Mon May 19, 2014 6:26 am
This topic is just up my alley.
Around 2009-2010 I was really into these RISC workstations. I had a SGI Indy. It didn't want to install IRIX over the network, so I got an Octane for 50EURs instead. Wow, it was huge. Beautiful. I enjoyed doing 'hinv -vm' on it. I installed IRIX 6.5 and updated it to 6.5.22f.
There's MATLAB and Mathematica for Unix OSes (both hard to find). There's nekoware, which is a community maintained package management system for IRIX. The best you can do is Firefox 2.0. Opening GMail in FIrefox 2.0 on a 300MHz MIPS R12000 is a sobering experience, where most of your dreams of actually using it for proper desktop work will crash and fall. Okay, I said, no dice using it as anything close to a desktop. Let's repurpose it as a server instead.
OK, so as a server, the Octane takes up to 3 hard to find SCA-80 drives (although in reality, the Octane doesn't seem to be designed with hotplugging drives in mind - it's probably only because it shares the same system as the Origin 200), and the largest you can find is ~300GB. Plus, it's loud, and I lived in a dorm room. That, and I didn't have much use for a server anyway. So eventually, after running glxgears on the SE graphics, it just sat there in the corner gathering dust. It was still devastatingly beautiful, and I dreamed of a Tezro, even though I knew it was going to be just as unpractical. That was back then. Today you have the Raspberry Pi, and SSDs that blow away any 10k SCSI hard drive you could put in the SGIs. Makes the proposition even more dreadful.
IRIX's main problem is that not enough people maintain the GNU ecosystem required for newer programs to run (like FIrefox 3). The slow hardware I can live with (you need to use slow ones sometimes to appreciate the fast hardware). But a software ecosystem really is the life and blood.
So, the RS/6000. There was a great deal going on those, the Intellistation POWER 275. 2 1.45GHz POWER4+ CPUs with 4GB RAM and a GXT6500P for what, 200EURs? What a steal! I got one from eBay. It arrived in a palette, all smashed up, the rear muffler dented. I complained, and got another for free. Woo hoo! Actually, it's still somewhere in the university... gotta get it back.
The Intellistation POWER 275 is even larger and heavier than the Octane, with much more brittle, low quality plastic parts that break often, and comes with a rear muffler and front plastic door (very easily broken, which is attached to the sturdy metal case in a complicated fashion which seems to be endemic to any entity that works closely with the US government), has a mini computer that handles the boot process and has its own fan that produces noise even when the workstation isn't powered on. You manage this mini computer through DB9 serial, which means you need another computer (most likely faster to begin with anyway). POST takes 10 minutes. You press the button, some complicated codes show up on the cool green LCD, and after a minute, the fans spin up and something starts happening. Welcome to AIX!
Right away, the GXT6500P doesn't want to play with Linux (although there have since been fixes for that - just adding the PCI ID to the list somewhere for the GXT4000 driver or something). For proper Linux graphics support on RS/6000, I have to have a GXT135P, a rebadged Matrox G450! Damn that's old! But the worst part is that old beater still gets sold for 200-300EURs. What a ripoff. So I had to stick to AIX.
AIX has a better software ecosystem than IRIX. But it's still not quite enough. I think I had Firefox 3 running at some point, and its page rendering performance was around 60-70% that of my Core Duo laptop, which is to say, usable. Quite usable. Back then, web browser based office suites were just catching on, and I didn't trust them at all, but whereas IRIX just had OpenOffice 1.1 and Abiword, AIX had it much better. AIX uses RPM for its package management system, but crucially, without a central repository and without dependency resolving. So you have to install every dependency manually, by yourself. I remember feeling so accomplished when I finally got KDE 3 installed.
AIX's GNU software selection is maintained by a corporation, whereas Nekoware is community maintained. I'm not sure how to describe the difference, but I think I like community maintained software ecosystems better. They probably fit my use case more.
Speaking of use cases, the Intellistation POWER 275 uses SCA-80 drives too, but with a special PCB adapter that spreads the pins out flat. The best thing to do is to get a used 9GB drive for RS/6000, take apart the drive sled and use the adapter on a bigger drive of your own. Of course, it still makes for a bad file server since it accepts 4 drives total, but each drive for SCA-80 tops out at 300GB. But it does have Gigabit Ethernet.
The Intellistation POWER 275 was kinda boring in the end. Sure, it was fast, capable, and definitely reliable. But it was just a black box that happened to have lots of requirements. No story, or fancy design to keep me interested.
There was a Sun Blade 100 which I got because I got tired of noisy RISC workstations, but that was such a steaming pile of slowness that I got rid of it as fast as I could, and lost interest in any higher end Blade machines. Plus, it wasn't even quiet. I even bought an aftermarket silent 80mm fan for it, and it didn't get much better.
Then I sold one of my POWER 275s off and used the proceeds towards a Powermac G5 dual. It was the perfect progression - the PowerPC G5 was a higher clocked modification of the POWER4 with less emphasis on reliability. It arrived. It was beautiful, large, sturdy, didn't have flimsy plastic bits. I pressed the power button, and it revved its fans like a race car, and then settled down to a quiet whisper. No matter what I did with it, it was always quiet, composed, even when raytracing in modo. Best of all, I could jam a 1TB SATA drive into it. Finally. And the audio wasn't just an after thought cheap PCI card, like on the POWER 275 (the Octane is supposed to have good analog audio outs too, and even has a SPDIF plug, but the machine itself was noisy and storage space was limited). Best of all, I could run the latest Firefox (okay, TenFourFox). But I never felt like the software was holding me back. PowerPC still has lots of supporters, and the software ecosystem is booming compared to IRIX or AIX. I was close enough to home territory to get the benefits, but yet feel like I was on a different planet. I loved the dual G5 with all my heart, even if it struggled when playing 1080p H.264.
Lesson: for desktop use, use an old Powermac if you have to have RISC. for server use, get an old desktop too - why? Because as an old system, it's already holding you back in terms of expandability, speed and power consumption - the least it can do is be quiet and look good to compensate. I would like to try a SPARCStation 20 sometime - those were genuinely beautiful.
Mothership: FX-8350, 12GB DDR3, M5A99X EVO, MSI GTX 1070 Sea Hawk, Crucial MX500 500GB
Supply ship:
[email protected], 12GB DDR3, M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3
Corsair: Thinkpad X230