The O2, an entry level Unix workstation, was introduced in the mid 90s and came with a single MIPS CPU. Here, we see some baby Octanes, haha! It officially ran on IRIX UNix OS but also supported the Linux and BSD families of operating systemsen.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_O2#unix #history
@nixCraft Plenty of RAM, at least
@nixCraft looks like one of those vintage toasters for $299, love it
@nixCraft I so very nearly had some of them, and Indigo servers, at work. But no, we went with Sun instead. Netra series servers but no workstations 😞
@nixCraft It looks like a toaster lol
@nixcraft A similar PC case in ATX form factor would be great.
@nixCraft I <3 the 8x 128MB DIMMs.
@nixCraft Those were just whispers of legend for us with 2mb of SIPP RAM and chalky-sounding RLL hard drives 😂 If you had one of those, you had a lot of people at your place, whether you liked it or not :) I would not mind having one of those if only to check off a 35+ year old bucket list.
@nixCraft I would edit that into : Linux and BSD family managed to port their OS to support this hardware 🙂 Your sentence suggests that SGI did the heavy work as a pioneer at that time supporting so many non mainstream OS-es. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_O2#O
@nixCraft I worked long hours on those.
@nixCraft Got one of those in the loft, along with its screen, an SDI video card, and a spare drive sled. Somewhere I also have the admin books and a box of IRIX discs. Last time I fired it up it was working fine.
@nixCraft looks like a steampunk coffee machine 😅
@nixCraft I adored the design of those SGI workstations back when I was a budding computer geek in high school… a few years later various outmoded machines like O2, Oxygen, and Indy workstations were repurposed into catalog search computers at a college library I worked at. That’s a whole lotta machine for library searches, but it was nice to see such lovely designs on hands-on display.
@nixCraft Back in the day when creativity was involved in workstation design.
@nixCraft I like it. Very clean design compared to modern gaming PCs with a bunch of RGB.
@nixCraft supported, but not in any marginally useful way
@nixCraft That does look very interesting...
@nixCraft Beautiful machine but the OS (IRIX) was IMO a disaster. Every update seemed to break an bunch of things. No concept of backwards compatibility or API stability.
@nixCraft That looks adorable!
@nixCraft Fondly remembering this as one of the homes of Erwin from User Friendly web.archive.org/web/2022022509
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