It's a UNIX system! I know this!
February 27, 2014 9:36 AM   Subscribe

 
Newman.jpg!
posted by phunniemee at 9:43 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


Psh. No tab completion, I quit after 5 minutes.
posted by axiom at 9:48 AM on February 27, 2014 [12 favorites]


That desktop background is giving me serious nostalgia for the SGI workstations of yore...
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:49 AM on February 27, 2014 [5 favorites]


"ah ah ah"
posted by k5.user at 9:50 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


I used to love that SGI interface - But I'm also really really glad that I didn't convince myself that an o2 workstation was worth the cost.

I can't remember that awful "3d file manager" but I used to fire it up (over a remote X connection, no less) whenever a tour was walking by the NOC I worked in at the time, along with a bunch of terminals running top and a bunch of tails. I was always told to make the place "look busy." The only time anyone ever called BS is when we ran matrix-style screensavers, but we had to do it for well over a year before anyone noticed.
posted by MysticMCJ at 9:52 AM on February 27, 2014 [6 favorites]


GOD DAMMIT, I hate this hacker crap!
posted by Think_Long at 9:55 AM on February 27, 2014 [12 favorites]


Whte_rbt.obj
posted by Midnight Rambler at 10:03 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


Nice title.
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:09 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


#include <stdio.h>
 
int main(void)
{
    printf("Hello, Newman.\n");
    return 0;
}
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 10:14 AM on February 27, 2014 [7 favorites]


Parts of fsn live on!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer

I do get nostalgic about seeing IRIX, too. Our Indy had a WEBCAM! So high tech!
posted by gregvr at 10:24 AM on February 27, 2014 [4 favorites]


I had an Indy around the time that Jurassic Park came out and was highly amused by the scene in question. It was similar to depictions of "hacking" seen in other movies at the time, like Hackers or The Net.

MysticMCJ: that awful 3d file manager was Fusion (fsn), and it was, indeed, awful.
posted by drklahn at 10:25 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


Whoa, instant flashbacks. Where is "flight"?
posted by Ella Fynoe at 10:30 AM on February 27, 2014


Ahhhh... Indigo Magic...

How I lusted for a MIPS or SPARC or ALPHA powered future...
posted by PROD_TPSL at 10:33 AM on February 27, 2014 [3 favorites]


I get a popup (but no "Ah, ah, ah!", sadly) scolding me for using Safari. What browser is appropriate for this? Mozilla? Something more dinosaury?
posted by xedrik at 10:36 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


From Jackson's reaction I always assumed that typing "access main security grid please" would have worked, but apparently not so much.
posted by Kikujiro's Summer at 10:47 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


xedrik, it works for me in Chrome.
posted by brundlefly at 10:48 AM on February 27, 2014


In terms of unix sommeliery: the feeling I got out of Indys and what not? Apple briefly flirted with that -- although not intentionally, I think, during the intel transition. And it's not just fancy industrial design or os-timings, but the way the whole system can make things feel magical, and in my sporadic encounters with modern intel macs, I don't get that at all.
posted by oonh at 10:49 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


Back in the day, one of my friends had an O2 (running Windows NT) as his primary machine thanks to a family connection at SGI. It looked awesome (what other computer had a door for the drives back then?), but it was mostly really frustrating, because the fancy graphics hardware and the MIPS processor, while enormously powerful for its day, were incompatible with a good number of games.
posted by zachlipton at 10:51 AM on February 27, 2014


I never understood the hate Jurassic Park got for its "hacking scenes". All the software that they used was contemporary. "This is Unix, I know this!" is something that someone would realistically say upon seeing /dev /etc /tmp /bin, directories in an unfamiliar 3D interface. Any idiosyncrasies are explained by the flamboyant Nedry character, and it makes sense as a character for him to write a shell script to echo "You didn't say the magic word" and start up an funny animation on all the workstations. It also makes sense for him to be using a silly, impractical 3D shell.
posted by zixyer at 10:51 AM on February 27, 2014 [18 favorites]


It seems to work as expected in Mosiac. Here's what happens when you issue the `system --lock perimeter` command.
posted by 0 at 10:52 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


"Mozilla? Something more dinosaury?"

Mosaic?
posted by mikelieman at 10:52 AM on February 27, 2014 [3 favorites]


Using "please" does get you something special. Not sure if it's the "One hidden feature" hinted in About.
posted by achrise at 10:52 AM on February 27, 2014


It works perfectly well in Safari, too, as far as I can tell; you just have to click through that popup every time you do anything.

Odd.
posted by ook at 10:53 AM on February 27, 2014


It works fine in Safari, it's just that the creator is either concerned about unpatched systems having the SSL vulnerability or is just a jackass.
posted by invitapriore at 10:53 AM on February 27, 2014


I vote jackass, given that the SSL vulnerability is in the OS, not the browser.

(Was. Patch came out this morning.)
posted by ook at 10:54 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


oh my god claris works
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:54 AM on February 27, 2014


Oh, SGI, those were beautiful machines, if a bit impractical. Modern reinvention attempts are sad in comparison.

I would think that people that actually used IRIX would be most likely to be on OS X than anything else these days, so the author's annoying "No Safari" popup seems like a bit of a misstep. So does the use of mismatched type sizes for the ASCII art of Newmann's face when you type "access grid please". Probably written by some 25 year old front-end web geek that never wrote a line of C in their life but thinks Coffeescript is pretty cool. B+ for effort. (/chestpounding)

I think most of the ridicule that the computer scenes got were from people that knew very little about computers and thus didn't recognize the screens, but thought they knew it all or at least more than a mere young girl would.
posted by Llama-Lime at 10:55 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


the way the whole system can make things feel magical, and in my sporadic encounters with modern intel macs, I don't get that at all.

The only system I got this from was the Amiga which, like the Indys, eventually aged out of it. :-)
posted by smidgen at 10:55 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


And it's not just fancy industrial design or os-timings, but the way the whole system can make things feel magical, and in my sporadic encounters with modern intel macs, I don't get that at all.

I know what you mean. The new Retina MacBooks got it, tho. I was satisfied with the old Air. I'm really impressed with the new 13-incher MBP. (Tho you need to tweak things a bit, otherwise it takes its sweet time reconnecting to wireless on wake.)

I'm still holding out hope for a MPPSCoaC (Massively parallel supercomputer on a chip) based on ARM for the next round of Macs, but the current crop coming into play is pretty impressive in a way Apple hardware hasn't been for me in a while.
posted by Slap*Happy at 11:03 AM on February 27, 2014


There is a file in the current directory, and you can use the standard command line image viewing command (ie. the one that has existed since the '90s) to open it.
posted by idiopath at 11:05 AM on February 27, 2014


To this day I still configure all my Linux window managers to have a title bar with dark grey italics on a light grey background all because I thought SGI Indys were so fucking cool.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:19 AM on February 27, 2014 [3 favorites]


Readers of "Jurassic Park: A Novel" will recall that it was the little boy who was the computer expert, not his sister. I always thought it an interesting edit.

The first dedicated web server I ever bought was an SGI Indy. I'm pretty sure that was 1995. Actually, I bought 2, with the thought one might serve as a proxy or some such, but we used it for dev/test.

The reasons I bought an SGI Indy were that we had flown out to visit Netscape and they told us we should buy a Sun or an SGI and that those would be good machines to use. My boss wanted to take their advice in case we made a mistake. I talked to Sun, but they wouldn't play ball on the price at the time and SGI was hungrier, I guess. So I bought the Indys.

We were a *nix shop. Well, we had SCO Xenix and IBM AIX. We used dialup to connect to remote equipment, so we were command line jockeys and didn't have much need for GUIs. Still ,it was kinda cool, though I preferred NextStep.

I stood up a brochureware site on the Indy. Then somebody got the bright idea to publish Investor Relations documents on the website. The General Counsel wanted to know who would be responsible for the documents in case there was a typo. I said I would be. "You?", he said. "Sure," I said. I was pleased with myself. After all, I would be copying a document.

I told my boss. He was not pleased. "You don't want to be in the middle of this," he said.

So I found a friend of mine in the Communications Department and asked her if she would be responsible. "Sure," she said, so I literally dragged her by the hand over to the General Counsel's office. He was meeting with the CFO at that moment, and I asked my friend to repeat her agreement to them and she did and they looked at her and said, "You will?". She said yes, and I was pleased with myself again.

Then her boss came back from a business trip the next day, and he found out what she had done, and he said, "No, you won't." And so that idea died for a while.

Eventually we upgraded hardware and one of the Indy's ended up under the desk of a System Admin, who used it as his workstation. I imagine it's been junked quite a few years now.
posted by grimjeer at 11:20 AM on February 27, 2014 [4 favorites]


The Onyx RealityEngine2 is shown off on a British computing TV show back in the day.
I too have fond memories of playing with rotatable OpenGL models that had video images from a webcam mapped onto them - and liquidised photos that would ripple. Of course I knew that the real future of computing would be in virtual reality and head mounted displays - but it was still pretty cool.
posted by rongorongo at 11:22 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


I always used the SGIs in the computer lab when I was in college.
posted by zsazsa at 11:28 AM on February 27, 2014


# of hours since post: 2

# of times to type "access security" to get ah-ah-ah: 3

# of times I've done that since the post, and shouted "PUL-EASE": approximately a thousand

# of times I've laughed a huge braying donkey laugh when I've done this: every.single.time

Thanks, brundlefly. This made my day.
posted by barchan at 11:31 AM on February 27, 2014 [4 favorites]


Couple easter eggs to find.
posted by stbalbach at 11:32 AM on February 27, 2014


Sadly... it seems that the reincarnation of Indigo... MaXX Desktop has withered on the vine...
posted by PROD_TPSL at 11:34 AM on February 27, 2014


I can't get the well known password to work, maybe it doesn't anyway.
posted by stbalbach at 11:45 AM on February 27, 2014


I think there's a kind of bikeshed rule about what people find implausible in movies. Nobody notices that the reactor couldn't possibly work, but everyone's willing to chime in on how the bikeshed couldn't possibly be painted that colour.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 11:48 AM on February 27, 2014 [3 favorites]


The sad part is how Jurassic Park is one of the very, very few movies that went to great efforts to create a believable depiction of technology in a dramatic storyline, while still keeping everything accessible to a technically unsophisticated audience. And yet it seems like it's the one movie that gets most singled out by geeks for criticism.

I think most of the ridicule that the computer scenes got were from people that knew very little about computers and thus didn't recognize the screens, but thought they knew it all or at least more than a mere young girl would.

Yeah, I agree that sexism is probably a major component of this.
posted by zixyer at 12:01 PM on February 27, 2014 [5 favorites]


Jurassic Park went as far as to use (the blinking skin of) a Thinking Machines CM-5 supercomputer, a contemporary and slick machine from a company that, in the 80s and early 90s, had the aura of early Google.
posted by zippy at 12:11 PM on February 27, 2014


On the big screen, reality doesn't look real.
posted by benito.strauss at 12:27 PM on February 27, 2014


This is cool and all but the one thing I remember about this movie is that Tim just stands around and doesn't help hold up the door while Lex turns on the locks on the door. He just stares at the computer not bothering to pick up a gun or push his own weight against the door. This I cannot forgive. I don't care that he's a child. If you can run AWAY from dinosaurs, you can help push your body/shoulder up against a door that's being attacked by dinosaurs.
posted by Fizz at 1:01 PM on February 27, 2014


And yet it seems like it's the one movie that gets most singled out by geeks for criticism.

I think that's precisely why it's singled out: they tried really hard to at least make the tech sound plausible, so little bits that don't quite work stand out more.

Plus it's really easy to laugh at I dunno, Hackers or The Net or whatever. You barely need to be a geek to do so. JP requires a little more knowledge to critique on that level, and well, people with that sort of knowledge tend to be a little energetic about critiquing imperfection.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 1:08 PM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


"display zebraGirl.jpg" is mildly NSFW.
posted by ben242 at 1:53 PM on February 27, 2014


I don't think I can get a current firefox running on my o2, though I could do X forwarding to run a version from a more modern system. 'IRIX desktop inside IRIX desktop' amuses me.
posted by arrjay at 2:10 PM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


I used to run Discreet Logic software on SGI platforms. Sweet flight simulator.
posted by DaddyNewt at 2:29 PM on February 27, 2014


"display zebraGirl.jpg" is mildly NSFW.

The only surprising part of that sentence is the word "mildly"
posted by ook at 4:14 PM on February 27, 2014


whoah, flashback to the job I had in 1997.
posted by Foosnark at 4:51 PM on February 27, 2014


This thread features far too few velociraptors.
posted by Vindaloo at 5:20 PM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


Related thread.
posted by homunculus at 7:56 PM on February 27, 2014


ls worked.

They had one file, a .jpg file.

xv didn't work, although it did reply "command not found".

cd .. didn't work and replied "command not found".

I quit.

OK I tried to cat the .jpg file but cat wasn't found either.

So then I really quit.
posted by bukvich at 8:53 PM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


If only there was a "help" command
posted by bdz at 2:27 AM on February 28, 2014


That's VAX/VMS. This is Unix.
posted by benito.strauss at 9:38 AM on February 28, 2014 [2 favorites]


No, this is a bit of fun.

There are only a handful of commands, help is one of them. The one to display the .jpg is pretty obvious once you read the manual.
posted by 0 at 9:47 AM on February 28, 2014


First, check the title.

Unix shells did not historically have a 'help' command. One usually used the 'man' command. My current bash shell does have a 'help' command, but it only covers bash internal commands, not things installed in /usr/bin.

In contrast, VAX/VMS had a help system that was completely integrated with the shell, and was accessed with the command 'help'.

"That's the joke."
posted by benito.strauss at 10:50 AM on February 28, 2014


TOPS/20 had this incredible ESC-completion feature. 85-86ish, IIRC...
posted by mikelieman at 11:07 AM on February 28, 2014


Ok, I (and presumably bdz) didn't get that bukvich was making a man vs help joke. Pretty understandable considering Type "help" into the console to see a list of commands is quite prominent.
posted by 0 at 11:12 AM on February 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


man pages ? geeze, I thought everything was info pages now ..
posted by k5.user at 11:13 AM on February 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


To be fair, I don't know if bukvich was making that joke, though I certainly was.

While I did eventually figure out how to display the image, I went through the same "No pwd? No ps? No man? WTF?" as bukvitch did before I switched to thinking "This isn't a UNIX system! I don't already know this!".
posted by benito.strauss at 11:45 AM on February 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


Yay, back to hugs and nostalgia. To be also fair, the only thing I ever did on a VAX was watch my then-girlfriend read this new thing she said was called e-mail. The 'e' was for electronic.
posted by 0 at 12:06 PM on February 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


>pwd
pwd: command not found
>ls
zebraGirl.jpg
>cd -
cd: command not found
>access main security grid
access: PERMISSION DENIED
>sudo access main security grid
sudo: command not found
>su
su: command not found
>^W

<velociraptors>
posted by [expletive deleted] at 2:09 PM on February 28, 2014 [3 favorites]


Hahahrawrrahaha
posted by brundlefly at 2:57 PM on February 28, 2014


display is actually the command I use to view an image from from the shell (even today). It was literally the first thing I tried, without even thinking about it.
posted by idiopath at 3:06 PM on February 28, 2014


I just googled "ansible playbook IRIX" and wish I hadn't, because now I am "teh olds."
posted by Slap*Happy at 4:50 PM on February 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


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