SGI O2 in 2022
==============

I am  still using my SGI  O2. But not often.  Once it was my  main home
workstation (2005-2018)  but now I  have an OpenPOWER  workstation (the
Raptor Blackbird) for most of tasks.

The O2 is still good enough for some terminal stuff (stuff like Gopher,
Lynx), for  emulation of even  older computers and for  development for
them and for communication with some of these machines, too. Of course,
I can  write (and  run) C  programs, Octave  scripts and  other similar
things here and the  LaTeX is also usable. Most of my  stuff is tiny so
it run well  here. For large computations  I of course have  to use the
Blackbird.

And  the  O2  still  can  play   some  MP3  streams  so  on-line  radio
stations are  still available. The original  XMMS (with a bunch  of the
IRIX-related patches) is still a thing.

The  funny  thing  is  the  fact  that  I  often  use  the  DOSbox  for
retrocomputing  tasks.  So  I  emulate  the  x86  computer  on  a  RISC
workstation to be able to communicate  with the Z88, the PSIONs and so.
The original  DOS-based utilities are  often simpler and  more reliable
than modern  GUI tools (and  these modern  tools are sometimes  hard to
compile on the  IRIX). OF course, some native tools  are nice (like the
J-Pilot and other palm-related tools).

The problem is  that WWW and the HTTPS. Most  of the available browsers
have issues with the HTTPS and  some "modern" ones (most probably there
is just the NetFront port) have limited features so they are refused by
many WWW sites anyway. So the only reliable World Wide Web services are
the 68k.news [1],  FrogFind [2] and the few remaining  HTTP servers [3]
(the IRIXNET [4]  has a HTTP-only version of its  forums, for example).
Fortunately  there  is still  the  Gopher  (with gophepedia  and  other
services).


References:

[1] http://68k.news
[2] http://frogfind.com
[3] http://technomorous.eu
[4] https://irixnet.org