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Silicon Graphics' IRIX and Magic Desktop Return as Linux Desktop

posted by martyb on Tuesday June 06 2017, @01:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the time-before-there-was-AGP dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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."

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:18AM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:18AM (#521807) Homepage
    OK, shameful stories time - I still quite like both FVWM and it's pregenitor TWM - I have a friend who still uses TWM. Were I to want to go untiled, I'd probably pull out my old fvwmrc.

    And worse - my favourite MS Windows UI is the 3.1 one. Possibly because it had the best file manager ever. It just managed files, and wasn't a browser or a control panel.
    --
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  • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:44AM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:44AM (#521813) Homepage Journal

    Funny story, I still use FVWM when I get bored of KDE. Or vice-versa. Did you know that it is currently being reworked? With a possibility of new config format? I know!