SGI Indigo R3k back in bussiness
================================

There was a big surprise yesterday: a courier service delivered the new
Tadiran-labelled [1]  battery for my  IRIS Indigo [2]! The  battery, of
course, come from the Far East and  not from the country you can expect
from its name.

This  this  a  thing  which  helps   the  Indigo  to  keep  time.  More
importantly, it  is necessary to make  the Indigo booting (it  DOES NOT
start without a working battery).

So I have installed it into  the battery slot (actually, I just pressed
the  pins into  the two  holes in  the CPU  board). Then  I turned  the
machine on.  The machine  complied a  lot about  incorrect time  but it
booted. It is pretty intelligent one as  it used the last time found on
the file  system instead of  something like 1970-01-01.  And everything
else works as it used to work before the old battery died.

It seems that I installed the now dead battery in 2016 [3] so it worked
for almost 6  years. It is not  too bad. If I recall  correctly life of
these things  was expected to  be 5 years  (the date of  manufacture is
printed as FBR-JUN-16 on the old battery). I hope that the new one will
survive at least 5 years, too.

Just for my reference: its the Tadiran TL-5186. 


Written on the SGI O2.


References:

[1] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Tadiran
[2] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/SGI%20Indigo
[3] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jirka/Phlog/2016_10_4.txt