IRIX Introduction

IRIX Introduction

Brief History

The first operating system developed for SGI systems ran on the IRIS line of terminals and workstations based on Motorola CPUs (see GL2 history). When the MIPS based IRIS 4D systems were introduced the 4D1 operating system accompanied these computers.

The earliest common version is 4D1-3.0 (1988). IRIX 3.x was based on UNIX System V Release 3 with 4.3BSD enhancements, and incorporated the 4Sight windowing system, based on NeWS and IRIS GL.

The next major version (4D1-4.0) was introduced in 1991. SGI replaced 4Sight with the X Window System (X11R4), using Xsgi and the 4Dwm window manager providing a similar look and feel to 4Sight.

When the next version was introduced, the name IRIX was more widely used. IRIX 5.0, released in 1993, incorporated certain features of UNIX System V Release 4, including ELF-format executables. Later on in the IRIX 5 lifecycle the XFS journaling file system was introduced.

Beginning with IRIX 6.0, released in 1994 during the IRIX 5 era, full 64-bit support was added. After a few platform specific releases with IRIX 6.5 the last "major" all platform release was introduced.

The last IRIX release is IRIX 6.5.30, introduced in August 2006. The IRIX product line was discontinued after this version, according to the press release dated September, 6th 2006 support for IRIX will continue at least until December 2013.