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onyx2-from-kentucky – An Onyx2 from Kentucky

1. Why an Onyx2 in the first place

The short answer is that I never set out to get one. It appeared on my path, mostly via Raion, and I said yes.

The longer answer is a bit of a walk through my hardware taste. I love SGI. I love Sun from the late nineties through the late 2000s. I love 68k Macs and I love the Amiga. It started early — my father kept a Personal Iris under his desk at work, and that is where I first met IRIX. By the time I was a teenager, the walls of my bedroom carried SGI and Cray posters and swag, where the standard boy's room in the nineties ran to bikinis.

The desk still leans that way. A Personal Iris sits on it out of pure sentiment, and an Octane2 next to it does real work. What has shifted is the direction. I'm a chip designer posing as a networking guy, and the compute side of SGI has been slowly pulling me in — supercomputing, MIPS, NUMA, MPI, cluster stuff, the kind of hardware I read about as a kid but never actually touched. That is what put an Origin 2000 in my head: eight CPUs in a single node, NUMAlink between them, the shape of a proper machine.

That itch got quietly satisfied by a set of Origin 350 nodes from a very generous forum member. Same MIPS lineage, same NUMA thinking, fewer fire-marshal conversations. The rack has a job to do, and it's doing it.

The Onyx2 was not on that list. It came on my path, courtesy of Raion. What follows is that story.

2. Kentucky calling

The Onyx2 chapter really starts on eBay. I'd been keeping an eye on a seller called amigavintage1990 — a name that doesn't quite prepare you for what was actually in his listings. Crimsons, Onyx2 chassis, Origin 2000 cabinets, racks of NUMAlink, boxes of node boards. The kind of collection that doesn't appear on the market intact very often, clearly being liquidated all at once. I spent more time than I'd like to admit scrolling through it.

Then, in early October, Raion mentioned he was planning a run to that same seller — mostly to grab a Crimson for himself, but with room in the van for friends. My first thought was of course an Origin 2000. Beautiful in theory. Catastrophic in practice the moment you start pricing freight to the Netherlands and explaining to your wife why a half-height rack now lives in the hallway.

rutger to Raion, 4 Oct 2025 I don't have space for a full cabinet, not if I want to stay married. A deskside would be perfect.

Raion was patient about it. He couldn't take a cabinet in a minivan anyway, and a deskside Origin 2000 wasn't on the table. A few days later he came back with an alternative I hadn't thought of: the seller also had a stack of Onyx2 deskside chassis, mostly stripped of plastics. He thought he could probably get one for me. If I wanted skins, he was already planning to upgrade his own Onyx2 to the newer "sgi" logo plastics — which meant his current set, the classic Onyx2 logo, could come with mine.

That was the moment the project flipped from "probably not happening" to "actually, this could work".

3. Sight unseen

The deal came together quickly — a working chassis from the seller, plus the set of skins off Raion's own Onyx2, since he was upgrading to the newer plastics anyway. On top of that I covered a share of the van rental. All settled up front so Raion wasn't out of pocket on the trip itself.

The trip was sight unseen. The arrangement Raion had with the seller was deliberately low-friction: pick what looked good, no specs requested up front, in and out. I appreciated that. The hobby is full of people who try to negotiate every screw and end up with nothing. Raion was solving for the relationship as much as for the haul.

4. What was in the box

The first message after he got back to his hotel was a configuration report, scribbled out the moment he had a minute. A dual 400 MHz CPU node board, GE-14, two RM8s, IO9G, two display outputs. That is a real Onyx2 IR2 setup — not the bare-bones config you sometimes get on these runs. Missing a couple of plenum blanks, missing the SMC key, no second node board, but the bones were right.

IRIS Onyx2 deskside (as received)
------------------------------------
CPU node    : 1x dual R12k @ 400 MHz
Graphics    : GE-14 + 2x RM8        (IR2)
I/O         : IO9G
Outputs     : 2x display
Memory      : ~1 GB (to be confirmed)
Notes       : no second node board, missing baffles,
              no SMC key (S2001 cylinder), no drive sleds

When I asked whether everything was settled on his end, Raion's answer was that driving a rented van halfway across the US and going on the adventure was enough for him — he hadn't asked for anything extra and wasn't going to. That set the tone for everything that followed.

The one thing the Kentucky pickup didn't have was a second nodeboard, and I wanted the machine at four CPUs. While the Onyx2 was resting at Raion's, I got lucky on eBay: the same amigavintage1990 seller listed a second, untested dual-400 nodeboard. Shipping it to the Netherlands only to send it straight back for installation made no sense, so I paid for it on eBay and had it sent directly to Kilmarnock. Raion tested it, dropped it into the empty slot, and that is how the Onyx2 left Virginia — already a proper 4-CPU machine before the crate ever closed.

5. Outside, under a tarp

For the first stretch after the Kentucky run, the Onyx2 was safe. Raion had it indoors, climate-controlled, out of the way — the way you'd want anyone else's machine treated. It only came outside once we thought we had a pickup date.

This is where the geometry gets you. Raion's house, like a lot of US houses, has a 32-inch front door. A standard US pallet is 44 inches wide. The maths is unforgiving. The Onyx2 weighs around 200 pounds. You cannot put it on a pallet inside and then carry it out — you put it on the pallet outside, on the driveway, and there is no going back without breaking the whole thing down again. So we only did that step once I had a shipper confirmed and a pickup window in hand.

Which would have been fine, except the shipper never showed up.

So there it stayed, ratchet-strapped to a pallet in Raion's driveway, wrapped in plastic sheeting and weighted down with bricks. A rainstorm came through. Another one came through. He kept checking the tarp. He kept reporting back. "It's been dry, the tarp is holding."

Raion to rutger, 20 Feb 2026 Don't worry, I'm keeping it dry. You're not inconveniencing me — I was mildly worried that it was going to get wet but the tarp is holding.

Meanwhile his own life was doing what life does when something is depending on you — one thing after another, none of it convenient. None of that stopped the photos and updates from coming. They were just slower than either of us wanted.

6. The shipping saga

I will keep this section shorter than it deserves, because nobody wants to read about freight forwarders. Brief version: I had a shipping agent I had been using for years at work. They got acquired about a year ago and went sideways. They could not figure out how to pick up one pallet of pre-2000 computer gear from a residential-looking address in rural Virginia.

I dropped them. Tried a second agent. Tried UPS directly — declined because the additional instructions confused them. Tried a third broker. Finally landed on Billy at Mapcargo, who understood the job, and who needed a real business entity on the commercial invoice rather than a residential address. Raion sorted that out on his end. The shipment suddenly had a real origin, and the wheels started turning.

From the first "I have a pallet" message to the actual pickup: roughly two months. Of which the machine spent about six weeks outdoors under a tarp.

7. Pickup at last

That photo is the one I will remember. A grey Virginia afternoon, a freight driver finally turning up, the Onyx2 still strapped down where it had been waiting for him. "I didn't let it get rained on," Raion wrote. "It was dribbling a little bit but I'm not worried about it. They're tough machines."

8. From JFK to my house

The freight depot took the pallet apart and rebuilt it as a proper export crate. Plywood, internal bracing, the chassis shrink-wrapped against itself and floated inside a wooden cage. The kind of work you cannot do on a front lawn with a roll of plastic and a ratchet strap. I had asked for door-to-door, no stacking, and that is what arrived.

It arrived dry, intact, and on its wheels. I had HIPPI working and a clean IRIX install on it within a week. The chassis itself is genuinely clean — better than the photos suggested.

9. Three boxes, one of them lost

The plastics came separately, as Raion had insisted from the start. The top hat needed its own box. The front and sides could share. Three USPS parcels in total, fully insured, instapaked against crush.

Two arrived in mid-April. The third — the biggest one, with the front and two side panels — went into the USPS system, got marked as exported, and then stopped moving. For about a month it simply wasn't anywhere. Raion spent his own time trying to file a search request with USPS, fighting account creation, calling the post office, talking to insurance. He was more upset about it than I was.

Raion to rutger, 23 Apr 2026 I want to stress something to you, I'm really disappointed that this has happened this way, and I'm sorry that you've been inconvenienced. […] You spent too much money on this for it to not go through rightfully.

Then, on 15 May, the missing box turned up. A few extra scuffs, nothing shattered, nothing broken. All present and accounted for. A complete set of skins, at my house, ready to go on.

10. Standing at last

The photo at the top of this page is the machine as it stands today. Plastics on, top hat fitted, wheels under it, sitting in its final spot next to the Origins and the Octane2. Some of the panels came in with the scuffs you'd expect from a set of skins that have been packaged, unpackaged, and repackaged more times than any piece of injection-moulded plastic from 1998 was designed for — but nothing structural, nothing that ruins the silhouette. It looks like an Onyx2 again.

The graphics have moved on too. What arrived from Virginia was GE-14 with dual RM8 — a solid IR2 for the vintage. Since then I've upgraded to a GE-16 pipe with dual RM9s, giving the machine a proper IR2E stack. The rear plate now reads the way I always wanted it to.

On the interconnect side, the Onyx2 is wired to the Octane2 over HIPPI — XIO card in the Onyx2, PCI HIPPI in the Octane2. That link is the reason the desk finally makes sense as one machine and not three. The plan from here is the one this whole thing has been pointed at from the start: MPI and PMP across the whole fleet, with the Origin 350s doing the compute, the Octane2 driving, and the Onyx2 handling the pixels.

Part two — MPI on the fleet: Origins for compute, Octane2 for control, Onyx2 for pixels.

11. Thank you, Raion

A short paragraph at the end of a long post. Raion drove a rented van halfway across the US, kept this machine dry through weeks of rain in his driveway, sorted packing and boxes on his own time while his own life was piling up around him, and fought USPS over a missing parcel because it bothered him more than it bothered me. He has asked exactly one thing in return, which was that I tell the story.

So — here it is. Thank you, Raion. I am eternally grateful to have this machine sitting in my office, and none of it would be here without you. If you are thinking about doing a pickup like this and you have the chance to do it with him, do it with him.

SEE ALSO

systems/arthur, the machine this story is about.