A brush with SGI

So the other day I went with Arzhang to visit the SGI box which lives out it's lonely existance at BSU. As far as I can tell, it pretty much qualifies as "BIG IRON" in the server market. It has four processors for God's sake, is purple, and has SGI written on the front. This should qualify just about any hardware as "BIG IRON". Arzhang has a picture on this page. Apparently most of these big SGI servers have 64bit MIPS processors, which is really cool because at one point I knew the basics of writing assembly language code for MIPS! (Hooray for Dr. J). They run a flavor of Unix known as IRIX. IRIX was originally released in 1987 and has apparently evolved since then.
I have had a few chances at dealing with other big corporate type Unix based systems in the past but nothing so big as an SGI box, so I was expecting quite a lot. I have to say that when it comes to usability, I was not very impressed however. For example, the software install and packaging system is straight out of a Douglas Adams book. There is no syntax highlighting when listing files or editing with vi, and to add insult to injury, there is no tab completion! Hardware being the same, I would take a Linux command prompt over an Irix one any day. The Irix desktop is is also a few years behind the curve, KDE and Gnome make it look pretty clunky. The difference between the two is really quite striking. Maybe the old Unix geezers (and don't get me wrong, I have boat-loads of respect for them) would tell me to stop my whining because they used to have to write 40 lines of code just to copy one file, but good lord, why haven't they AT LEAST written tab-completion into Irix? It didn't seem to work under tcsh or bash! To put it more poetically, Linux is like a young growing thing whose muscles bunch and ripple beneath ones hand, Irix is like a withered tree in the dead of winter, lifeless. Maybe it is just that Irix is so old, but my hunch is that the difference lies in Irix's closed-source nature. The people who use Linux can also change and improve Linux. This insures that it is continually evolving to be better, faster and more streamlined. On the other hand, Irix is reliant on a few programers who are probably paid too maintaining and create hardware drivers and other such system-level things, but don't get much time to spend making the interface snazzy. Don't get me wrong here, I'm sure the big systems from SGI can process data like mad, and they seem to still have a bit of a niche, but as a lot of the big-name corporate software producers are finding, it is hard to keep up with OpenSource. The expense of one of these SGI boxes is also incredible. I would be quite suprised if an SGI box could outperform an equally priced cluster of Linux systems.