Introduced in 1993, the Indy was the fruit of SGI's effort to muscle into the market for desktop publishing, low-end CAD and multimedia. At the time, the market was mostly dominated by Apple. The Indy 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 really was a multimedia machine.
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. |
