[rescue] Identifying SGI in picture for interests sake

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 
> > > All kidding around aside, Windows NT did at one time run on MIPS
> > > hardware.
> >
> > But not SGI Mips hardware.  At least not any public release of NT.
> 
> Public release of NT, but not a public release of the SGI hardware.  SGI
> had NT 3.5 running on an R4400 Indigo2 that had the necessary system
> board and firmware alterations to make it little-endian.  They used some
> crappy EISA video card to provide a framebuffer.


The console for the desktop sGI machines is called ARCs. As in Advanced
RISC Computers, as in the same group of companies that were behind things
such as EISA, and of course NT.

In theory SGI used to market the Indigo machines, as IRIX and NT capable.
With NT as some sort of upgrade (ugh..). Which looks the same as today's
situation in which SGI offers MIPS machines with Itanium as some sort of
upgrade.

And for those folk who don't know it yet. NT was acually developed on
MIPS... the early research versions of the OS had not a single x86 line.
It was basically a port of some of the core ideas of VMS to an open
platform (which was not yet defined, hence the hardware abstraction in
the code)... at that point MIPS and M$ worked together and produced the
magnum reference plaftform that the ARC people were supposed to use as the
new PC. However DEC and SGI already had their MIPS lines, so ARC was
modified to run on SGI and TurboChannel machines...

...everyone knows what happened next.