Comment by neilv
9 hours ago
You can use it as an SSH terminal. :)
In grad school, I ended up borrowing an old teal Indigo2, with graphics upgrade, that my research group had sitting around, to use from my dorm room, mainly as a terminal.
(I owned almost nothing in the world at the time, not even a computer, having shed my possessions in a "Gattaca" kind of way, of not saving anything for the swim back from grad school. But an SGI Indigo2 is more than powerful enough to be an SSH terminal, and my electricity use wasn't metered. And, unlike the laptops I'd borrowed, no one would want the Indigo2 back.)
Getting IRIX installed involved multiple installation tapes (or was it CD-ROMs?) that some kind person in the lab happened to still have.
An admin later offered to give me this Indigo2 that I was borrowing, but they first needed me to bring it back in for inventory. Around then, I'd finally built (or was about to build) a Linux box, and hauling the Indigo2 and its huge CRT anywhere was a chore without a car, and I'd soon be graduating, and moving away lightly. So I carted the Indigo2 back across campus, and left it for good. Hopefully it ended up with someone who preserved it, as the author here does.
In the mid-90s our CS department got a lab full of Indys, which undergrads weren't allowed to use until their 3rd year because those were the serious kit. We could only imagine how cool it would be to have Indigo2s to play with.
In about 1998 a friend gave me a Casio PDA (E-15?). It was surplus because it wasn't great, and sluggish. CPU was a close relative of the on those Indy workstations used.
In 2002 I was working for a visual effects shop in the Bay Area. Among the chaos of wires, Wacom tablets and GeForce cards in the IT bay were two large stacks of Indigo2 Maximum Impact workstations. The ones with the MIPS R10k CPU and fancy graphics option. We complained when we had to move them because they were so heavy, and nobody could be bothered to take them to e-waste.
I used an Indy with X11 forwarding for a while, I could run a modern Firefox from my Linux machine, which worked nicely. As much as it looked like it was running natively, it really wasn't, so downloads would end up on the other computer, and sound would also play remotely. Because I never throw anything away I still have a small bunch of these machines in the attic (apart from the Indigo they are all teal though) waiting for this kind of treatment, which have been super high on my to-do list.
Same for me circa 1993 in my uni a friend got a dumped vaxstation running Ultrix from the IT department, this was my first PC as I had no money at the time.
It had two stacked large PCB, the upper one was full of RAM chips totalling a whoping 8 MByte of RAM ;)