Photos: Dinosaur Sightings 3

by ZDNet Author | July 20, 2006 2:49pm PDT | Image 8 of 16

SGI Indigo

Not the oldest by a long shot, but here's John Goodman's SGI Indigo. John first worked on Indigos in 1992 and reported being "blown away". "Not only was it powerful," John wrote, "[the Indigo was] one of the most appealingly designed computers ever."

John's description of the Indigo:"Very ergonomic and compact, it was one of the premier desktop platforms for serious graphics back then. It's only about twelve or thirteen years old but, when it first came out it was about $60,000 for the model pictured here. (R4400 150mhz, 360mb RAM, ELAN Graphics). Alias or Softimage or similar animation packages were also in the $50K + Range then too. I rescued this one from the dumpster at work and swapped out some parts, bought some RAM and installed IRIX 6.5, which amazingly enough runs great even on this old box. The Elan graphics were especially amazing at the time of its release, there was almost nothing comparable for the desktop. I keep it running to remind me what it was like to work on a $60K computer, since my $2,000 Linux PC runs rings around it now. I even kept some old literature from the year of its release."

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