[vishnu]

I understand you, but actually I don't see a need to exclude each and every "off-topic" post here. I am totally fine if my monologue here is "interrupted" from time to time with some sort of off-topic but still related posts - especially from vishnu - long live we graybeards! - and especially as vishnu didn't tell me what to do with my machines in his posts, as if there's only one way to use them. So I'm thankful for vishnu's posts as they allowed me to provide my point of view and I learned some more about his.

All fine for me! Let's carry on...

I apologize, I tend to be much less succinct than I should be. Anything our members can do to learn more about these unique machines is valuable. SGI, just like Sun with Sparc, IBM with Power, and basically every vendor who wrote their own version of Unix and made their own processors motherboards and cases, kept everything intensely secret and to themselves. That's really why Unix lost, the Unix vendors were doing EVERYTHING themselves, Their own processors, their own motherboards, their own operating system, their own cases, no one in the Windows world ever tried to do that.

With Windows, Microsoft wrote the operating system, Intel and AMD designed the processors, everybody else made motherboards and cases, and that specialization defeated commercial Unix. So yeah, the BSD's and Linux are thriving, because that's all they do, is their operating systems.