I wished that they FOSS’d IRIX when they pulled it off the market. It was the most mature UNIX for MIPS-based desktops. That seemed irrelevant to most people but I knew it might come in handy. The Octeon III processors from Cavium were the first to confirm that with 48 cores with most stuff like networking, compression, and crypto accelerated with dedicated hardware. A Linux or IRIX desktop with some of those might fly.
They probably had 3rd-party code in it, though, that prevented FOSSing. Plus didn’t care.
SGI got bought by Rackable some years back (Rackable, I know…). Then Rackable got bought by someone else. I consider myself lucky that SGI released XFS source. I would love for some of the more awesome bits to have been open sourced, too.
I was about to suggest emailing the new owner about FOSSing it. With your comment, I’ve lost what little hope remains of that. I mean, just look at the VMS situation. Ridiculous…
Not just XFS. Also that whole-program optimising compiler. As part of Linux move, they also contributed improvements to the kernel for NUMA and such that might be benefiting multicores or big servers today.
Back in the early/mid-90s, Magic Desktop/Interactive Desktop was, other than the NeXSTEP GUI, IMHO the best desktop environment available for Unix systems. Even on low end hardware it was responsive, it worked well and it looked pretty good too. Far better than horrible CDE…
I wished that they FOSS’d IRIX when they pulled it off the market. It was the most mature UNIX for MIPS-based desktops. That seemed irrelevant to most people but I knew it might come in handy. The Octeon III processors from Cavium were the first to confirm that with 48 cores with most stuff like networking, compression, and crypto accelerated with dedicated hardware. A Linux or IRIX desktop with some of those might fly.
They probably had 3rd-party code in it, though, that prevented FOSSing. Plus didn’t care.
SGI got bought by Rackable some years back (Rackable, I know…). Then Rackable got bought by someone else. I consider myself lucky that SGI released XFS source. I would love for some of the more awesome bits to have been open sourced, too.
HP owns SGI now
I was about to suggest emailing the new owner about FOSSing it. With your comment, I’ve lost what little hope remains of that. I mean, just look at the VMS situation. Ridiculous…
Not just XFS. Also that whole-program optimising compiler. As part of Linux move, they also contributed improvements to the kernel for NUMA and such that might be benefiting multicores or big servers today.
So, they were helpful in a few ways.
Back in the early/mid-90s, Magic Desktop/Interactive Desktop was, other than the NeXSTEP GUI, IMHO the best desktop environment available for Unix systems. Even on low end hardware it was responsive, it worked well and it looked pretty good too. Far better than horrible CDE…