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SGI Announces MIPS and IRIX End of Production
ramakant writes "Considering the recent news regarding their dismal financial situation, it should come as no surprise that SGI announced end of production for MIPS based hardware and the IRIX operating system. From the article: "SGI launched the MIPS/IRIX family of products in 1988. Since then, this technology has powered servers, workstations, and visualization systems used extensively in Manufacturing, Media, Science, Government/Defense, and Energy. After nearly two decades of leading the world in innovation and versatility, the MIPS IRIX products will end their general availability on December 29, 2006." IRIX has always been my favored OS, and I'll be sad to see it gone. Hopefully my O2 will survive for many years to come."
204 items found for SGI.
Good times for collectors.
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Irix itself wan't that much worse than any other *nix of the same time period, but none of the varied tools, 3D bells & whistles that SGI bolted on were designed with security in mind. The only way to avoid getting hacked into was to remove it all before connecting it to the net, but once you removed it there was little point in buying one.
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IRIX is System V-based, and thus probably encumbered with SCO nastiness... I wouldn't expect it to be open sourced. Perhaps the parts that were developed by SGI could be, though. They already released XFS under the GPL, for instance.
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I'm sure they'll continue to teach MIPS assembly for many years to come simply because it's the easiest to teach and learn. SGI's dropping of MIPS won't matter since every computer-organization student is emulating it with SPIM on more common architectures, anyway.
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I always remember talking to some vendor at a usenix conference a few years after the birth of IRIX. We were talking about the relative benefits of SunOS (Solaris as it is now) versus IRIX. The guy said that using IRIX compared to SunOS was like riding a motorbike compared to driving a car. "It's fast, it's a rush, it's more fun than you can possibly imagine - but it's easy to fall off - and when you do it hurts a lot more!"...that pretty much says it all.
I spent a large fraction of my most productive years sitting in front of a million dollar computer with IRIX in my face. It was pretty good - but with SGI's market share shrinking and Linux getting so mature, it makes sense for them to dump the hideous cost of maintaining an entire OS by themselves. For SGI, it's a good decision in desperate times.
We split from using SGI to off-the-shelf PC/Linux about 5 years ago - about as soon as nVidia's graphics got good enough for our needs. A PC costs about 1% of an SGI with similar horsepower...QED.
As for MIPS, the equation is the same one Apple had to face down. Performance = Horsepower per CPU / Price per CPU -- and whilst your own solution can win on horsepower, you can't beat the price of whatever is made in the largest quantities...and it's the same deal as with IRIX - when you have to cut costs, designing your own CPU isn't the smart way to go.
Sad - but inevitable.
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To be serious for a moment, the 6502 series (which included the 6507 and 65C02) was an excellent processor architecture that was incredibly easy to learn on. Its small instruction set, focus on 8 bit instructions, and logical segmenting made it popular both in real usage (Commodore 64, Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari 8-bit computers, Apple II, BBC Micro, etc.) AND in teaching.
Just about anyone can learn to program it by reading the documentation. It's so simple, it can even replace BASIC as a first language. (Although, you might have a bit of diffculty doing "Hello World" unless you understand the hardware you're programming for.)
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Consolidation of operating systems is not good for computer science. Variety increases knowledge just as travel expands the mind. Everything is heading for the day when there is one primary OS on one primary HW platform. Let's hope that creativity spawns many new creations.
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I for one teach an undergraduate Assembly course in the Spring, and I intend to continue using SPIM in the class.
I'm not sure where the logic for something like this comes from. Like there is an infinite ammount of people who will work on every project ever abandoned. If IRIX was so wildly popular, I doubt SGI would stop working on it. I'm sure there's lots of useful code in there, but I'm also sure it's littered with stuff that has a patent on it as well. SGI is still a company that seeks to survive (I would assume), and isn't doing so well. They are in no position to work on figuring out licence issues to put IRIX under the GPL.
Well this is the first of the old school Unix's to fall that I can think of. AIX and Solaris will probably be last. The ones maintained by Hewlet-Compaqard will be next in line after the death of SCO derivatives.
``It seems innovators, the "product guys", have a danger of being overrun by companies with more agressive marketing. The technology lovers, the hackers, don't always make it in a world run by economics.''
Nor do those who price themselves out of the market.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
oh, we should all be sorry for people who chose mvs or vm/cms in the last few decades? SunOS 1.0 was released in 1982, and today we have SunOS 5.10 aka Solaris 10. we'll have to see if there's Linux distros in 24 years before we can really pass judgements on longevity compared to Sun's stuff. BSD is still widely used too, and fifteen or more years older than GNU/Linux distros depending on how you look at things, so I'd say any BSD based stuff has even more safety than Linux (and Linux keeps borrowing good stuff from it and verse vice)
MIPS was great and still has life left in it. However ARM has been bulldozing its way through recently in the higher embedded markets where MIPS was strong. Even AMD sold Alchemy eventually.
The embedded market was getting crowded, which is a good thing. The survival of the fittest gave us ARM instead of us being stuck with assembly codes like the PIC and x86.
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X86!
using the X86 to teach assembly language is like using Perl to teach object oriented programing.
No need to move off MIPS, just use an emulator.
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Uh, they did, and that is what killed them.
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It's just Another UNIX System Vr4 variant that runs on SGI MIPS hardware. You get all the same and more in Solaris (swap MIPS for SPARC) since it had much more R&D. You also get the same and more in Linux, but without the official Sys Vr4 codebase.
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It's quite true in a sense, though of course it depends on your definition of "great". If "great" is just someone who is very good at his/her job, then yes, you can be a "great" programmer without ever using Lisp. However, if you define "great" to mean somebody who really has a higher-level perspective about programming as a whole, then I'd have to say that you can't be "great" without experiencing Lisp or something like it.
Put simply, different languages represent different areas in the design space of programming languages. C represents one area, C++/Java/C# another set of closely-grouped areas, Ruby another, Python another, etc. Lisp represents a very large, and to many people used to C++/Java/etc, very novel portion of the design space, as does ML and its kin. A truely great programmer, then, must not only be proficient in the usage of a specific tool that represents a specific point in the design space, but must have a perspective of the whole design space. He must be able to look at specific solutions, and realize when they are just instances of a higher-order, more generalized principle. The only way to gain that perspective is to explore the design space, and mastering Lisp is a way to explore a very large and unique part of that space.
There's a saying that "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail". This refers to a general notion that our tools limit the ways in which we think about solving problems. Let me give you a concrete example. Lisp has a feature called multi-method dispatch, in which the target of a polymorphic call is decided by the types of more than one of the arguments. To someone who has only ever used a language with single-dispatch (ie: C++/Java/C#'s virtual methods), the very idea of using multiple-dispatch to solve a particular problem never even comes to mind. He makes due with what he has, using techniques like the "visitor pattern", and sits content thinking that this is the best he can do. Somebody who knows Lisp, on the other hand, might still have to use the visitor pattern (because his boss forces him to use Java), but he'll realize that its just a way to do double-dispatch in a single-dispatch language, and that increased understanding of the nature of the solution will help him write better code.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The MIPS core that is used in the TiVo Series2 systems is a Broadcom design, licensed by Broadcom from MIPS Technologies. I see no reason that that would jeopardize Broadcom's licensing arrangement... though I could be wrong.
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Um, at least Solaris makes great efforts to make sure that an application that runs on Solaris.X will be able to be transfered seemlessly to Solaris.X+1. Thats one of the reasons there's all this legacy staff lying aroung in various directories. If you look at Solaris man pages, there's usually a note about whether the interface is stable and whether it will remain in the next releases. Even the output of commands tends to be relatively stable across releases. And of course there are cases of drivers (for example network cards) that are compatible across Solaris.8,9,10 because they were written according to the guidelines. Even the migration to 64 bits (on SPARC) has been done a decade ago. So, if you invest on it, chances are that your software will probably be able to be transfered unchanged to the next version, when it is around.
Linux is great, don't take me wrong, but in what way your intellectual investment is safe, when the entire landscape is in continuous flux? I mean, APIs are changing back and forth, kernel modules come and go across minor kernel releases, each distro has its favorite places where commands and files are placed. Not to mention the 32 to 64 bit migration which is in a terrible mess. This is not MHO, read July's Linux Journal editorial and laugh about it.
The truth is, I don't think you are not interested in any kind of intellectual investment, you are just betting on a horse because someone told you that in the end there can be only one. Well, guess what, "they" 've been saying the same since 1985, and today there is still Windows,Linux,all the BSDs,Solaris,AIX,HPUX etc etc. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and, really, it is great to have such a diverse ecology.
(Although I may have sounded harsh throughout the post, I want to stress that this is all just friendly advice -- kind regards)