[airbozo]

Nice story!

I have some documentation that might be interesting to some folks and when I get a chance I will contact the authors and see if I can publish them. One is all about troubleshooting the graphics subsystems of the original Onyx up to the Origin3000.

Internal Support Tools, by any chance? I've got one of those with some other material coming from the Cortaillod (Switzerland) facility that I still need to process. They seem to be awfully IRIX specific so more  == better. For the older IRIX versions they were called 'Diagnostics X.Y', same deal.

The troubleshooting doc about the Onyx (the original one at least) has been on Ian Mapleson's site since well before SGI first went bankrupt so I assume nobody will object to publishing such material. Really anything helps when dealing with these old monsters and is hugely appreciated.

The Troubleshooting documents I have (Have to make sure I still do have them), were never published outside of the company as far as I know.  They never ended up in tech pubs.  It is a collection of notes and data related to different visual and performance benchmarks. By cross referencing what you see (or don't see) on screen and the output of different commands it breaks down what is wrong and what should be checked in a specific order. Some of the tips even drill down to a specific component on the faulty boards. It's not a lengthy document, but quite helpful.  Most of it was written by the designers and engineers with input from the manufacturing team that repaired the systems.  It is mostly graphics related, but there are some storage and compute only items. If I remember correctly it covers everything from the Personal Iris up to the Origin3000 series.

Now I'm getting worried I left it at my old company when I departed and they are now out of business. I'll have to put the time aside to search for it. A good friend still works in the product development and testing labs (now HPE). He might have a copy as well.