@flexion Oh sure. I came to SGIs after administering mainly Suns (plus a mixture of oddities). The Suns could do "boot cdrom" with the SGIs you had to do something like "boot -f dksc (1,1,8)sash64" and then you had to do some other incantation involving stand/fx which was different depending on scsi ID, and CPU and I had to look up every time. Oh you also needed the *right* cdrom drive and most of them didn't support the sector size needed (I still have a SCSI Plextor somewhere just in case).
@flexion Once the OS was installed it was lovely. ISTR new ones came installed and they were reliable enough that you basically only ever needed to reinstall them for something dire like a HD failure so it wasn't a major pain - I just remember the "WTF!?" moment at the commands needed the first time I did it.