Those of you yearning for the experience of running a 1990s-vintage graphics workstation are about to have a good day: a developer named Eric Masson has resurrected the IRIX Interactive Desktop that shipped on Silicon Graphics Workstations and now offers it as a Linux desktop alternative.
Silicon Graphics (SGI) had a crack at the workstation business in the early 1990s, when it dominated the then-rather-limited world of computer graphics and decided it would try to parlay that experience into the CAD and desktop publishing markets. Apple's early Macintoshes led those market, but their 68xxx CPUs had obvious limits. SGI threw MIPS silicon at the problem, brought IRIX out of servers onto the desktop and cooked up a nice windowing system to match the Mac and hit the market.
SGI did okay for a while but proprietary workstations became an oddity once Windows came along and Microsoft encouraged makers of graphics-centric apps to bring their wares to Win32. SGI added a Wintel workstation line, but then had to compete with PCs-at-scale outfits like Compaq and Dell. The company kept making MIPS-powered workstation well into the 2000s, but eventually succumbed.
Masson has tried to bring back some of that heritage in the form of the Maxx Interactive Desktop, which aims to offer "an evolution of SGI's IRIX Interactive Desktop."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:47PM
Why not instead put those resources into creating a new system that maybe borrows some of the few good ideas from that old system?
Because no one will use it or join your project, that's why. Instead, they'll use garbage like Gnome3 and devote their resources to that, instead of helping with your project. So if you're a single person wanting to do some interesting UI work, you'll make a lot more progress taking some old but highly usable system like this and getting it to work on a modern OS and hardware than trying to build something from scratch.
Really, we already have a bunch of "new systems", and generally they all suck. Gnome3, Windows 8/10, MacOSX, they really all suck. If this weren't the case, then maybe people wouldn't be "wasting time" on "resurrecting" these old systems.