The first Magnum was released in March, 1990, and production of various models continued until 1993 when SGI bought MIPS Technologies.
In addition to these proprietary operating systems, both Linux and NetBSD have been ported to the Jazz-based MIPS Magnum machines.
In addition, headless (i.e., without a framebuffer or video card) versions were marketed as servers under the name "MIPS Millennium".
The G364 includes a SUN 13W3-style output (which can be converted to the more common VGA pin-out), and is capable of pixel screen resolutions of 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, or 1280x1024.
However, because MIPS Computer Systems, Inc.'s in-house effort to design a MIPS-based Windows NT system had met delays, MIPS Technologies abandoned its in-house efforts and instead licensed the Jazz design which Microsoft had developed in the early 1990s to facilitate the porting and development of Windows NT (it was first developed on the Intel i860 architecture and then on the MIPS architecture, both using Microsoft's own prototype hardware and was designed from the start to be easily ported to other system architectures, such as the Intel 386, Alpha, and PowerPC).
incorporated many features more common to Intel-based PC's than to the commercial UNIX workstations of the era — for example, the Magnum R4000 included an EISA bus, used IBM PS/2-compatible keyboards and mice, and used commodity chipset components whose control registers were mapped to memory locations set forth in the IBM AT standard.
All Magnums could run RISC/os, MIPS Computer System, Inc.'s proprietary port of BSD UNIX.
The MIPS Magnum can run NetBSD, and it also ran OpenBSD at one point, but lack of developer interest and proper resources lead to the termination of the arch's support prior to the December 1, 1998 2.4 release.