[rescue] Oracle making just a little harder to keep old machines in use

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Quoth Jonathan Patschke ...
> On Fri, 7 May 2010, Ian Finder wrote:
> 
> > I really miss Irix and SGI hardware a lot.
> 
> Same here.  Every new generation of hardware was novel and 
> impressive, the OS was rock-solid, and Indigo Magic was the 
> nicest desktop around before OS X matured.

Add me as another IRIX fanboi.  I miss some things more than others, but one
of my faves was the file manager.  Having an integral file contents display
was very, very handy.  
 
> > No joke, it actually torments me quite frequently that their that 
> > platform is gone forever, and there is now a Dell box under my desk.
> 
> At least you'll never have to get into a wrestling match with 
> inst again.

After about two dozen go-rounds over five years, I finally got so I could do
a whole-system install without throwing things, but inst was not SGI's best
idea.  It was the introduction to their products for many folks, myself
included, and it didn't make a good first impression.  

What made installations _much_ easier and faster was having an external SCSI
disk with all the SGI freeware, all the Neko freeware, the 6.5.22 update,
and the 6.5.30 update.  I'd install a base system, mount the external disk,
and the rest was a breeze.

Now I'll have to go dig out one of my remaining SGI machines ....

-Shel