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Who are the silicon graphics enthusiast members here?

NeXT said:
SGI saw its uses in high-performance and rapidly innovating environments. Those of us who were buying machines left and right in the 2000's were doing so as universities, game developers and television/cinema production houses were decommissioning them and save for a few top-spec machines where the resale value was sustained by companies who were going to hold out for another decade, once that burst of surplus happened, they were gone. At one point in the mid-2000's there was a member on Nekochan who had bought a tall skid of Octane's on surplus for only a few hundred dollars and he did build one nice machine and sell a few others but the rest stayed on a skid and were left out in the snow and there was pictures of him digging machines out in one thread. The other like I mentioned was that once Irix fell out of everyday use a lot of the folks who were interested in SGI moved on. The last few years of Nekochan reminds me of a few forums I've watched over the years as the regular users died off. Some subforums might see a new post once a month.
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Is it possible to use something like a Tezro for everyday computing tasks nowadays? It isn't at all practical but its the last sgi machine to sport somewhat modern specs to deal with the maladies of the modern web.
 
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evan1 said:
Is it possible to use something like a Tezro for everyday computing tasks nowadays? It isn't at all practical but its the last sgi machine to sport somewhat modern specs to deal with the maladies of the modern web.
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Can't run a modern browser because there is none. Even if there were, most likely not nearly enough CPU oomph to run it at an actually usable speed.
 
onre said:
Can't run a modern browser because there is none. Even if there were, most likely not nearly enough CPU oomph to run it at an actually usable speed.
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Can you not compile Firefox? Or something more lightweight like arctic fox?

I admit getting an adequate toolchain working on irix to do something like this would be a mission in of itself.

I still run a Core 2 Duo Thinkpad, and I've found that for basic web browsing it works fine. Granted I would consider that the bare minimum for anything nowadays and it does not play nice with Windows 10 at all. I've found getting a minimal Linux distribution is the only way to make it usable.
 
evan1 said:
Can you not compile Firefox? Or something more lightweight like arctic fox?

I admit getting an adequate toolchain working on irix to do something like this would be a mission in of itself.

I still run a Core 2 Duo Thinkpad, and I've found that for basic web browsing it works fine. Granted I would consider that the bare minimum for anything nowadays and it does not play nice with Windows 10 at all. I've found getting a minimal Linux distribution is the only way to make it usable.
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Official GCC support ends at 4.7.4, hobbyists have backported support into 9.2.0. However, that toolchain has an issue preventing very large applications (more than 16k GOT/PLT entries) from being linked.

There is no working Rust, Firefox requires Rust from version 54 onwards. Older Firefoxes could possibly be done if aforementioned toolchain issue were fixed, but these tend to be quite bad at taking advantage of multiple CPUs so the slowness would be even more pronounced. Also JIT for the Javascript interpreter would have to be taken care of, somehow, to avoid abysmal performance. In any case, this would be a lot of work.

Arcticfox and other forks have all the aforementioned problems too, adjusted for the specific version of Firefox codebase they're based on.

I don't know of anyone with both skills and motivation working on these things anymore.
 
The practical uses for Irix and its ported browsers ended in the mid-2010's when HTTPS enforcement and HTML5 broke most backwards compatibility. Many of the Irix mail clients do not work with the likes of gmail either anymore without some arm twisting and Irix never really had a native "office productivity suite" because that wasn't its core market. Even for video playback it's a fight to do basic HD.
SGI's are some crazy cool hardware but it's finally reached the end of its usable life as a daily driver and has been retired to the likes of 68K Macs and windows 98 machines where between eachother in an ecosystem they still work but they simply are not fast enough for anything that requires The Internet.
 
NeXT said:
SGI's are some crazy cool hardware but it's finally reached the end of its usable life as a daily driver
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I always ask this question to myself when I acquire something interesting but I always end in the same conclusion :(

I wish these boxes had some practical use outside of just being toys to play with. That only goes so far honestly. Maybe MIPS, m68k, sparc etc programming would be another use case, but with how convenient QEMU is, I have a hard time seeing them for even that.

You could serve a static webpage but like you'd have to do it on hardware that you know won't crap out on you and have the psu recapped.
 
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I mean, you can start running local proxy servers and mailboxes that sync with modern web services so that you can continue to operate and that's been done for years now but the learning curve is staggering.
 
It's a bit ironic to even think about these things since they were considered e-waste for the longest time so I'm not really sure what I'm expecting lmfao. But I still have the inclination to place them somewhere that isn't a desk ornament.
 
Programming ethics have changed a lot in the last 25 years. It's no longer how well you can support multiple platforms and for how long but how quickly you can write code that checks the boxes and hoping your client's hardware is fast enough for them to not notice how inefficient it is.
 
Frio said:
I used to have quite a few systems many years ago, an Onyx Deskside, three Indigo 2 (two purple one teal), a couple of Indys (I still have one) and an Octane.
Over the years I sold all of them due to international relocations, and never recovered, too many competing hobbies/interests.
Nowadays I am back to looking for a Deskside Onyx, as I have some unfinished business with it (I was a games developer at the era of the Nintendo 64 AND I worked at SGI later in the early 2000s)...
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i feel that many many conflicting interests im in the process of just going down to a few interests
 
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