[ghost180sx]

I recommend just chilling out. The economy is taking a huge hit, so the tightwads will loosen their buttholes soon.

I hope so. Or it might get even more pricey!

Lately, the Canadian to US Dollar or Great Britain Pound has not changed in my favour for buying. It was initially awesome the week after Brexit and when COVID first hit hard, and then went to a worse rate that before either of these events. This is an additional challenge for someone like myself that has to get almost everything from elsewhere.

I, like you Irinikus, am amazed, perplexed and shocked at the eBay prices on 'retrocomputing' items. Nuts!

Here's to hoping, like Raion believes, that this is a passing fad. Some of the systems I've seen on eBay have been there for over a year now, and the sellers are slowly dropping their crazy prices.

[pcar]

I was poking around ebay for sgi stuff and stumbled upon some o2's with asking prices from $15k to $55k. I thought surely this was a mistake, I looked up the seller and noticed that they are local to me. I gave them a call and I had to tell them "you know, those little blue boxes", they were like "oh yeah, those look neat". I asked them if the price on ebay was wrong or what, they said that the price was correct, i asked why and this is what they said, "those machines came from an industrial facility where they were connected to machines making all kinds of electronics etc, and when one of them breaks they are nearly impossible to replace".

I think this may be possible, but I also think that the cost is more about what the o2's are running, not the HW itself. The issue though is that the seller has no idea if they work, no clue on specs, no way to connect it to anything, etc. So, i'm going to head over there next week to see what all they have, I think they said right now they have about 12 "little blue boxes" haha. I'm taking a keyboard/mouse/monitor/moncable and we'll see what these guys are. I will try to make some deal with them for "enthusiast/collector" value and see if they bite, they may be willing to part with more of them, wish me luck.

[jan-jaap]

they said, "those machines came from an industrial facility where they were connected to machines making all kinds of electronics etc, and when one of them breaks they are nearly impossible to replace". 

Once upon a time, some O2's were used in assembly facilities for automated inspection of finished PCBs. You know, make sure the pick & place machines didn't mess up, that component haven't been soldered upside down or the wrong way around etc. Last time I was in an assembly plant is a couple of years ago, but even then they were using much faster, HD systems to this job. Of course the value of a complete system used to be considerable, but a complete system is more than just the O2. It requires external components (special cameras etc), licensed & nodelocked software and whatever.

A large part of the value of the complete system is the manufacturer's support. If you run a PCB assembly facility you probably want a supported system because if the system goes down you have to do inspection by hand which is time consuming and error-prone. But I wouldn't count on a legally valid transfer of any licenses for something bought on eBay. No support for you.

But yeah, the seller probably thinks he's got gold. This may take some time...

[nintendoeats]

they said, "those machines came from an industrial facility where they were connected to machines making all kinds of electronics etc, and when one of them breaks they are nearly impossible to replace". 

Once upon a time, some O2's were used in assembly facilities for automated inspection of finished PCBs. You know, make sure the pick & place machines didn't mess up, that component haven't been soldered upside down or the wrong way around etc. Last time I was in an assembly plant is a couple of years ago, but even then they were using much faster, HD systems to this job. Of course the value of a complete system used to be considerable, but a complete system is more than just the O2. It requires external components (special cameras etc), licensed & nodelocked software and whatever.

I work in this industry. The current technology is way beyond anything an O2 could think about handling, using interfaces that are unlikely to be available for SGI systems (such as CoaXPress, GigE vision and USB 3 vision). I suppose somebody could still be using these systems if they have been manufacturing the same thing in the same way for 20 years, but these days there are even all-in-one solutions (smart cameras) that could be used to completely replace an entire system and do a much better job. These things have a camera, processing, and IO for interacting with a PLC, all built-in.

The only limitation would be writing new software, but if he thinks he is going to get 15-50k for these machines then he is pricing himself into competition with machine vision integrators who will write new software running on modern, stable platforms.

[pcar]

I was able to find that these systems, very recently, came from this company - http://www.appliedmaterials.com. maybe they are going through an upgrade or re-tooling process and they no longer need these, but I gathered from the seller that many companies have not re-tooled and would still need access to these specialized o2's. (allegedly).

[nintendoeats]

I was able to find that these systems, very recently, came from this company - http://www.appliedmaterials.com.  maybe they are going through an upgrade or re-tooling process and they no longer need these, but I gathered from the seller that many companies have not re-tooled and would still need access to these specialized o2's. (allegedly).

I mean, one can't say it's impossible without knowing what is special about them. Maybe they have some kind of special add-in board. The idea that they were used for inspection is just a guess as well. Are there any pictures?

If there are any unusual connectors provided, I know many people I can ask.

EDIT: Found them. I note that they all seem to have dual-head add-in cards in the spot that normally has the LCD expansion, which is pretty interesting. One of them also has an unusual connector on a PCI-X card. Unfortunately that picture sucks, so it's pretty hard to make out. I think I've seen it before.

---

To me, the fact that one of them is missing the system board suggests that he is really overestimating the value of these O2s. At that point the only interesting thing would be something on the HDDs.

[Irinikus]

All of this seller's prices are retarded!!!

https://www.ebay.com/sch/getspares.com_s...7675.l2562

The only thing that was probably special about those O2's was the fact that they ran IRIX, and the software that the factory used required IRIX to run!!! (The unified memory architecture maybe helped a bit!)

[nintendoeats]

To update, that PCI-X card looks like it has a DBHD100 connector. Unfortunately this connector doesn't seem to be standard for anything, so it's hard to say what the card might be.

[pcar]

I'll grab all the hinv I can from the ones they let me connect to.