I am building a new computer room (it is actually rather just a corner)
in our weekend house. There has been always a writing desk and for some
time my wife had a laptop here.
I have decided to make a workstation place the blue SGI IRIS Indigo
with a 1 5" LCD here. I have combined it with an original keyboard and
mouse (they are from my second Indigo and were used at the Siemens
Nixdorf and obviously are wnot perfect but I decided to keep the less
used peripherals in storage). The 15" LCD i s an old Compaq one. It is
1024x768 only but the LG1 graphics of the Indigo works only on that
resolution so it is ideal here.
I only have to cover the "Compaq" label and find a SiliconGrapgics logo
some where...
I have tried to make software of my two Indigos (one at home and one in
the weekend house) as identical as possible to make their use easier.
This blue one can actually do more because it has a newer MIPS R4000
CPU (in theory I can run Adobe PhotoShop 3.x here. I even have original
installation media. But I see no prospect in running such program on a
computer with 256 colors).
The main problem at the moment is communication. There is no Ethernet
around (and no WiFi) so the workstation is not connected by any mean. I
have only serial ports here (and the parallel, of course).
There is no need to move big amounts of data here, even a floppy would
be enough. The problem is that I still have no working SCSI floppy
drive (I have at least five of them but I still have not managed to
make a working one).
I also have a parallel ZIP drive but it is unreliable (it was even able
ho hang a Windows PC - on the old Slackware it worked without such
problems, though ) and there are no IRIX drivers for this thing. The
IRIX 5.3 (the one I have he re) cannot read VFAT-formatted ZIP media so
a SCSI ZIP would be also of little use (I used to have one).
Another way is a SD2SCSI board but I do not have one at the moment. I
have h ad an version 2 of this thing and it had issues with a SCSI
controller which is used by older SGIs (including the Indigo). I hope
that newer ones will be better. But I will see...
So at the moment the easiest way to move (at least text) files is to
transfer them to a Psion Series 3a. The (current!) p3nfs works even on
such old IRIX a d I have enough serial cables tor this purpose. I will
be slow but it seems to be easy...