> 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.

Huh. That would be an interesting case of load testing.

Yeah it was. And back then, running IRIX, I was more than a bit crazy and wild. It was such a fun OS! SGI as mentioned up thread, put a ton of thought into it.

Once a person reached a solid mastery, amazing things could be done, sans reboots and the like.

I was terribly spoiled though. Ran it until it made no sense, then ditched all of it to go small.

My next fun toy was the Parallax Propeller. The first chip was amazing, 8 cores all independent. It was a full multiprocessor, able to perform concurrent and or parallel computing with such ease! Spoiled again!

The second chip is the Amiga of microcontrollers. Maybe I could call it the SGI of micros. Today, one can program the 8 cores in BASIC, SPIN, C and ASSEMBLY, all at the same time!

Write video driver in assembly, framework in SPIN, some functions in BASIC, others, maybe sound in C.

It has hardware support got ADC / DAC and more on every pin, shared CORDIC math able to do powers, roots, trig and more. It can drive almost any display made since monochrome TV.... too much fun.

We ended up with SGI machines for technical data processing (huge amounts of data), tons of processing going on in parallel. We went through DEC systems (Alpha), Sun, HP, IBM. The SGI systems could handle way more load than any of the others without trashing. And several other reasons. A happy choice.

I still have a few SGI systems in my basement. Octane, Fuel, some Indy boxes.. O2..