When you have a chance to use some truely nice technology, you just want more.
So, a few weeks ago I was handed, gratis, a purple Indigo^2 Extreme, a 20″ Silicon Graphics monitor and a Silicon Graphics keyboard. The monitor needs some help (it’s all tinted green) and the keyboard is just a PS/2 101-key kit in SGI skin, but with the addition of a PS/2 mouse, I have a complete system.
Well, okay, I had to go on ebay and find some RAM and drive “sleds” so I could actually make it usable. But now it’s perfectly usable. After you let it warm up for about half an hour. Otherwise the graphics output looks unhappy.
While I was surfing around for the parts to make my Indigo^2 complete, I found someone selling an Octane for cheap, with no bidders. Nice box (once I fixed the damage from shipping with crappy packing), and I’m rooting around for an external SCSI cdrom so i can install the OS from scratch.
Yes, while looking around to fix up the SGI box I already had, I was somehow compelled to get another one. It’s newer! Faster! Better! I needed it! Really, I did! Because… well… Do I have to answer?
I’ll probably get rid of the Indigo^2 once I get it all patched up to IRIX 6.5.22 (the last version that supports that machine. It’s a heavy beast. I’ll probably get rid of the monitor, too, if it can’t be fixed, though I need to consult with an electronics wizard I know before I do that.
So, you may be asking, why, now, am I collecting more old computers? That’s actually a good question. Part of it is that I’ve decided I’d like to broaden my horizons and learn more than just Linux and Mac OS X in terms of Unix systems. To wit, I’ve got a Sun SPARCstation5 that I’m going to load Solaris 9 onto for learning and experimentation. I’ve got this SGI Octane. I might even do some graphics programming, and I’m one of the oddball people that likes to get his code working on as many platforms as possible.
And, as it should be already apparent, I’m just a geek.