This is very timely for me, because I've just come into possession of a 4D/60 "buttons box" (which normally would go with the dials). It is quite unlike the later button boxes since it's a giant cheese wedge with the power supply integrated, which seems to be very rare as there's no reference to this on the net anywhere. It even has a display where when the unit powers on it says it's rev A. I'm hoping the DB-9 on it is RS232 and can be spoken to by a modern machine, but my one RS232 cable is the wrong gender, of course.

Many years ago I had an Indigo, and even 25 years ago that was an exercise in difficult interfacing with modern equipment. The monitor was amazing.

Edit to add: the notes here about 20A power requirements remind me of when a VR company I was consulting for hired a notable CTO from the VFX business and all he cared about was making sure there was enough electricity supplied to the office. That was in about 2015 and I remember thinking he was clearly scarred by previous events and was long out of date.

> [...] I was consulting for hired a notable CTO from the VFX business and all he cared about was making sure there was enough electricity supplied to the office. That was in about 2015 and I remember thinking he was clearly scarred by previous events and was long out of date.

You're likely being overly dismissive. Ensuring you have enough power is vital, and being wrong can set you back a year or longer while you wait for permitting, the actual service upgrade, and inspections to be completed.

I'm currently dealing with this right now with my startup and wish I'd begun the process a year earlier when I first expected it to be necessary; at the time, I'd assumed it could happen in a few months.

It is RS232. Try 9600 baud, N, 8, 1

It should start streaming events in ASCII the moment you do anything with the buttons.

The joystick ran at that bitrate, which I thought slow but it wasn't.

A full SGI setup, ONYX Reality Engine with edge blended display, joystick, buttons, dials, space ball 3D control (all RS232), a sprinkling of workstations, is kind of a magical environment.

At one point, I had everything except the reality engine. Origin servers instead of ONYX. Fantastic computing environment.

A few things possible on that setup:

Pull a sick SCSI drive right out of a group setup with error correction and full XFS Journaling. Nothing bad happens except disk activity goes up a little. Then insert another one, rescan the SCSI bus, then add the drive to the group and see disk activity go way up as the system repopulates that drive to replace the sick one.

Want an incremental tape backup? You can ask IRIX to back up a subset of any given file system. No big deal, lot of systems do that, right? Well, read it back into your home directory only to find out that incremental backup is a valid, mini-fileaystem that can be read, written to and so forth. That feature makes doing backups simple with a few scripts, same with file recalls.

Start ones career with a XFS disk created on an Indy, IRIX 5.3. Take that same file system through a career, Indy, O2, Octane, Fuel, Origin, and end it on IRIX 6.5.30

Each time I leveled up, I cloned my original environment onto a disk suitable for the new machines, ran swmgr to sort out OS components, dependencies, libraries, dev environment, and then it was off to the races!

I made many different file systems, but my personal one only needed to be made once!

Linux window managers and fonts were kind of crappy compared to how nice the Indigo Magic Desktop was. I had an Indy managing windows and serving fonts to my Linux boxes for a few years.

X was network modular. Still is, and I hope the effort to save it sees success!

Once, just for fun I distributed a high end CAD application across many machines:

One machine was my primary user display. Another machine managed the windows, yet another handled fonts, another was sharing storage for the application which ran on yet another machine which got data from still another machine!

Double click an icon, hear that kerechka! SGI app launch sound and see 6 machines contribute to the spinning model on my screen!

Could run an X server with -GLX extensions enabled to make it 7 machines, one being a PC running an X server to view the product of the other 6 machines.

Record video using S-video input while compiling MAME. Write it out on an S-video capable VCR with quality equal to commercial VHS movies, or sometimes better.

On that note, build XMAME on an Indy. Using GCC it would take close to a day. Using MipsPRO, it could take longer with -O3 enabled to get a binary 10 to 15 percent faster.

One time I got behind on a movie project. Needed many machines rendering frames to hit deadline. I had set one up to do the work over a weekend and the job died 100 frames in.

OOF!

After management secured some temp licenses for the Alias renderer I was using, I spent 16 or so hours straight using every machine in the building to render frames.

Some had users on them who never knew I had unloaded whole sub-systems they were not using to make room for the renderer to be loaded and work. I would kick it off and then renice process priority low enough to mooch every cycle the user did not need. Then when done, put it all back how I found it most none the wiser. Out sysadmin, who was training me to do systems work loved it and spent a fair amount of time looking at the various boxes and how they performed under the high loads I subjected the ones without active users to.

I spent the time in front of my O2, main desktop at the time, using virtual desktops to manage all the environments I had remoted to my display and copying bunches of frames to my local storage to be burned onto optical disk every so often to hedge against catastrophe, and otherwise slotting them into my Alias Composer movie timeline and doing test writes to VHS as chapters got done. Was brutal! And on the eve of a major holiday, family a total mess because there was no way I could go home!

Wrote it all out to video tape just an hour before the person who bought the time was going to catch a flight to Taiwan. Made them 2 copies, just in case. Literally hit play, saw they were complete, hit rewind, and when the VCR did that finish click, the guy walked in anxious expression melting into a smile as I handed him tapes!

By the way, that experience about 5 years into my serious computing phase, was when I really committed to UNIX. It was so damn powerful compared to Windows at the time. Still is, but it is harder to tell these days.

I had the best computing experiences ever on SGI machines! Learned a ton along the way and miss all that big sometimes.

My UNIX knowledge ebbs and flows, depending on where project work may take me. But what I know of UNIX and LINUX at any given time is more than enough to kick ass and get shit done.

Further, most of that has remained useful without too many changes.

Take Linux and the body of Open Code we have today and it is a lot of great software offering up a ton of capability to anyone who bothers to load it up and just start using it.

Nothing compares. Don't get me wrong here. Windows and MacOS are really good now, but they were not back then when it really mattered.

What I like most is not having to constantly remap skills as much as I sometimes find myself doing in Windows and to a fair degree now and then in Apple land.

First thing I do on new hardware is spin up a Linux, then install Windows. I mostly leave Macs on MacOS, though I can't wait to run Linux on my M1. Just need some time...

Then I go get all my open code, settle all that in and then finally whatever closed thing I gotta use get setup and I am ready to go. Until recently, I was proud to have never purchased Microsoft OS or App licenses. Happy to do the work as long as some one else clicks the EULA and pays the money...

This time around I bought Win 10/11 though I am gonna try and avoid 11, and permanent licenses to Office because those may go away.

These things all come from SGI influences.

Edit: Years later a friend brought me an Indigo Elan! Beautiful machine running IRIX 5.3. 30Mhz R8000 256Mb of RAM.

On a whim, I compiled amp, which was an optimized mp3 decode to real-time playback, or output to wave or AIFF file tool.

That 30Mhz machine could play back up to 256mbps Joint Stereo files without stuttering! 90 percent CPU utilization. Yes, that left just enough to do it from an xterm on a logged in desktop from a shared file repository the machine read over NFS. Basically full utilization doing that! But hey, quality, stereo mp3 playback from a 30Mhz workstation was sweet! Really showed the quality of the systems. That particular box was produced in the very early 90's I believe.

It is no surprise to see nVidia doing ehat it does today. SGI had many of the best and brightest in the building and often funded what it took to get the most out of those people.

Heh, a shared memory design in the O2 workstation could throw moving video onto moving surfaces with relative ease and do so before 2000. Heck, it could do the same with a 700mb image.

Apple M1 is a shared memory design that warms my heart. I know they are up to what M4, M5? I am happy with my M1 Mac Air for now.

Sorry for the ramble. Sometimes an SGI topic gets me remembering so many damn good and fun things...

If you made it this far, thank you for reading! Please putany cool IRIX experiences you are having or had here where I can see 'em.