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SGI Announces MIPS and IRIX End of Production

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the end-of-an-era dept.

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."

4 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Too bad - MIPS was pretty by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Interesting
    My computer architecture class textbook was based on MIPS, and after messing around with 68k and x86 assembler for years, its assembler was like a breath of fresh air. It had a truly elegant design, or so I thought, and it's a shame to see it die.

    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?
  2. FOSS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think they should release IRIX under the GPL and let the community maintain it!

    1. Re:FOSS by Burdell · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The Alpha and Tru64 Unix are going away first. The last order date for a new AlphaServer is October 27, and (despite earlier Compaq and HP promises and guarantees) Tru64 and its related technologies die with the Alpha.

  3. Re:Pick an OS with staying power by jgrahn · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I feel sorry for the person that picks an OS dependent on a corporation for its existence. When there is only one "Sun" to nourish your OS "ecology" it is much more likely to wither away - eventually. I picked an popular open source OS for this very reason. RedHat may die but it will take a unprecedented disaster to also kill off Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware (especially Slackware), SUSE Linux, etc.. My intellectual investment is safest with Linux.

    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.