture due to the shiny metal.
 
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