unsigned long geek = random();

On Monday I finally acquired my first Silicon Graphics machine – an O2. It cost me only R500 (about $85) for a machine with a 150Mhz R10000 CPU, 128M RAM, 2×4G SCSI drives and a 2G tape drive. It also came with IRIX 6.3 and 6.5 media, which is great.

Unfortunately none of the open source operating systems support SGI machines well – NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have ports, but none have full hardware support or have stability problems. I’ll therefore be using IRIX for the moment (yay! /usr/etc/ifconfig here I come!).

Yesterday I bought a 10,000 rpm 18G Fujitsu SCA drive from Bridgeport to replace the internal 4G drive. I’m still looking for more RAM (preferably another 4×128M DIMMs to take the machine up to 640M). Unfortunately the RAM is rather pricey, even on eBay.

Some useful SGI links:

• Nekochan – be sure to check out the forums
• O2 information at Obsolete
• FutureTech SGI Technical Advice and Data – very comprehensive

For those interested: hinv output.