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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."
Alpha, MIPS, and others - where are you now? x86-2^x is pretty much all that's left for general-purpose programming these days (although Sun might have something to say about that), and that's too bad. Kind of like how you can't be a great programmer without ever having seen Lisp, you can't be a great chip designer without ever having known something that doesn't run IA32 code.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I think they should release IRIX under the GPL and let the community maintain it!
This is UNIX! You're supposed to be able to take your ecology with you to Linux, or Solaris, or OpenBSD, or wherever. With some pain, admittedly---but little more pain than if you're migrating from, say, RedHat to Debian.
I think MIPS was the popular arch to learn asm on. Here at UMBC, MIPS is still what the assembly programming courses revolve around. In the mid 90s, SGI/IRIX was popular in (american, at least) universities. This course is pretty much one of the only reasons why we keep a few O200s around (including a 24-CPU Challenge XL... well, okay, it's now 16 CPUs, because we seem to be seeing one CPU board die each year). It's funny because back in the 90s, the Challenge XL was billed to faculty as a high-speed research computing server, which it was - at the time. Some of the old timers believe that's still is true today, probably because they just don't know better. 16x 200Mhz CPUs ain't all that, no matter what arch you're on.
Hopfully we can convince the CS dept to move their course off of MIPS so we can push these aging servers off the end of the loading dock. SPARC or x86/64 would be the alternatives here.
True, but we could still use technology driven companies like DEC, Sun and yes even SGI.
When left to their own devices most of the large computer companies (IBM, HP, Dell, even Intel, AMD, Cisco etc etc) do very little revolutionary or insightful things. They usually tread water with minor "improvements" until someone comes along and kicks them in the pants (see: IBM vs Apple, IBM vs DEC, Intel vs AMD etc etc) with some better technology.
If all we have left are the "big guys" where is the next revolution going to come from ?
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
You can run Irix binaries on NetBSD/sgimips. See http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2002/08/08/irix.ht ml for more information, and check out the NetBSD port's page at http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sgimips/.