I repost it here, because i accidentally posted this in the wrong section:
BTW, I heard about this place months ago, because from third year of high school students do work/school alternation (it's quite complicated to explain), and my IT teacher told to the classroom the best students that put more effort in studying would be sent even to CRS4 (research center) and other awesome places.
Well, months ago i thought my quest to obtain an SGI machine would come to an end, but fortunally there was a change: my IT teacher told me she worked at CRS4 in Pula (quite distant from Cagliari, but not too much, there is even an ARST line), and when i asked about workstations she said there were Silicon Graphics systems and there were "workstations with big monitors (i suppose 19 or 22 inches CRT monitors) and equipped with 1gb of RAM (this leads me to think about an Indigo², an O2 or an Octane), praised by any employee".
Then i did some research and i discovered the CRS4 have relationships with CERN and had relationships with Silicon Graphics Headquarters in Switzerland, and they had these systems:
- Indy
- IRIS 4D 420 VGX (dual MIPS R3000 40mhz and VGX graphic system), was connected to a Macintosh (first CRS4 LAN), it costed 500 milions italian lyras (~260k €) because of a 50% discount (the MSRP was 1 bilion italian lyras)
- Onyx and Onyx², they were in a room called "Penguins room", because there were two air conditioners to keep the room temperature around 15/16 °C
- O2 *
- Indigo and Indigo² *
*unconfirmed, but they seem to match my IT teacher and another employee description
They even had other systems :
- Sun SparcStations
- Parsytec transputers (one i found was the GC PowerPlus/64)
- IBM PowerServer 950
- IBM SP1
- Many others i didn't mentioned
So, some days ago she told me there is one employee that tried to decomission the SGI and Sun stuff, but he gave up because the procedure was so long, but since i asked for this, there are some chances i could get something, and my IT teacher wrote to another employee. I hope something will happen.
I also found some links and articles about CRS4 equipment and SGI related stuff:
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http://venus.web.cern.ch/VENUS/i3d/i3d-h...paper.html
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https://www.aicanet.it/storia-informatic...talia/crs4 (in Italian)
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https://www.facebook.com/SaloneInnovazio...=3&theater
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https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-...s_Balaguer
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http://www.crs4.it/~3diadm (check the 1998 page on WayBack Machine)
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https://web.archive.org/web/200012191959..._homepage/ (Virtualization and VR stuff)
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https://www.claudiozannoni.it/zannoni_ca...ico_94.pdf (look for CRS4, seem also they had IBM, HP PA/RISC and DEC stuff)
