General Information

About the Indigo

The Iris Indigo is a UNIX workstation produced in the early 90's by Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI). It was one of the best designed systems SGI has ever produced, and the first one with a 'designer look'. Some (including myself) say it is the nicest looking computer ever produced by SGI. It got its name from the color of the case. Iris means Integrated Raster Imaging System, which is used from the first machines on (the Iris 1000). The design seems to be from a company called IDEO

A word on the Naming

The codename of the project during the development of the R3000 Indigo was 'Hollywood'. The codename for the IP20 board (R4k Indigo) was 'BlackJack'. An internal nickname was 'The Song and Dance Machine' ( 1 ), because it was the first multimedia machine. The IP12 is in old literature referred as '4D/RPC', the IP20 as '4D/R4SC'.

OEMs

The Indigo was OEM'd by at least two companies. In Germany it was sold as RW320 (IP12) and RWxxx (IP20). They had dark grey skins. In the US, at least the R3000 was sold from Control Data as Cyber 910 ( 1).
The Indigo was also sold as a Color Printing System from Colorbus, named Cyclone. Unfortunally, there is not a lot of information floating around. It seems that there were different hardware sold under the same name, but see yourself : 1 2 3 4 .

Espressigo

Some employee of SGI in Germany made a esspresso machine in the case of an Indigo as a present for 'good' customers. No one seems ever seen such a thing, but it is real (1).

Mechanical Description

The case has the size of a mini tower, with a front door on the right side ( 1 2 3 4 5 ). Behind that door are two 3.5 zoll drive bays, a third is available for the system disk, but not accessible behind that door ( 1 2 ). The drives sit on drive sleds, which are setting the SCSI Id depending on the position (ID 1 is the lowest) ( 1 2 3 ). There is also a reset button and a hole for a lock bar. The lock bar is made of steel and goes through the whole system, and maybe locked with a padlock at the back. It secures the front cover. The front cover is removed by pressing two button on the top ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 ). On the right site is in the upper half th epower supply with the speaker and reset button. On the lower part are the three 3.5 zoll drive bays. On the left site is a flap which can be opened by turning the lock on top around ( 1 2 3 ). There are two slots, the left one is for the cpu board, the right on for the graphics board. Each can be pulled out with the two white lockers ( 1 ). If you remove the cpu and graphics board, all drives and the power supply (it is secured with a screw on the back), you can access the backplane ( 1 1 ). The backplane connects the power supply (white connector on top), the internal SCSI devices (the 3x2 connectors on the left side) and the cpu and graphics board (the large 4-row connectors on the right side). It also has the EEPROM which holds the mac address (I gues it is th eone labelled U1). On the back side of the backplane are the parallel port and the external SCSI connector. A block diagram is 1 and 2 .

Labelling

The IP12 Indigo has the type of the graphics subsystem printed on the front door. Possible Values are 'XS', 'XS24', 'XZ', 'Elan' and 'Data Station' for the headless Server ( 1 2 ). The IP20 Indigo has Badges on it ( 1 2 3 4 ). There was also an 'XS24 4000' badge, it looks exactly like the 'XS 4000' one.

Pictures