In a bittersweet moment a week and a bit ago, I finally decommissioned my SGI R5K Indy. We got the machine in the summer of 1996, so it has been provided faithful, trouble-free service for just over ten years. That's impressive longevity, especially for the hard drives.

It was a pretty good machine when new, basically the top of the line of SGI's basic workstations; as a peon sysadmin, I was lucky to get it. I spent several years using it as my primary workstation and enjoying the various nifty SGI bits (including its video camera) before we moved from SGI servers to a PC and Linux environment; after that it lingered on in the background, still doing various bits and pieces.

(Even today, looking at it makes me feel nostalgic, a feeling which is helped by the distinctive case design and the SGI marbling on the monitor; SGI machines were never generic beige boxes. Even if the R5K Indy was not the best thing on the block, SGI worked hard to make it feel cool and sexy. A part of me still regrets that SGI ultimately lost to the PC juggernaut; sure, I get a lot more performance, but it lacks the pizzazz and personality.)

Part of the bittersweetness is that the Indy is probably the last of my machines that will be in service for such a long time. Not only am I letting go of a machine that's been running for ten years, I'm letting go of the idea of having hardware that I run for ten years. The world is a different place now; major OS and architecture transitions seem unlikely, disk capacity keeps growing rapidly, and my current machines instead have a kind of serial immortality, where the important thing is the data not the particular hardware it lives on at the moment.

One of the semi-impressive things (or alarming, depending on your perspective) is that the Indy has been running the same operating system for those ten years. I installed Irix 6.2 on it back in 1996, and it has run it ever since; we never upgraded.

Sidebar: the Indy's hardware configuration

The machine has a 150 MHz R5000 MIPS CPU with two 32K L1 caches (I and D), a shared 512K L2 cache (still a common size), and 64 MB memory. I think we bought it with a 1 GB internal SCSI disk; in its current configuration, it has a Micropolis 4743NS (4 GB) and a Seagate ST32430N (2 GB), with one of them in an external enclosure (probably the Seagate). Back in the days, this was a lot of disk space.

(Even when new, there were bits that were dowdy compared to the PCs of the day; 8-bit graphics (even with multiple hardware colormaps) were clearly on the way out, and the serial port speeds were nothing to write home about.)