[weblacky]

I can't tell if you're joking or not, so I'm going to assume you're actually serious.

If you started to notice those instructions have not been enough for several newcomers we've recently experienced and I assume this is an age related thing above all else.

Ian's instructions are the most complete anyone's actually publicly written for everyone to see, but they're not numbered steps nor is following them literally going to address resolving the two or four conflicts that I remember that always come up around Java and Mozilla and what not. It also doesn't talk at all about how to properly install SGI drivers for add-in cards that aren't normally detected automatically. It doesn't talk about the graphical desktop at all nor does it talk about things like creating a user account.

I don't want to get into a stupid argument about how today's kids need videos and all that crap. But I am saying that a video would make it more accessible to newcomers until somebody writes an installation script and publishes it for automated/unattended installs.

My personal opinion from observation is that there's more that we knew intrinsically because we actually lived through this era. If you had a workstation PC and you were generally knowledgeable about corporate computing bac then you knew about parallel SCSI buses, you knew about hard drive volumes, you understood basic networking elements, and overall you sort of had the proper expectations.

We have people coming from Windows 11 to try to load an SGI that straight out of 1995 & Jurassic Park. It just looks too alien to new/young collectors that are interested.


If someone was willing, it would be a great idea to just link Ian's installation instructions in a YouTube video description then go ahead from PROM and properly type in the necessary commands walk-through the basic FX commands we all expect people to just do, start the install and progress through it along with resolving the conflict and doing first startup. Also telling people what's you're going to commonly see if you don't have ethernet plugged in, what's going happen with the default Apache in mailbox errors at startup and all that stuff and probably how to use chkconfig to turn them off.

Logging on for the first time in the graphical environment and seeing where the tools are. Being able to make yourself a basic user account and also showing you how to add additional discs and mount them using the graphical utilities.


Just what I've described alone could allow us to just reply to everyone's initial inquiry of how you should install the operating system with a URL to a YouTube video. Yes I realize in the video they can't say where they got the files from. You also have the issue of whether you're doing a CD install or a network install. I'd recommend the CD install first and then make another video with the network install but that would just be me.


You and I may be used to these kind of instructions, we figured it out based on these instructions, but we were also there at the time and could sort of read between the lines and intuit it and also understood what might be reasonable versus selecting random options and just keep saying "go" or "continue". Which is what new younger people today will actually do. See they're used to highly controlled environments like iPads and whatever that keep warning you if you're doing something wrong or prevent you from doing destructive operations. That wasn't what computers did before, especially in our generation. So you and I might stop and think about a question that we have and perhaps do some quick research on it but you would be shocked that most young people would actually just barge through it like it's a unwanted ad you click no or cancel too. They don't think about the fact that there might be lasting effects because in their minds almost everything you could wrong you can just go back and change later. To some extent that's kind of true but for most of the decisions in the SGI installation that isn't true.

So while you may have initially dismissed under the thought of why in the world do we need a video of instructions when we have a several sheet guide of written instructions? I would easily counter that those instructions are no longer adequate for a newcomer that is say 25 years or younger who wasn't exposed to computing from the early 2000s or the late 1990s.

There's a difference between hand holding and making a guide, obviously I don't expect a YouTube video to go in depth on SCSI... But I would expect it to say that the machines tend to use ID 0 for the controller and that you should be using ID 1 to boot from. I'd also expect them to fast-forward through loading screens or things that would be unnecessarily long and boring.

But that's the basic reason I asked, we can shove the SGI depot instructions into anyone's face but if they're not a seasoned computer user from the late 90s they still haven't seen a bunch of this stuff. Basically once IDE/PATA dropped off the planet... These parallel ribbon bus connections are now foreign to people who grew up with computing after about 2004. It would also be important in the video to set appropriate expectations like how fast the network connection is and how fast the data connections are. We're talking about orders of magnitude slower than a $300 computer I can buy today. It's appropriate to set the stage and help the people through it so they can get something that immediately works they can play with then they can decide if they want to really learn or if they did what they wanted to do and they wanna just sell their system and pass it on to someone else.