Back in the day I was running high end Macintoshes and my own Appletalk and then Ethernet LAN, and I ran across a girl who was the daughter of some University of Colorado professor... and thanks to his University professorship, he had an Indigo2 at home running a webserver, connected by a long distance wifi link. I was like, holy crrp that's elite and was envious. I was still locked down to dialup. I ended up building some IMPs (486's dedicated to nothing more than moving internet packets) under flipped up outside trashcans, to wireless get internet from one side of the farm to the other where my sister had a cable modem. Eventually it evolved into a DD-WRT system in Client Bridge mode which I have no and that has been running for the last 10 years or more, along with my own solid state webserver running Tinycore linux. My Ryzen 7950x would smoke that Indigo2 now, but I wonder what she now has... or rather, her dad. My system is by no means the top of the line but gets the video rendering I need done. I once saw and Indigo2 and monitor parked on a rolly cart right next to an unmonitored exit at a Smithsonian museum on my way out... I guess at one time it had run a demo... I was sorely tempted to roll out the door with it. I didn't though. One, I had my friend with me, and two, the proprietary SGI ecosystem was probably a bit jaded and old news. I knew there probably had been very few apps developed for it, and none of the high end desktop and image editing ones like I enjoyed on Macintosh from having pirated an entire software store I had wored at. That was the one and only time I saw an SGI machine in person.
I had an indigo 2 on my desk for several years for molecular modeling. Of course it also had a flight simulator... That 3D demo demo brought back memories.
This brought back happy memories of my University CS department’s two Indy’s acquisition in 1993, one of which was upgraded to 24 bit graphics a years at a cost of £23,000 The CD drive alone cost £1200. One of the PhD students modelled flame simulation on these systems
There was something so brilliant about Windows XP, i miss my childhood on counter-strike 1.6. This was my machine specs from 2004-2009 "Windows XP , Pentium 4 3.0ghz, 1gb ram, gtx 440 fx (i think).. Had the best times ever. The thing i miss the most was the download screen/box with the loading bar in the middle..
About that time I purchased two Pentium-90 towers. Yes, a 90, just plain Pentium-90. Final cost $5000, each. $32k is an awful lot, but people were already dropping 4 digits on money on computers. So to have one do what that thing did, you could argue that the $32k was justified.
I've played a train/vroom game at 9:04 a lot at work as a student. We ran an SGI Indy as a web server and practicaly as a lab toy at the time :) Had a original monitor, keyboard and Polk speakers.
I run ran across that sync adapter in a box of random stuff a couple months ago. I had no idea what it was for. Ill be listing it on ebay when i find it
And it has the world's greatest screen saver - ElectroPaint. There have been many attempts to port it to other platforms, but none have gotten it completely right. The best I know of is called ElectroPortis, where someone reverse-compiled the original SGI application, but it is missing the graphical control panels and configuration files, so you can only view one possible configuration You may find that there is quite a lot of software you can port to Irix. The 3D GUI library is GL - the non-portable predecessor to OpenGL. I don't know how hard it would be to back-port an OpenGL app to GL, but I suspect it wouldn't be too difficult for someone that is already familiar with the two APIs (I realize that there were many more such people in the 90's than there are today).
Used dial up from 2001 to 2004, set up by computer instructors. Never had to do it myself. Used 2G and so on since 2005 before getting copper wire broadcast in 2021. Now after using 5G, I have to get a fiber connection.
