neitzels irrelevant irregular intarweb notes

All those various SGI workstations require model-specific mounting sleds/cages for the harddisks. If you lack them, you can't add extra drives, but once you have them, swapping disks often becomes easy.

Last week I bought one missing sled and two SCA HDs on ebay for hiram, upgrading from 8+4 GB to 4+73+18 GB:

src 6 # df -h
Filesystem             Type  Size   use  avail  %use  Mounted on
/dev/root               xfs  4.1G  2.4G   1.7G   59%  /
/dev/dsk/dks0d2s7       xfs   68G  1.1M    68G    1%  /u2
/dev/dsk/dks0d3s7       xfs   17G  5.4G    12G   32%  /u3

The 73GB disk arrived empty, but the 18GB one came with a gracious set of presents:

src 7 # ls -F /u3
Avid_Matador_7.55/             Maya_Studio_Tools_11/
Avid_Media_Illusion_6.1/       Mosaic_2.2/
Avid_Softimage/                Photoshop_3.0.1/
Discreet/                      Planeten/
IRIX 6.5 Techpubs Library/     Shake_3.5/
IRIX-System-Tour/              Studio_Paint/
Licenses/                      Wavefront_Power_Animator_9.0/
MIPS_PRO/                      Wordperfect/
Maya_6.5/

Neat! An upgrade and missing parts for the IRIX C compiler I had on the smaller disk:

% a.out
hello world!

While doing all the disk juggling, I also recovered an IRIX system disk I had already forgotten about (the 8GB disk which will probably soon replace the 4GB one). I'm a happy camper!

Another visit to another Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VFCe). This time I toyed around with two tutorial boxes, toggling and tracing tiny test programs:

The IMSAI-8080 computer, courtesy of Guenther Loeffler:

The DCT11-EM pdp11 trainer board, courtesy of Bernhard Riedel:

Thanks to burnhard & sanne for hosting me!