Physical Traits
The Indy packed a reasonable amount of power into a very small (41 cm × 36 cm × 8 cm), simple, and elegant package. The sturdy, electric-blue colored "pizza box" chassis is comparable to a small desktop PC from the same era, and is designed to fit underneath a large CRT monitor. It was the first computer to include a digital video camera, and was built with a (then) forward-looking architecture including an on-board ISDN adapter. With the inclusion of analog and digital I/O, SCSI, and standard composite and S-Video inputs, the Indy was a machine designed for multimedia.
At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first operating system for the Indy, did not take full advantage of the hardware due to inadequate memory management. SGI realized this and quickly increased the base specification to 32 MB, at considerable cost. Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage. The latest release of IRIX available for the Indy workstations is 6.5.22.
One option for the Indy was a floptical drive. The floptical used 21 MB disks, but was able to read and write standard magnetic floppies as well.
Read more about this topic: SGI Indy
Famous quotes containing the words physical and/or traits:
“The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (182595)
“... the first reason for psychologys failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychologys failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.”
—Naomi Weisstein (b. 1939)