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A little over a year ago - Raion - 05-29-2019

We lost a little bit of ourselves. Nekochan.net. Not a day goes by where I don't think about that place. May 20th 2018 will forever be a day in my memory. 

I guess it's a perfect time to detail my experience, and exposure, into SGI:

I was 19 years old and working for a company called InMotion in Virginia Beach. I met a curious guy there with a bright red workstation and a small light blue slab at his desk. His name was Will, but he was known on Nekochan.net as "thebulbguy". He was their Tier 3 Network Engineer, and I became fast friends with him. He began telling me about these "SGI" computers. At the time I was into Amigas and old PowerPC macs, so he had my attention. 

I then found two Personal Iris 4D/35s local in Chesapeake. I went and grabbed them, and was completely at a loss with what to do with them. I signed up on Nekochan, and well, learned I had pretty much useless machines for major enthusiast work. So I gave them to Will, and he used them for parts for his personal irises. 

I later grabbed an octane and became super active in 2014, and despite an emotional meltdown that had nothing to do with the site and everything to do with negative, shitty people I lived with in 2015, I was a regular user up until the day it died. I wasn't ever really interested in the 3D graphics. I was always interested in the OS itself, and its uniqueness. I even daily drove IRIX for about 2 months on a dual 300MHz Octane. 

I never saw myself as willing to take up the mantle, tbh, that Pete had left behind. This site's original purpose was a smaller alternative discussion that allowed for sales of commercial software, something Nekochan never allowed. 

Then all of us were blindsided by Peter's sudden decision to shut down. I don't know all of the facts, but I do know he had been troubled by running the site for some years, his interests have drifted to other microcomputers. And as of late we had a lot of controversy on the site, too, with users throwing around insults at each other constantly, people trying to "expose" us on /r/conspiracy etc. Nobody knows how this must have weighed on Peter's mind. 

It's been hard, but we've bounced back. We recently surpassed 600 forum members. This is all a good thing. 

Eventually, I hope to start offering more services and have more things people look for from a community like this. Make it the best we can be.

RE: A little over a year ago - Irinikus - 05-29-2019

Raion, you've done an awesome job in holding the community together and I really hope that it only grows from strength to strength from here on, which I'm sure it will! Well Done Man! Smile

RE: A little over a year ago - jirka - 05-29-2019

Happy  1st anniversary!

RE: A little over a year ago - Raion - 05-29-2019

Well we started in Feb 2017, for reference. So we've been around for 2 years.

RE: A little over a year ago - Trippynet - 05-30-2019

Raion Wrote:I wasn't ever really interested in the 3D graphics. I was always interested in the OS itself, and its uniqueness.

Funnily enough, you've described my own feelings about SGIs perfectly here.

As it is, I have the utmost respect for what you've done with irix.cc. Make no mistake, the SGI community is a very small one - and with good reasons. These machines were never intended for home use, and that is one of the things that makes them special. As it is, that's one of the reasons why running a community such as this is hard work.

Although I look back on Nekochan fondly, and Pete did a great job running it for as long as he did and helping to build up a repository of applications, he did unfortunately tarnish his reputation at the end by pulling the plug with zero notice - rather than trying to hand over in a more structured manner if he simply didn't want to run it any more. Thankfully, we had irix.cc to migrate to as you'd already put the spadework in, and it is great to see the community still going.

Many thanks to yourself Raion, plus everyone else who has helped with the running of this place. Here's hoping for many more years!

RE: A little over a year ago - stormy - 05-31-2019

I'm really happy this forum is here, I often researched into SGI machines and read information on Nekochan etc. When the old site went down last year even I felt a loss, because I'm a vintage computer enthusiast any loss of community of any platform is terrible to me. Now I finally have my first SGI (most likely not the last) I'm really happy this place exists so I can bounce my noob questions around and 'grow up' in the SGI world lol Smile

RE: A little over a year ago - BackPlaner - 06-01-2019

Thanks for doing it all Raion, I am eternally grateful.

FWIW I dont think of this place as something to compare to Nekochan; thanks to your efforts, it is its own thing.

RE: A little over a year ago - jpstewart - 06-01-2019

It's hard to believe it's already been a year since Nekochan disappeared.

I still struggle to log in here, nearly every day.  I almost always try to use my Nekochan password first.  But these forums have stronger password rules (which is a good thing!), so I have a different (and presumably stronger) password here.  And my middle-aged brain is still stuck in Nekochan mode for some reason.  Maybe by the two year point I'll be able to remember to use the password for this site on the first try!

Thanks Raion (and the rest of the team) for providing this place.  SGIs (and other vintage Unix workstations) are a hobby for me so these forums are a happy place to relax and enjoy discussing stuff that interests me.  It's a nice break from work and the rest of life.

RE: A little over a year ago - Raion - 06-01-2019

The only reason I require stronger passwords is because there is a great chance of being hacked. I have replaced the search rankings for most of the Silicon graphics communities, and along the way we have unfortunately made a few nasty enemies mostly from people who were already pissed off at either me, or other members of the Silicon graphics community. Pretty much everybody knows who I'm talking about, I'm not going to give him the validation by naming him.

Really I just want this community to become even better and I think that we have the potential to already because we have removed a lot of the gatekeeping that was involved on the old site.

I really only wish my friend Will/thebulbguy would come out of his hiding and join us here because he really is the reason that I'm here today and I have nobody else to thank for introducing me to the hobby and being a wealth of information that prevented me from being too much of a retard on the old forum.

There is still a small part of me that hopes a copy of the database will turn up and I can start restoring content. If such a thing happened I would probably start by creating a read-only forum. And then slowly package people's old posts, private messages and other things into a format that would be easily downloaded.

RE: A little over a year ago - Irinikus - 06-02-2019

I really hope some day soon, systems become available requiring people to authenticate in order to access the internet, allowing the authority to criminalize or simply ban certain people from using the internet. (Not simply banning repeat offenders from certain sites, but the internet in total!)

Thumb print authentication would work here. (AI's could also be used to "Police" the internet.)

The internet is a public space, and like in all public spaces, right of admission should be reserved!

It's so sad that adults prove time and time again, that they need to be treated and policed like children! (If you act like a child, you should be treated like one, and have all of your so-called "rights" stripped away!)

Just imagine the consequences of not being allowed to access the internet in this day and age? (It would be an extreme handicap!)