Sometimes, my office looks like Ali Baba's cave. On the day I took these pictures, you could find here one PC (not so fun...) and two MIPS computers (SGI Indigo 1 and 2) and one HP/PA station.

SGI Indigo 1

Thanks to Jean-Baptiste Yunès for preserving this venerable computer. First, a general view:

This is indeed SGI stuff (a.k.a Silicon Graphics):

A mouse:

Front view

Rear view, with various ports: keyboard and mouse (PS/2), serial console (1 and 2), network (AUI), video (one VGA and one SGI/Sun specific connector), scsi, ...

Another rear view, with the AUI<->RJ45 adaptor

The front panel can be easily removed, leading to 3 zones: power supply / disks / circuits.

The original system disk, scsi 500Mb, still containing Irix 6.2

Let's now open the door protecting the circuits (still without any screwdriver). We now discover two boards: the motherboard on the left and the video-card on the right.

Still without any tool, the motherboard can be pulled outside the box

View of the RAM sticks and the heat sink hiding the MIPS R4000 CPU.

The CPU is in fact mounted on a small auxiliary board. Beneath it, you can see the round system battery (Tadiran TL-5186) that we had to unsolder and change in order to boot the computer. The issue is described here, and I managed to find a compatible replacement battery (a Sonnenschein SL-340) in a Parisian shop.

As soon as the CPU board is removed, the view on the battery is better:

Say hello to the video-card

Two screenshots of Irix 6.2 (hello J.B.!)

Finally, a few external links concerning this machine:

www.irisindigo.com

SGI Indigo 2

First, a big thanks to Enguerrand Catillon, for having provided this machine

So here is an Indigo 2, whose color is in fact ... Turquoise, not Indigo:

A small detour to the SGI logo:

Front view:

On top of the box, the ex-owner had noticed the MAC and IP address

The front panel can be removed, leading to free space meant for internal cdrom- and hard-drives.

Rear view, with ports for keyboard/mouse (PS/2), serial consoles (1 and 2), networks (AUI and RJ45), parallel, scsi. No VGA connector, but only a specific one for SGI/Sun.

Let's now open the beast. On the left: extension cards (EISA) with their own fan on the front. All these cards seem to form the video card (see below). In the middle, below the cdrom-drive space, one can discern the heat sink of the CPU through a grid. On the right: power supply and space for the hard-drives.

Close view of the central zone, with its RAM sticks. The CPU under its grid is visible on the far right of the first picture. Another SGI logo on the orange ribbon.

Still the same zone.

In the middle of the previous picture, a chip worths a zoom. It's a "watchdog", meant to trigger a particular maneuver (often a reboot) when the computer is stuck. Closer view of the cool logo on this chip:

Finally, let's look at the left zone, with the extension card. On the side views, notice the four levels of EISA cards. According to the rear connectors, it seems that all these four levels are forming the video-card (EXtreme GU1). Based on the size of the stuff, one can guess that this video-card is quite feature-rich! Probably native 3D via IrisGL or OpenGL.

Control Data CDC4330

While making the two previous SGI machines fit for use, I learned that J.M.Moreno was still having two other MIPS machines in the server room of the Computer Science Department of my university. Nicknamed floreal and thermidor, they are both Control Data (CDC) 4330, which is in fact a re-branding of machines named MIPS Magnum 3000 made by the original MIPS company. The processor is a MIPS R3000 at 25Mhz, coming along about 40Mb of RAM. Two systems can run on such antiquities:

First, the native system, EP/IX, which is a proprietary Unix, specific to Control Data. The name is quite modest: EP/IX = Enhanced Performance unIX. This O.S. seems to have had a really restricted spread: it's now really hard to find any documents about it on the Net. It's based on RISC/os, another confidential Unix (not to be confused with RiscOS of Acorn), and is a sort of hybrid between a 4.3BSD and a SystemV. I've now a copy of the system disks, including man pages. Moreover, Moreno still has somewhere the complete paper documentation, that might someday be scanned automatically. Contact me in case of interest.
I've also made a quick test indicating that NetBSD can also run on these machines, when using the mipsco port. Beware, it seems that the activity on this port has been null in the past years. Anyway, it still works, at least a bit.

First, a general view:

On the left, the logo. On the right, a tape drive (150Mb in each tape).

Two pictures of the rear. In addition to power supply, one can find there a PS/2 port for keyboard, two serial port (DB9 and DB25, the latter used here for a console cable), a AUI network (here with its RJ45-adaptor), a port for a monochrome display, and finally a external scsi port (here with its terminator). Color display was planned through a extension card, not present here.

After opening the box, appear: a voluminous power supply (on the N-W), the tape drive (on the N-E), which is in fact above the system harddrive, the scsi ribbon, with here a free internal connector, used normally by a second internal harddrive in the S-E corner.

Let's have a closer view of the S-E corner. Up one can see RAM sticks. In the middle: CPU and FPU, in the middle of small chips with a nice "∫dt" logo. Notice that it was still possible at that time to operate a naked processor, without any heat sink or fan.

Zoom view: the processor is indeed a MIPS R3000, with a R3010 FPU.

Last detail, the MIPS logo on the motherboard confirms that the core of this machine comes from MIPS Computer Systems Inc, whereas Control Data has only made the final building (or maybe just replaced the front logo ?).

Off-topic: when replacing the dead second harddisk, I struggled a lot before finding the datasheet of the "new" replacement disk, so let's place here a backup of this datasheet (HP C4290), just in case. In particular, this is most useful when changing the SCSI ID via jumpers.

Misc. Mips

When installing free systems (NetBSD and/or Linux) on these MIPS machines, the main issue is the lack of support of the video-cards (respectively LG1 and EXtreme GU1 on the two Indigo). Luckily, Roberto Di Cosmo has provided me two cables allowing to send the console of each Indigo to the serial port of a PC. On the SGI side, the serial connector is similar to PS/2, but with 8 pins, and seems to be common with some old Apple cables. On the PC side, one can find a classic DB-25. A new life for these cables, after being used to link an Apple Macintosh and a french Minitel !

When playing with the regular video output of the Indigo 2, one can either use the huge SGI screen, or connect the Indigo to a standard VGA screen via the following adaptor (thanks to J.M.Moreno):

Finally, it was slightly inaccurate to say in introduction that there were two MIPS machines in my room this day. Indeed, the wifi access-point below is in fact a respectful MIPS computer, with probably as much computing power as the previous SGI's. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem possible to hack this particular model and install a free system on it. But maybe will I encounter some day a less reluctant wifi stuff ! Or a PlayStation 2 of motivated students ?

HP/PA 712/60

No I'm not a MIPS-centric guy: a non-MIPS strange machine has also ended in my office. It's a HP/PA, coming from a time where every big computer brand had its own line of processors and its own proprietary Unix. For Hewlett-Packard, this lead to HP/PA and HP/UX. This machine, dating from the founding of my lab PPS, has now two interests:

First, it's one of the rare machines able to run the revolutionary NeXTstep system. By the way, NeXTstep is still installed on the hard drive and functional.
In addition, along with MIPS, ARM and a few others, HPPA is an exotic platform still supported by Debian (for how long ?). One can use it in particular for testing the portability of a Linux program.

A few links

The OpenPA website contains in particular a description of the 712/60, as well as some pages about NeXTstep and Linux on this kind of machines.
Debian on HPPA
A few pages on NeXTstep: the one of Wikipedia, the one of Eric Lévénez.

General view of the machine:

The logo:

Under the cover. On the left, the power supply. Top: the motherboard. Bottom: harddrive and floppy-drive, surrounded by ... polystyrene!

Closer views of motherboard. One can discern the heatsink of the processor, the RAM sticks, the system battery (not solded this time!), and a extension card, filled with memory chips(?).

The harddrive, outside its polystyrene packing. Note the width ! At that time, this was mandatory for disks of respectable capacity (1Gb).

The rear and its different ports: