So I’ve been very busy this year working, collecting and playing with my growing collection of SGI systems. My most interesting one to date is the Power ChallengeL that I obtained from an associate who found it destined for the trash at an NYC University. Â Picking up the Challenge from NYC. It was suprising…
Category Archives: RetroBattleStation
Dive into IRIX
I’ve been diving into IRIX lately, setting up both 5.3 on my Personal Iris and 6.5.22 on my Indigo. It’s been interesting unlearning 20 years of Linuxisms and embracing the IRIX. There is an interesting project going on called irisware which aims to resurrect a modern pool of open-source software for IRIX. Which is not…
Sparcbook 3
The Tadpole Sparcbook3 was dug up out of storage in time to submit it for the Reddit Portable Battlestation contest. Â This one came from a Craigslist buy at least a decade ago, and I promptly just stuck the whole box in storage. It came with a couple of CDROMS, batteries and accessories (scsi cable, 2…
SGI Indigo Elan
I’m in the middle of this one, but it’s booting from the SCSI2SD v6 and a totally minimal install of Irix is installed. More to come.  It’s a eBay surprise as it was listed as a R3K Indigo, but turned out to be a R4k with Elan Graphics installed. Not bad.    …
DEC Professional 350: Booting
I found the DEC Professional 350 in Ebay for just $150 and I considered a nice way to get a PDP-11 system that could at the very least run BSD— for a decent price. PDP-11s are not only expense but the peripherals are also expensive prone to issues and it’s difficult system to bootstrap let…