Hi All!
I'm new here (as you can tell) and found this forum when I obtained my first SGI about 4 weeks ago. Let me tell you about myself and my story first (long post, sorry)
I currently live in Texas, but I'm originally from
Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. I lived there until my late teens when I migrated north to Buenos Aires in 2001 in order to get some college education. As a teenager in the 90's, I lived through the 2D-3D gaming transition and I owned computers anywhere from a 286 (my first one) with a Hercules (orange) display, to a Riva TNT 2 Ultra, with great graphics accelerators in the middle like the 3Dfx Voodoo 2 while living in my hometown.
You have to have in mind that technology was very slow to arrive to Argentina and EVEN MORE to my hometown (Google map the name of that city, you'll understand why the delay in obtaining technology), so when I first have internet access at home in 1996 (and I was one of the few privileges people in doing so) with a crappy Dial-up 14.4k modem I started reading around about a whole new world of technology that I ignored its existence before. My interest in technology sky-rocketed and I was literally drooling when I was reading about Silicon Graphics Machines doing real-time 3D stuff. From that day on and until a few weeks ago, I said "Some day I will own an SGI machine".
I made a career out of technology and now in my early 40s I said "I will start collecting some machines I want to own". This is why this forum was/is fundamental to me hence my interest to say HI and THANKS.
I had
zero idea about which machine to target in buying. Had to be cool, powerful, and not that expensive as I'm on a budget here. Reading about what was being offered on eBay, I had to educate myself on what's an Indigo, what's an Octane, etc,etc. Also, what's an SI, ESI, EMXI graphics options, etc, etc. TRAM? I didn't even know it was a thing. What's a good powerful CPU? anyway, I knew nothing but Google was my friend and Google pointed at an expert forum.
I silently read hours and hours of posts and here is what I accomplished while reading this:
- Purchased my SGI Octane. 2x300Mhz CPU, 1.5GB RAM with an EMXI + TRAM board for a bit less than $500 (shipped). I think it was a pretty good deal but time will tell
- It had no HDD, but I had an SCA from another project. So troubleshooting mode was on. The octane was sold "as-is" and only as "powers on". I was happy to see an image popping up on my screen but it hung very often. Just was able to complete the tests from the PROM once. Long story short, I had 2x256MB + 2x512MB RAM, one of the later seems to be defective. After several non-POST situations, I was able to have a solid system at 512MB of RAM, so onto the next adventure.
- Instaling Irix... Reanimator of course was here to help (promptly donated a few coffees to Linux-RISC). I decided to get a null-modem cable and go the serial way. Took me some time and some retries because I was in the middle of playing with the RAM as well. But by the time I decided to go 2x256MB and to retry after the PROM error while installing 6.5.30, I was able to breeze through the installation and for the first time in my life, I was able to login into an Irix system and getting that beautiful CDE to play with.
- I was able to learn how to manage dependencies on the installation software. I was able to learn how to install from different sources and plenty more.
- Biggest accomplishment was to get my Dell U2412 running at 1920x1200. Sounds silly to say that, but it wasn't easy ;-)
- Demos and doom are now running flawlessly on my Octane though I barely scratched the surface. I need to remodel my office to have a permanent space to have my SGI plugged in and exposed
All these thanks to this forum, which btw I haven't found a "donate here" link, so please direct me to it if there's one!
There's a lot for me ahead on this journey. I've already bought RAM so I can upgrade it to 2GB (I have the 030-1467-xxx mainboard so I can go up to 8GB, but 1GB sticks are scarse and expensive, 2GB should do it great for me), and playing with software. I know nothing about 3D modeling and animation, but my idea is to be able to do some basic animations and renderings with it. Just a cube moving will do it for me, I don't have big hopes for my artistic skills
. I will probably challenge my 15 y/o kid to do the same as he's more avid on these types of creative tasks (he's a blender basic user so already miles ahead of me).
I'm going to stop here but I will be sharing questions and success stories as I get them, for now, I'll attach a few pictures of my SGI journey.
THANKS Y'ALL!
-Aldo
(past: 
)
