Can SGI’s Enthusiast Community Bring IRIX Back to Life?
Today in Tedium: One of the nice things about many historic operating systems is that we’ve been able to dig into the legacy that was left behind to find the interesting details. Many of the UNIX-derivative operating systems are largely open-sourced today in one shade or another. The Berkeley Software Distribution, for example, gave birth to open-source options such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. And, of course, Linux is Linux. But UNIX System V, a commercial version first developed by AT&T in 1983, remains the one branch of UNIX being driven by still-active commercial descendants—though, many of its branches have admittedly withered over the years. (Apologies to the Tru64 UNIX users in our audience. Hope your DEC Alpha workstation is still going strong.) There was one major free-software variant based on System V, Sun’s OpenSolaris, but it was closed off when Oracle bought Sun in 2010 and reverted back to closed Solaris. (Those open roots live on in the form of illumos, also known as OpenIndiana.) But what if there was still a path forward for keeping some of these old operating systems alive? Today’s Tedium, in a follow-up to a 2018 piece we wrote about Silicon Graphics, has a little news to share about a budding project of interest to UNIX nerds. Hold onto your hats, IRIX fans. — Ernie @ Tedium Today’s GIF is a DNA render from the movie Jurassic Park. You might remember it from this scene.
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