So Bill brought in an SGI Indy on Wed. I know the general policy on old tech, but I would submit that the Indy is somewhat of an exception. Being a $20K chunk of hardware, it has a life expectancy somewhat out of the normal range of tech. There is a difference between an old pinto vs an old Lamborghini.

If I'm vetoed, I'll claim dibs are the hardware (noone tell my wife, k?) But I would recommend that the SGI be tasked with being a Makerbot or GCode type station. We have a general issue with what ever we setup with the Makerbot being re purposed all the time, I'm guessing that this would not be as likely to be 'borrowed'. I was going to hunt down a copy of GCC et all for the thing so we could start playing with the tool chain.

Thoughts?

Over the course of time, we've had issues with non useful stuff being brought in.

This isn't about that at all.

This is a freaking SGI.

When I first got in to 3D Modeling and animation, this is the machine we all drooled and lusted after.

It might not seem like a super dooper powerhorse right now, but if you compare it to a 486 dx2 33 mhz machine with 4 meg of ram, it's the shizzle.

I like it, it's gorgeous, we should find a home for it, if we can do so and have it be useful, that's a bonus.

If we can have things like this in such a way that the having of it doesn't interfere with someone elses use of the space, then why not?

If it needs a home outside of the classroom (for some reason), that's doable; I do know that it's from now on going to be one of my talking points when I give a tour.

Riley

Well again, it needs to earn its keep. I agree this is not a museum. Anything, tools included, should justify their existence. The nice thing about something like this is that it could be setup to do other things as well.

I have two SGI O2s sitting around doing nothing (since I don't have the root password for them, and the CD-ROM drive is locked without root, which makes it difficult to install a linux distro) if we decide to turn the Indy into some kind of evil robot and it needs a couple foot soldiers.

You'll perhaps have to take them for a field trip to the space. Rooting old hardware used to be a favorite pastime of mine. Worst case you yank the drive and get the info off it direct. Usually though you can just run some cracking software on the paswd file.

I know we're not a museum, and I don't want to be one.

I do like having neat things around.

If there's something that I or others want to have around for Neatness rather than Usefulness, I'll bet you a dollar I can find a spot for it that won't interfere with anyone's making.

If we end up with aesthetic issues that conflict, well, I have a list of things in that milieu. (Including my massive piles of stuff.)

Riley

I used to hack on SGI hardware and one of the biggest problems with it is that SGI as a company couldn't spell "host security" if their life depended on it. And as far as getting GCC to work, IIRC Irix was one of the few Unices that shipped without development headers so you couldn't get GCC on it without paying for the commercial compiler for it (which included said headers) in the first place.

While that may have been true in the "day", currently that's not exactly true, check out http://freeware.sgi.com/Installable/gcc-3.3.html There is GCC for sgi. Also as it's an old system it's highly likely that the development tools are available somewhere on the net.