eBay: Very Clean Personal IRIS in Indiana

[SiliconClassics]

Seller is asking a hefty price considering that it doesn't even power up, but how often do you see a clean, complete PI on eBay anymore? Aside from some damage to the rear plastic fan grill it looks almost perfect.

[jan-jaap]

Looking at the ports on the E-module, that's a 4D/2x, not a 4D/3x.

[smj]

Ah, I thought that was going to be the $1,200 + S&H unit I spotted on ePay over the weekend.

I had just managed to forget the details of the last Craigslister with a PI to flake out on me. Now you've re-traumatized me!

[mopar5150]

That is a beautiful piece and the price does not sound that bad. Nice plastics and sheet metal are always the hard to find part of this hobby.

[Raion-Fox]

I sold a PI for $100... and gave away another in 2013/2015 each

[pentium]

The is like the fourth or fifth PI I've seen show up for sale anywhere in the last six months. Why the sudden resurgence?

[Intuition]

I'd love to see what a PI user experience is like. Though I know it probably isn't that capable overall, to see what the older Irix and software was like on it would be fun for a day or so. I've almost bought a Iris Indigo on Ebay a few times just to see what the first wave SGI experience was like. BUT,, then I think... the o2 is about as slow as I can handle now. So why go back?

[SiliconClassics]

Whoa - already sold. Anyone here the proud new owner?

[uunix]

I have a qic tape with NetFlash backup tool on it. Were they called qic tapes?

[jan-jaap]

I'd love to see what a PI user experience is like. Though I know it probably isn't that capable overall, to see what the older Irix and software was like on it would be fun for a day or so. I've almost bought a Iris Indigo on Ebay a few times just to see what the first wave SGI experience was like. BUT,, then I think... the o2 is about as slow as I can handle now. So why go back?

A 4D/35 is technically largely identical to an Indigo R3000, except for the VME slot, the GR1.5 vs. XS/XZ/Elan graphics. That, and it's brown skins covering 35kg of solid steel. If you can find all the pieces you can run IRIX 3.3.2 on a Personal IRIS, but there's essentially zero software available and porting is a pain in the behind due to the pre-ANSI system headers. There's no source code out there to show off the NEWS interface.

With IRIX 4.0 and X11 it's more usable, and with sufficient RAM (at least 32MB) you could even run IRIX 5.3 on it.

[gijoe77]

I'd love to see what a PI user experience is like. Though I know it probably isn't that capable overall, to see what the older Irix and software was like on it would be fun for a day or so. I've almost bought a Iris Indigo on Ebay a few times just to see what the first wave SGI experience was like. BUT,, then I think... the o2 is about as slow as I can handle now. So why go back?

I ended up dedicating my Indigo2 Extreme as an IRIX 5.3 coff system, purely to run the oldest software I can get my hands on for that authentic 1993 user experience. I'm not sure what the next "level down" would be - IRIX 3 or 4, but I do think it would be cool to see both in action - maybe someone can find or make some video's and we can get our fix in

edit:
uffa! Is NeWS black and white? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
holy moly that authentic 1988 user experience perhaps would be fun for a day or so afterall