I acquired my Personal IRIS from a friend who had it sitting in his
basement. One of his first jobs had been programming conveyor belt
simulations on the machine, and when the company he was working for
upgraded, they gave him the PI.
Silicon Graphics released the Personal IRIS 4D/25 in late 1989. A message posted to several newsgroups talks of a demo given on Sep. 21, 1989, at the company headquarters.
For a machine built in the early 1990's, the Personal IRIS 4D/25 is a horse. Its R3K CPU runs at 20MHZ, and it has 32MB of RAM (16 slots of 2MB SIMMs). The 676MB hard drive is immense, and weighs more than any six hard drives today. My model is a super turbo (with a TG after the model number), which means it has 24bit color and drives the monitor at 1280x1024.
The box runs IRIX 4.0.5, which as far as I can gather was released around June of 1992 (this post is the first I can find where someone is actually running the release). It's remarkable to see how much the environment in such an old OS looks like the modern-day 4DWM desktops SGI still ships. Apps are much snappier than you might expect, though the choice in what to run is a little limited (there was never a release of Netscape for 4.0.5. Binary copies of Mosaic 2.4 are available).
My current setup connected the PI to my network via, of all things,
fiber. I didn't have a long enough coax cable laying around, so I
have a transceiver in the PI (which requires the cover off since
it sticks out too far) connected to a media convertor via four feet
of fiber, then ethernet running to the network. Ugly, but it works,
and I enjoy saying that I run fiber.
My current project is to get at least ssh running on the box so I can use it as a console, and hopefully at some point to get a more recent browser to compile.
2004-06-19:
I've ditched the fiber setup in favor of a more traditional RJ-45 ethernet transceiver. I found a 4.0.5 compiled version of sshd (1.2.27), so I've got that running now. My next project is getting sudo to compile.
hinv output
[dumont (eric@IRIS)-([Sat June 20 02:30PM])] ~: hinv 1 20 MHZ IP6 Processor FPU: MIPS R2010A/R3010 VLSI Floating Point Chip Revision: 2.0 CPU: MIPS R2000A/R3000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.0 On-board serial ports: 2 Data cache size: 32 Kbytes Instruction cache size: 64 Kbytes Main memory size: 32 Mbytes Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 0 Tape drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0: QIC 150 Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0 Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93A Graphics board: GR1.2 Bit-plane, Z-buffer, Turbo options installed