by ThatGuyRaion on 2/25/25, 4:46 PM with 80 comments
by tombert on 2/25/25, 6:52 PM
I am curious what the world would be like now if Silicon Graphics had made a model that was less than $2,000, but still ran Irix and had some amount of the 3D processing stuff with it. For that matter, I sometimes wonder what it would be like if Nintendo had released kits for the N64 that let you use it more as a computer.
I'm just thinking that it's all about timing; if they had released something in 1997 for "prosumers", before OS X came out, would Apple have its same market position now? Would we all be using SGiPhones? Would every tech startup get all their engineers little SGI laptops?
by yjftsjthsd-h on 2/25/25, 6:59 PM
> Why are machines that run IRIX expensive?
> There are no new machines being produced, and high-end machines are in short supply. Less expensive machines can be had. We do not recommend using eBay to search, as the prices are usually extremely inflated.
Less expensive machines can be had on the non-eBay used market, or have we hit the point where the cheapest way to have such a machine is dedicated emulation like https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard ?
by neilv on 2/25/25, 9:50 PM
* If you can find ways to collect and preserve copies of the software, that can be big value. Every version and variation of a title has sometimes been important after the fact. Maybe use archive.org for historical archiving of software with unclear licensing status, and link to it from your wiki, with your wiki providing the background text and organizing that isn't archive.org's strong suit. (I'm not talking about piracy, but just trying to ensure that any copy at all survives, which had been a real problem on some other platforms of this era. Also, it's easier to get a company to say that such-and-such software from a company three acquisitions ago is OK for people to run on vintage boxes and in emulators and museums, than to ask them to find and provide a working copy, which they usually cannot.)
* You might want to capture provenance/copyright info for uploaded photos, like Wikipedia kinda does. Easier to capture it at upload/linking time, than to try to reconstruct it later.
by foldor on 2/25/25, 6:51 PM
by ur-whale on 2/25/25, 7:50 PM
http://industrialarithmetic.blogspot.com/2011/04/sgis-finest...
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/fele3v...
by zvr on 2/26/25, 2:25 PM
The main box says "Tech-Pubs.net, or TechPubs, is a public wiki cataloging the hardware of the former Silicon Graphics Corporation." but you have so much more content than a catalog of hardware.
Do you plan to expand to other things that SGI produced? Publications? Swag?
by siev on 2/25/25, 8:07 PM
Very Important: Are you gonna be adding an entry for the Japan-exclusive set-top box that had its own official port of DOOM done by Jonathan Blow? :p
by blankx32 on 2/25/25, 5:56 PM
by iancmceachern on 2/26/25, 9:37 AM