<p>Indeed. I have a Digital Multia, once worth thousands, only kept as its case engineering is so pretty.</p>
<p>Were I to get an SGI Indy, I rather think the best use would be as a case for an espresso machine. </p>DND: MARLANT went to heroic lengths, but were forced, in the end, to shut down the last MULTICS system in 2000. I expect that the disk drives had been out of production for twenty or so years. This was pretty big trouble, as there isn't yet a MULTICS emulator, so software running on it had to get rewritten. (Sources now available... Anyone got a PL/1 compiler? <a href="http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics_Internet_Server/Multics_sources.html">http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics_Internet_Server/Multics_sources.html</a>) <br>
<br>Heroics were fairly worthwhile, as these were multi-million dollar computers. (Albeit likely with less CPU power and storage than is found on the average smartphone these days. Original specs for GE-645s involved approximately 1 MIPS, 256K words (36 bit words), 200MB disk spindles, so your cell phone is massively more capacious.)<br>
<p>Most pointedly, it isn't much worthwhile to put heroic efforts into
preservation of computer hardware that was cheaply built and that is
wildly inferior, under a multiplicity of metrics, to newer stuff.</p>