If you ever have an opportunity play around with an SGI Irix box, an Indy or an Indigo.

I've got such opportunity. Now, every time somebody jokes about the "it's a UNIX system. I know that!" I have to explain that that file manager actually exists but still looks like sci-fi for mere mortals even today.

Irix was the most clean and integrated Unix for the desktop that I've ever used, even Sun didn't come close with their offerings.

The most shocking thing on the Suns back then compared to the SGIs was the mouse movement. While the SGIs had a smooth movement, Suns mouse ended up jumping dozens of pixels between refreshes.

Suns were not really designed for desktop use - they more or less aimed for the generic case. SGIs, however, were built to be experienced.

I remember the first time I used a Sun Workstation. From a PC background, I was impressed by the fact that the keyboard housed the beeper, the keyboard was a serial device and the bios equivalent had a built-in command line.

It is a shame that such a small set of features jumped from workstations to the PC.

The SPARCstation 1 was the first of the family to have more than a buzzer. Sun 3’s could only beep.

When I went to engineering school in 1995, most of the computers on campus were UNIX machines… Sun SPARC in the dorm, IBM AIX machines, a few others. But the fastest and shiniest by far were the SGI IRIX machines. They not only had a webcam built in, but ran at (IIRC) 200MHz. These all were my introduction to not only UNIX, but also the internet. I first got ImageMagick compiled and running on an Indy, and later, even played DOOM in the lab. <3

That webcam is the very reason why I wrote that first version of live streaming video on the web :)

It was the first camera that came with a computer and it had a pretty easy interface from C so that + a small embedded HTTP server and we were off to the races.

The funniest bit to me is still that people simply would not believe they were looking at a live image from the other side of the world. More than once I had to go in front of the cam and wave at people or show them some tekst :)

Eventually I automated that by putting a remote controlled fan + light (and a mobile of paper cranes) in front of it, but then people would claim that I was faking it. Tough crowd :)

Wow! I’m just a casual HN user but I find it genuinely cool that people as accomplished as yourself post here.

I went from an Amiga at home to an Indy at university (my uni got a massively got deal from the SGI distributor to outfit a couple of the computer science labs; nothing like rows of Indy's placed next to tired old Sun terminals white monochrome screens to make SGI look like the hot new thing), and while I never particularly liked Irix, it certainly felt closer to "home" in a way that Windows or even Linux didn't at the time.

I had an SGI Indy on my desk, back in 1997 or so. Definitely a fun machine. I remember the web cam, and doing full video conferencing (and bandwidth hogging most of a T1!)

I can beat that :) We were bandwidth hogging the transcontinental backbone to the point that I got a testy email from the maintainers that they were going to block port 2047 in a couple of days so if I wanted to act it had better be quick. That's how we ended up with an office in Canada (300 meters from Front 151 with a nice fat fiber).

What this kind of UNIX systems have versus Linux, is that when you develop an application for a SGI Irix, you get a full stack of frameworks and every Irix is the same experience.

Me neither, because Linux is not an experience of combined hardware and software, and every couple of years everything gets rebooted because reasons.