old versions of Irix - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

18 Mar 1999

On Mar 18, 16:12, William Donzelli wrote:
...
  Subject: Re: old versions of Irix
  I have a box of QIC tapes that claim to contain
old versions of Irix,
 mostly circa version 4.0.x, with a few random Sun and IBM tapes from
 around the same era (late 1980s) thrown in.  Does anyone want them? 
 YES!!!!
 Irix can be a bear to get, as there seem to be lots of
 self-proclaimed "SGI-cops" out there that uphold the rather unfriendly
 license agreement. 
In response to those who try to prevent an SGI owner obtaining media for an
OS his machine probably originally had, I'd point out that:
all SGI machines that ran IRIX were shipped with the OS;
the OS is/was licenced for the CPU, not the original owner;
the license doesn't preclude the system owner making a copy for use on the
same CPU.
There was a discussion about this a few months ago on comp.sys.sgi.admin,
in which the concensus from the SGI staff was that there was nothing wrong
in obtaining a copy of the OS for a system, providing one wasn't upgrading
to a version later than the one the system had been licensed for.  You
should be able to find the discussion on DejaNews.
OK, so that won't help in getting a copy of 6.5.  Judging from our
experiences, you don't want it just yet, anyway  ;-)
--
Pete                                            Peter Turnbull
                                                Dept. of Computer Science
                                                University of York