Just got my first SGI box

[TeamBlackFox]

Hey there!

I'm a longtime fanatic of vintage computers but I have never been able to find one in my budget. I got my big break just the other day, when I got an SGI Personal Iris 4D/35. I'm going to be getting it running soon, to join my fleet of servers and desktops I already have.

Anyone here use a Personal Iris and have any advice for a newbie? I'll be getting it running ASAP.

 

[NeXT]

Ooh! I didn't even think you could still find Pi's in the wild.
Well for starters the /35 was the fastest Pi they made. I'm on the other end and own a 4D/20 myself which has the slower CPU but uses standard 30 pin sticks of RAM. Your model uses SGI's proprietary memory modules which were also used in the first generation (R3000) of the Iris Indigo. I run Irix 4.0.5 myself but you have the faster hardware so give Irix 5.3 a try. IF you are to attach a monitor it needs to support Sync on Green. You will also need to have the keyboard and mouse plugged in (and I'm hoping you got those because they are proprietary and alternatives are expensive), otherwise the machine will automatically operate headless form serial port 1 (9600,8,n,1).
The machine will take ordinary SCSI disks (however the sleds are hard to come by if you're missing them) but because you and me are pre-ARCS PROM if you want to use a CD-ROM it needs to be one of the slightly older Toshiba drives that can be jumpered into a specific mode.

 

[TeamBlackFox]

Hi NeXT, nice NeXT cube in the photo there. I assume you own one? Lucky, I always liked the way those looked.

Luckily I have a huge SGI fan as a friend and coworker, so he'll be helping get it running. I have the 4D/35 SUPER TURBO version so it has VGA. I'll be taking it over to my friend's place to boot it up. I'd offer you my second SGI I picked up, a 4D/35 but its already claimed by my friend, plus I don't think it would survive shipment to Canada from the USA. It does look like the sleds are missing though and the guy I picked the two up from for $20 didn't have any extra equipment so I have a WTB thread out on Nekochan to hopefully get one soon. I'm new to System V, but I'm familiar with Linux (7 years experience) and learning BSD (only just exploring it).