Indy

[ehowton]

Its been years since I fired up an SGI and that was when I installed an Indigo 2 and never used it again. The manual package selection and dependency resolution was insane. But somehow this little Indy seems lighter. And faster.

I found a year-old post on the Vintage Computer Facebook group I belong to and reached out as he was interested in selling them. Much to my surprise, he still had them a full year after advertising them, and I agreed to pick them up. In Saint Louis. It just so happened he was coming to KC in a couple of weeks and would bring them with him, halving my 16-hour round trip drive to just eight. The game was afoot!

He arrived in a freaking Astin Martin (black sports car, he'd texted when he arrived at the predetermined spot. I got a working Indy, a non-working Indy, and a half populated Challenge (server version of the Indy workstation). I'd already been researching SCSI-to-SSD configurations and was pleasantly surprised to find people were booting their SGIs with SD cards from a SCSI add-in. Thing is, my Raspberry Pi boots from SD, and while unremarkable, not sexy. Of course many of the so-called solutions were just under $80, and that seemed steep for a 100Mhz processor on a 30-year old machine. But I did find a 50-pin "fast" SCSI-to-SAS adapter. And SATA can fit on SAS, its just runs at an amazeballs 6GB/sec instead of the SAS's amazeballs 12GB/s but again, we're talking 40MB/sec fast-SCSI. And SATA SSDs are cheap. And if it didn't work I could always put a 15k SAS drive in there. And the adapter was only $4. HELL YEAH.

So I spent overnmight and most of the day configuring it, playing with it, admiring it, and of course manually resolving all those goddamn software dependencies. But its the most fun I've had with an O/S in a long time. And my 64GB Memory Core i7 Mac Mini arrives tomorrow. I think I'll place it atop the Indy :)