[Raion]

It seems pretty much every vendor is slowly phasing out their work. I mean I get it there's not very much money to be had in this hobby. Pretty much all commercial usage of it is down to the last couple businesses, one of which is the oceanography company that I keep maintaining their systems for. 

I hope that they're willing to turn over their websites before they delete them, especially if they have catalogs of part numbers. I wouldn't mind rehosting more stuff if the time was right. 

Ultimately I think that it's going to be a lot more individuals negotiating with recyclers. That's unfortunate because I know that a couple of them in Virginia don't really care to deal with individuals. 

I know that I haven't been able to contribute much to the community in the last year or two. Between facing eviction last year, depression, changes in my life and a stalking incident, I had to take a step back. But I'm not giving up. I have been talking with some people and at the very least I can say that there is still a lot of things that I plan to get done. IRIXCE is basically at this point awaiting a major update, some tools that I commissioned, and a couple of things I managed to RE. I think once I finally have a clear head and a bit more time I will focus on finishing my revival of the nekoware base. 

Anyways I just hope that any vendors that read this who have online catalogs and are thinking of shutting down shop in the future are willing to turn over copies of them to the community. If nothing else it is nice to have nostalgia.

[weblacky]

I would assume that they're simply running out of parts, on top of business-to-business, paid, work. I can't speak for countries that are not the United States but I have a family member that just has a small business license for a personal consulting business and the amount of paperwork and taxes and all that that you have to do requires a good influx of cash every quarter year to be worthwhile. If these vendors are getting contacted twice a month or once a week by people then there's just not enough business to keep the lights on. Also very few of the parts are so small that you can ship them in a small box. Most of the stuff is big and awkward and loves to get destroyed. Attrition in every sense of the word defines the vintage computer parts business.

Also we've all been told that these business clients can't divulge that they still use SGIs for fear that investors will go running away from them because it's like "how dare you use vintage machines in your business". So the general public doesn't know who might still be using these things but we know it's not very many. And we also know that it's really the lack of fast emulation that keeps some of these systems online for business use. If emulation was suddenly there the demand for hardware, for these systems through businesses, would quickly dry up.

I do know that there is a very small sliver of the SGI Systems market that's based on appliances that were manufactured around SGI systems. By that I mean textile looms, medical Imaging, computer vision systems, or volumetric rendering for oil and gas exploration, etc . These were software or giant manufacturing systems where they were designed to be run by these computers. Now of course those appliances are now several decades of years old, it's nearly impossible to know how many of these appliance type systems have been scrapped by now but who's still using what and whether due to hard times or just the lack of need a business is still using 25+ years old appliances on their manufacturing floor or the like which happened to require one of these SGI computers to run its little brain.

I assume an SGI parts dealer today is equivalent to a car dealership trying to do business and sell cars with only what's left in the dealer's building and whatever used cars come through the door.

We can only hope that they know not to just dump their inventory and to at least put out a notice to their clientele or websites like yourself that if they're looking to go out of business they have one final catalog push and that's our opportunity to try to get what we can. I can tell you that for things like high-end model graphics cards for SGI Systems it's gone incredibly dry in the past three years and that's no accident.

Also you don't talk about the personal age of many of these dealers. Most of them were around while SGI was still in business. So we're talking at least 1990's. At some point what's the knowledge of 30+ year-old systems worth to the general population and with the scarcity of parts and demand being whatever it is prices have to rise and revaluation must take place as currency inflation takes hold of our nation. So we all talk about how systems used to cost blah blah blah now they cost yada yada. Same is true on the dealer catalog.

The other point I will get to has to do with that the fact that the dealers I know never transitioned into repair shops, by that I mean board level repair shops not just part cannons. So as the hobby has gone from a bunch of old used junk parts that just get hoarded & thrown away to a total lack of parts that now need to be curated and cleaned and repaired that's not what those dealers set out to do and that's not perhaps in their skill set especially at their respective personal ages.

I see SGI collecting going the same way as NeXT computer collecting: fewer websites, fewer systems around, what is around is buku bucks. And generally collectors simply trading amongst themselves and no more dealer websites but perhaps one or two collectors called themselves dealers due to the overflow of their inventory.

I think the day of the third-party SGI dealer is sunsetting mainly due to age and lack of fresh inventory but also to keep the doors open in a business you have to pay business prices for business level guarantees and warranties. That's not needed anymore except in very specific circumstances where most of these companies will be better off hiring internally to have somebody just keep their SGI systems going and internally horde the parts they need and just stop any kind of outside consulting relationship regarding these old computers.

However with dealers sunsetting I believe that the dawn of the repair shop is now starting. Hopefully we'll be open for business with enough repair services soon to make up for the initial fall of dealer part inventories. We'll be recycling parts instead of pulling parts out of a old warehouse and opening boxes to hope we have what we need.

My two cents.

[vishnu]

I'm sure most of us remember the "fire sale" SGI had with what remained of their stock of workstations, it was hot news at the time at nekochan. After that sale ended, my inside source at SGI told me they scrapped the rest of them. The recycler we use at my place of employ won't sell anything, they melt it all down for the precious metals, they scrapped all of our SGI machines, many hundreds of them. There hasn't been an SGI where I work for at least 15 years. And the software thing, we had a 6 DOF that we wrote to model the smart round for the 6-inch gun the Navy wants to use on their DDG 1000 cruisers, a whole passel of programmers all working on dual 600 MHz V12 Octane2s, but the problem they didn't like was having to lug them around for demonstrations to the customer and at trade shows, so when Linux got to the point where it had a fairly useable Open GL, they gave me an 8-hour authorization to estimate the workload to port the 6 DOF to a Linux laptop. Well, it was trivially easy, I ported the whole application in the time they gave me to investigate it. None of those Octane2s were ever used again, we installed a Slackware partition on everyone's desktop PC and that's how we've been doing all the development ever since. 

So that's why I bought my Octane2 in 2007, because the bastards at work took mine and had it melted down for the few grams of gold it contained, and I missed it.

At work, we never had any Tezros, but we had a million-plus dollar Visual Integration Lab that SGI custom built for us, I've got a picture of it around here somewhere. Now of course, melted down to zero.