I just finished my new project, it is called love. It allows installation of IRIX from IRIX, LINUX or WINDOWS.
The reason for its existence is that IRIX installations are difficult, even for experienced users. New users almost always struggle with IRIX installations which can be demotivating and frustrating.
My goal is to make this task easy, fast and accessible.
This is absolutely amazing, and it works very well. This will make life for retro SGI users a lot easier.
This might be the push I need to download MAME and try running IRIX, since MAME emulates an SGI system pretty well
Irix emulation on MAME is slower than molasses.
There was very little information about the details of SGI’s GFX subsystems, so their systems have been notoriously hard to emulate.
My first job out of college, I’ll never forget what my Technical Lead said to me the first day: “No one told me you were coming, I’m not sure what to do with you.”. He then gave me an SGI O2 (180MHz MIPS R5000, 2x 9.1GB SCSI) and the IRIX install disks (6.5.something) and told me to install my own workstation to use.
After a couple days of reading and searching (we had Internet, so that was a plus), the install kept failing in weird ways and I finally went back to admit defeat. Upon troubleshooting, the O2 motherboard was bad and once we swapped it out for a different one the install went fine.
That’s a pretty nice way to start in IT.
My own first job (or internship) while I was still at the university was in a company who sold all kinds of PC software for working in an Unix environment : terminal emulators, X11 servers, web servers/proxys/browsers, anything to exchange all kinds of data, from Hummingbird, Attachmate, and many companies I long forgot about.
One of the first tasks I was given there was to install SCO Unixware on a PC. With some *nix background from HPUX and early Linux, Unixware seamed unwelcoming and unattractive. Oh, and I think I failed to get X11 running, which certainly did not help.
Meanwhile my dad was working for CDC (Control Data Corporation) with Sun and SGI workstations, which certainly looked more attractive, with their good looking (by then) GUIs and pretty computer cases. Colorful Indigo workstations had gorgeous looks that really set them apart from any other computer of this time.
Well, during college I worked part-time in IT. Novell Netware shop, lots of Windows NT4 and Windows 95 clients, Cisco Catalyst Switch, PIX firewall, We were the main office of a small company, so even got to do some WAN and ran Linux (Slackware!) for DNS and mail relay into Novell’s IntraNetGroupWare or whatever that product was called. But it was a really nice start for my first full-time real job.
I had the O2 until a few years ago. I fired it up in my basement (along with my Amiga) after at least a decade. Sadly, I took the O2 into the office for show and tell and the caps gave up when I turned it on. 🙁
I was always fascinated by IRIX, it was certainly more exciting than HP/UX on which I was trained. In some way it was the AmigaOS or the BeOS of the Unix world. It’s such a shame the way SGI went down…
> It’s such a shame the way SGI went down…
Ha, I guess the same could be said about Commodore or Be Inc. 😉
Working hard to make it easier for people to install a long forgotten OS (last major version is 25 years old!) seems weird to me.
Sure, this was posted to a SGI user group forum.
Still, I miss the “why should you run IRIX on your computer today” bits.
Irix desktop was fairly pleasant to use. NextStep and Irix were the only unix desktops that seemed to have had some thought put into them in terms of quality of the experience. I think those 2 were the only “user friendly” unixes (maybe A/UX? as well).
Which it is ironic, because Irix’s install process was downright user hostile.
I remember getting some old SGI boxes when I was in school, and one of the labs I worked was getting rid of them. Installing Irix was quite the odyssey. Which was bizarre, because even their PROMs were far more graphical than the stuff you would get in a SPARCStation or any other Unix box. for example.