A quick update regarding the SGI O2 system I’ve written about a few times over the years. I grabbed an O2 setup on eBay back in 2003 (went in looking for an Indy, but the O2 seemed a better proposition) which consisted of an SGI O2 unit with a 64-bit 175MHz MIPS R10000 CPU, the O2 media interface card with camera, and a new-in-box 17-inch SGI 1600SW display and video interface card. It’s a sweet little system that I had setup and running down in the basement computer room for several years until I picked up an Apple Lisa 2/10 (in 2005) and needed desk space to set that up. I shelved the O2, intending to bring it back out one day.
That day was last Tuesday.
What inspired me to bring it out was a series of videos that “Dodoid” / “DodoDude700” is publishing which take a look at the history of SGI. Here’s part I and part II. They’re worth a watch.
While there’s zero unused desk space across the six desks I’ve got down in the Byte Cellar, my office in DC has a huge amount of unused space. Two morning Uber trips in to the District was all it took. In the three years I’ve been working here I’ve brought in my Apple //c, my SAM440ep-Flex PowerPC-based “Amiga,” and a Raspberry Pi. And, joining them now, is the O2. It’ll be nice to be able to use it occasionally, as I do the other systems on my desk.
What version of IRIX that the O2 is running? Wikipedia lists 6.5.30 as the last update. There were some free updates, but the last few updates required a support agreement.
Bootup messages just say 6.5. I am not recalling if it’s actually 6.5.x or if its not. I got the install CDs from the chap in Britain with the huge SGI, Ian Mapleson years ago.
I’ve only spent a little bit of time on IRIX. I briefly had some Indy workstations at work, but they were running a revision of IRIX that was not Y2K-compliant. The prices for getting updates were way out of reach so we shuffled them off to another department, where I heard they sat unused in a stack in their machine room for two or three years before being sent of to surplus.
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have been looking for just the case and a working cd rom of SGI O2 computer. hard to find.
http://irix.cc has the inst sets it seems.
You need to say “uname -aR” to get the minor rev numbers. uname won’t give it. Eg:
corax 4# uname
IRIX
corax 5# uname -a
IRIX corax 6.5 04100803 IP32
corax 6# uname -aR
IRIX corax 6.5 6.5.30f 04100803 IP32
Likewise you can get a bit more infos from hinv -vm:
corax 19# hinv -vm
CPU: MIPS R5000 Processor Chip Revision: 10.0
FPU: MIPS R5000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 10.0
1 300 MHZ IP32 Processor
Main memory size: 1024 Mbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte on Processor 0
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
FLASH PROM version 4.18
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version ADAPTEC 7880
Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0 (unit 2)
CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version ADAPTEC 7880
On-board serial ports: tty1
On-board serial ports: tty2
On-board EPP/ECP parallel port
CRM graphics installed
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Iris Audio Processor: version A3 revision 0
PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x9004, device 0x8078) PCI slot 1
PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x9004, device 0x8078) PCI slot 2
PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x10a9, device 0x0009) PCI slot 3
Video: MVP unit 0 version 1.4
AV: AV1 Card version 1, O2Cam type 1 version 0 connected.
Vice: TRE
corax 20#
This is even more chatty on Octane/Octane2: http://ns4.reboot.net.au/octane2/octane2.png
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