SGI O2 in 2022
==============
I am still using my SGI O2. But not often. Once it was my main home
workstation (2005-2018) but now I have an OpenPOWER workstation (the
Raptor Blackbird) for most of tasks.
The O2 is still good enough for some terminal stuff (stuff like Gopher,
Lynx), for emulation of even older computers and for development for
them and for communication with some of these machines, too. Of course,
I can write (and run) C programs, Octave scripts and other similar
things here and the LaTeX is also usable. Most of my stuff is tiny so
it run well here. For large computations I of course have to use the
Blackbird.
And the O2 still can play some MP3 streams so on-line radio
stations are still available. The original XMMS (with a bunch of the
IRIX-related patches) is still a thing.
The funny thing is the fact that I often use the DOSbox for
retrocomputing tasks. So I emulate the x86 computer on a RISC
workstation to be able to communicate with the Z88, the PSIONs and so.
The original DOS-based utilities are often simpler and more reliable
than modern GUI tools (and these modern tools are sometimes hard to
compile on the IRIX). OF course, some native tools are nice (like the
J-Pilot and other palm-related tools).
The problem is that WWW and the HTTPS. Most of the available browsers
have issues with the HTTPS and some "modern" ones (most probably there
is just the NetFront port) have limited features so they are refused by
many WWW sites anyway. So the only reliable World Wide Web services are
the 68k.news [1], FrogFind [2] and the few remaining HTTP servers [3]
(the IRIXNET [4] has a HTTP-only version of its forums, for example).
Fortunately there is still the Gopher (with gophepedia and other
services).
References:
[1]
http://68k.news
[2]
http://frogfind.com
[3]
http://technomorous.eu
[4]
https://irixnet.org
