• will_a113@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Had they been real at the time they would have shipped with a 30-lb NiCad battery that provided 10 minutes of power and set your pants on fire.

    • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      5 months ago

      Worth it imo, no 90s PC laptop would let you do real-time graphics work or whatever

      They probably could have figured out something less power-hungry tbh, the MIPS processors of the time weren’t so bad compared to PCs

      The issue is in all the support circuitry and especially those huge SCSI hard drives that spin at like 10K rpm lol

      My Indigo 2 gets pretty warm

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    In the early 2000s, in return for a favor, I got my hands on an SGI O2. And then did nothing with it.😅 It was too slow and I didn’t have any idea of what do with it. But I finally owned an SGI. It was a very pretty paperweight.

    • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      5 months ago

      That’s soo cool

      Were you running IRIX on it? Idk how well IRIX ran on those machines by the early 2000s but I guess not very fast

      I guess they aren’t all that useful today but I’m just kinda a MIPS stan for some reason (world’s first successful RISC architecture, aged way better than SPARC lol)

      I will probably never get to see an O2 in person…

      • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        Yep, ran Irix super slow. I didn’t have anything else to run on it as this was right around when broadband came into my area., and while there were plenty of warez sites, downloading niche stuff wasn’t as easy to find. One of the coolest things about it that surprised me was the whole thing was modular. (Remember this was 20 something years ago.) There was a little lever or something on the back and you could just slide out the motherboard module and other stuff for upgrades.

        Sadly, I think it ended up in the trash when I went nomadic back in 2010. Might be in a closet somewhere at my parents, but I think I remember have a long emotional struggle over putting in the dumpster.

    • PaX [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
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      5 months ago

      PC microarchitecture is RISC now

      Everything is RISC now outside of weird old microcontrollers still in use but that doesn’t tell you much about the actual substance of whatever is being described as RISC

      I like MIPS for being a (mostly) clean and simple implementation of RISC. MTI tried some very interesting ideas out for a while (superpipelining, delay slots, using optimizing compilers rather than making machine code easy to write for people), and while a lot of these failed or were abandoned, many of them just became common practice