[bri3d]

Wow, that's ridiculous. I bought two racks of Origin2000 with a friend in high school and that was enough logistic overhead for me! I can't imagine 72 racks!!

Installing IRIX doesn't require CDs; it's much, much easier done over the network. Back in the day it required some gymnastics to set up with a non-IRIX host, now Reanimator and LOVE exist to make IRIX net install easy. There are huge SGI-fan forums still active with a wealth of hardware and software knowledge - SGIUG and SGInet managed to take over from nekochan when it went defunct a few years ago.

I have two Origin 350s with 1Ghz R16ks (the last and fastest of the SGI big-MIPS CPUs) which I shoehorned V12 graphics into for a sort of rack-Tezro. I boot them up every so often to mess with video editing stuff - Smoke/Flame/Fire/Inferno and the old IRIX builds of Final Cut.

I think that by the time Bitcoin came out, Origin2000s would have been pretty majorly outgunned for Bitcoin mining or any kind of compute task. They were interesting machines but weren't even particularly fast compared to their contemporaries; the places they differentiated were big OpenGL hardware (InfiniteReality) with a lot of texture memory (for large-scale rendering and visualization) and single-system-image multiprocessor computing (NUMAlink), neither which would help for coin mining.