I actually loved IRIX for a couple of very simple reasons: it mostly got out of the way of the applications and it 'just worked', reliabily, month after month. After many years of using many IRIX boxes as workstations and as servers I realized we'd never seen a machine crash, uptimes were in the years unless we rebooted a machine on purpose. Very solid hardware, very solid software and for the times on the workstations amazing graphics. The lack of eye candy in the OS was an asset to me. I still set up my terminals the way the default terminal in IRIX looked because it feels like home to me.
Linux has some of these properties today so that's what I'm using now.
IRIX users would beg to differ. Towards the end of SGI's life, IRIX has a amassed a laundry list of bugs labeled critical that weren't getting fixed and the list was getting bigger, prompting many of the staff to leave SGI and many SGI customers to switch to BSD or Linux, further driving more nails into SGI's coffin.
Anything after 5.3 I missed because I had already seen the writing on the wall by then, so it may well be that both of these are true, but that we're talking about different times. Mine: 1995 until 2002 or so. Right about when they got VR crazy (a bit like what is happening with Facebook right now).
I actually don't, but I think this has to do with the generations of the hardware and software combo. Early stuff would typically be very stable. Towards the end of their gold era, SGI urge out new stuff and reliability went down.
In grad school I ended up managing a small cluster of SGI machines in our department. After setting up two new machines the time was wrong. I fixed it. Hours later it’s off by 12 minutes. Back and forth I go for a week thinking SGI has crappy clocks.
Found out SGI machines seek out each other and elect a TimeMaster based on up-time, clock changes. Turns out we had a machine that predated all of the new ones that had not been restarted in 2 years that had incorrect time.
I remember IRIX as that operating system that had an amazing number of exploits, and they went unpatched for so long. It looked like there wasn't a buffer that they wouldn't overflow...
That's fair, it wasn't exactly secure on the OS level, fun stuff like the help function allowing a backdoor to a user account. But to be fair to SGI this was exactly the era when the internet went from 'small village' to 'megapolis' and that brought the vermin right along with the funding.
Yeah, there were so many easy exploits that we regularly used them for our many SGI workstations when we didn't have the root password for that specific machine.
The SGI O2 was my first professional computer. I still customize my bsd desktop env to look like Irix and find it far better looking than the modern default look. I also use Screen font on my older Mac because it looks great. The SGI workstations never had the best performance but they looked great to me and never crashed in my experience. Closed source was simply not the way forward for me.
The Irix (and Solaris) ports used the Lattitude porting library from Quorum Software Systems [0]. It was sort of a reverse engineered portable macintosh Toolbox library.
Linux has some of these properties today so that's what I'm using now.