New computer room
=================

I am building a new computer room (it is actually rather just a corner)
in our weekend house. There has been always a writing desk and for some
time my wife had a laptop here.

I have  decided to make  a workstation place  the blue SGI  IRIS Indigo
with a 1 5" LCD here. I  have combined it with an original keyboard and
mouse (they  are from  my second  Indigo and were  used at  the Siemens
Nixdorf and obviously  are wnot perfect but I decided  to keep the less
used peripherals in storage). The 15" LCD  i s an old Compaq one. It is
1024x768 only  but the LG1  graphics of the  Indigo works only  on that
resolution so it is ideal here.

I only have to cover the "Compaq" label and find a SiliconGrapgics logo
some where...

I have tried to make software of my two Indigos (one at home and one in
the weekend house)  as identical as possible to make  their use easier.
This blue one  can actually do more  because it has a  newer MIPS R4000
CPU (in theory I can run Adobe PhotoShop 3.x here. I even have original
installation media. But I see no  prospect in running such program on a
computer with 256 colors).


The main problem  at the moment is communication. There  is no Ethernet
around (and no WiFi) so the workstation is not connected by any mean. I
have only serial ports here (and the parallel, of course).


There is no need to move big  amounts of data here, even a floppy would
be enough.  The problem  is that  I still have  no working  SCSI floppy
drive (I  have at least five  of them but  I still have not  managed to
make a working one).


I also have a parallel ZIP drive but it is unreliable (it was even able
ho hang  a Windows  PC - on  the old Slackware  it worked  without such
problems, though  ) and there are  no IRIX drivers for  this thing. The
IRIX 5.3 (the one I have he re) cannot read VFAT-formatted ZIP media so
a SCSI ZIP would be also of little use (I used to have one).


Another way is a  SD2SCSI board but I do not have one  at the moment. I
have h  ad an version  2 of this  thing and it  had issues with  a SCSI
controller which is  used by older SGIs (including the  Indigo). I hope
that newer ones will be better. But I will see...


So at the  moment the easiest way  to move (at least text)  files is to
transfer them to a Psion Series  3a. The (current!) p3nfs works even on
such old IRIX a d I have  enough serial cables tor this purpose. I will
be slow but it seems to be easy...