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
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