Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

My main workstation is a ThinkPad manufactured in 2009 (retrofitted with even older model's keyboard), and I have a stack of backup units, and shoebox of parts.

(It's now supplemented with a beefy GPU self-hosted server, and I can also use cloud servers.)

One thing you can do to keep old production computer hardware going is to stockpile your backup/parts units and individual parts now. Many times I've noticed how some old hardware I used to see a lot of on eBay has disappeared, or the little remaining is in much worse condition, or only available as a single example priced like a museum piece that sits on eBay for years. Some small parts seem to be available despite what I'd guess is low market demand, but entropy gets a lot of old gear (increasingly stuck in collections, discarded, worn out, etc.).

View on HN

Im slowly making my 500 MHz 4 Gb SGI fuel my main workstation. I added a sata card to replace the spinning rust, and a gigabit ethernet. Swapping out the fans and the PSU to silence it and Im throwing my Ryzen workstation into my closet.

Why use a 20 year old 500 Mhz dinosaur? Time. This machine can do everything I need (terminal, emacs, ssh, old modeling software that has a better GUI than any modern counter parts, etc) and cant do anything I should not do (browsing the internet)

I'd be very interested if you chronicle this somewhere. A part of me long wanted to do the same with an O2 workstation, but in more recent years it became much less tenable due to the modern Web (half the web is already broken in minor modern browsers like Firefox), modern languages (Rust? or even Python, now that half of its ecosystem is dependent on Rust by way of cryptograpy), and modern tools (I'd be fired for disuse of Slack, which isn't open-protocol so that it could be used with a portable client).

When Im done I might put an entry on sgi forums. Ill post a link on HN.

Just use the O2 as a very powerful "dumb" terminal that keeps you from wasting your time. Its a great little machine.

Neat. One thing I've wondered about SGI workstations especially: have you noticed any eBay deals on SGI add-ons that were once prohibitively expensive, but now very affordable because they're obsolete to the kind of people who used them?

(I occasionally window-shop vintage Sun gear like this, but SGI seemed to have more exotic unobtanium artifacts.)

I noticed that someone with a bunch of O2 parts seems to have finally given up and started lower the prices. I've bought a new CD driver cover (they break notoriously easily) and a long coveted 300mhz CPU upgrade. I haven't gotten around to installing them yet though. I haven't used the machine in about 12-15 years.

I probably should be keeping an eye out for maxing out my Octane and Fuel as well now before it is really too late.

You know, there's an after-market upgrade to 700 Mhz (and 4 Mb cache?) for lower speced O2 without using expensive SGI parts. Kinda hacky, but it seems to work.

If you google it you'll see what it is. I dont have an O2 so I dont remember the details.

EDIT:

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/o2cpumod.html

Depends why you want the machine. I doubt you want to re-live 90s TV editing, so all that stuff is out.

Full machines with graphics are expensive. Luckily I got my fuel for $200 back in '09. I scored a V12 from a broken machine at the time cheap.

Parts are generally cheap. At least for the Fuel, the community now knows which DELL or some other server parts are equivalent to the SGI branded ones (SATA or Gigabit cards) and a lot of stuff is useless (why care for a SCSI card?). RAM is cheap if you see this as largely a vanity thing.

Finally, if you're good at debugging X (Im not), an origin 300 is a great machine. I bought one but I have the fuel for X client (works great). If I understand the problem, around 2007-2008 something changed in X11 (Xorg??) that broke compatibility with the SGI for 3D graphics.

As far as i remember SGI 3D stuff was based on PEX and xorg decided to drop this extension around that time.

That's awesome! Thanks.

Very cool. Care to share more details on setup? What’s the power consumption like?

Clearly it doesn't keep you off hacker news. Haha.

But I would be very interested in pics, screenshots, and a rundown of your workflow if you have the time.

:D I was on my phone.

Seriously though, I never tried HN. Should work.

What is the current state of community support for SGI stuff and availability of hardware? I stopped following around the time of the demise of Nekochan.

I envy you.

Are you still using your SGI box with IRIX, or did you move to something more modern like NetBSD?

IRIX 6.5.30. I have a bunch of software that runs on it that I prefer to modern equivalents.

You actually being serious or snarky here ???.

A priest once advised me to just take people on their word; the cognitive load to second guessing them is not worth it.

> and cant do anything I should not do (browsing the internet)

I’m increasingly shifting towards that side of the fence, looking at the web browser as the gateway to a toxic waste dump.

Luckily, I’m not doing frontend stuff, so I can survive (and blossom even) without a running browser.

The computer “feels” empty and quiet that way, like it used to feel back in the day when the modem was off.

Is that, by chance, a T500 with the T60 keyboard swap? I ran with one of those for some time, before the lack of graphics horsepower (I think it had a Radeon 3650?) ultimately did me in.

If you're looking for another cool upgrade, I also did a 1920x1200 screen upgrade on mine. I wasn't able to find a Lenovo-native part, but I did find a pin-compatible screen out of a Dell mobile workstation that fit mostly perfectly, after sawing off some tabs with a Dremel.

Yep, T500 with the highest (stock) resolution display, with original T60 keyboards (not the Lenovo T500 keyboards that flex too much).

(While deciding what to move to after T60, I tried a T400, T400S, T420, T520, T420S, T500, and some others, until I decided I wanted Coreboot, and liked the T500 display aspect ratio.)

I'm good for high-res T500 displays, but if/when I upgrade to a slightly newer ThinkPad platform, I'm targeting 1920x1080, and I'll probably have to screen-swap those, because that res. is a stock option, but rare.

A hard part of preparing for hardware failures is knowing what things to get. I have spare power supplies and hard drives, but wouldn't know what else.

Yeah, this is one of the ways that entire spare units come in. Something on an old workstation breaks, you always have a spare of every part, tested together. (I actually just move the SSD/HDD to the spare, and then worry about repairing dead machine.)

Other than that, I can only guess. PSU and HDD is good idea. If you have an old industrial device that really needs floppies, buy them now, and also be looking into the retrofit options. For laptops, right now I've guessed at stockpiling keyboards, fans (but not the whole heatsink assembly FRU, just the fan part), backlight tubes, display inverter boards, AC adapters, the laptop-side AC adapter connector, HDD caddies and doors (often left out of replacements), upgrades for RAM and for faster/cooler CPUs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com