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SG Indy Pricing from 1993 issue of Digital Video magazine - Printable Version

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SG Indy Pricing from 1993 issue of Digital Video magazine - Silicon Classics - 07-05-2020

Scanned this out of the October/November '93 issue of Digital Video magazine - page shows some software pricing as well.

   

   

RE: SG Indy Pricing from 1993 issue of Digital Video magazine - Irinikus - 07-05-2020

Cool! Thanks for sharing this!!! Smile

Confirm this is only the XL-8 and24 bit graphics, and not XZ graphics, as I thought XL was only for 2D graphics, on an R4000 Indy anyway?

I am aware that the XL-24 was the better card for the R5000 variant, due to the improved floating point arithmetic performance of the MIPS IV architecture.

RE: SG Indy Pricing from 1993 issue of Digital Video magazine - Lady Serena Kitty - 07-05-2020

So basically my Indy was a $10,000 machine.  Wowzers.

RE: SG Indy Pricing from 1993 issue of Digital Video magazine - Silicon Classics - 07-08-2020

(07-05-2020, 11:39 AM)Irinikus Wrote:  Confirm this is only the XL-8 and24 bit graphics, and not XZ graphics, as I thought XL was only for 2D graphics, on an R4000 Indy anyway?

I am aware that the XL-24 was the better card for the R5000 variant, due to the improved floating point arithmetic performance of the MIPS IV architecture.

Yes, I think that XZ debuted a while after the Indy was introduced. And the XL-24 doesn't always come out ahead on R5000 systems - as Ian Mapleson discovered, the hardware z-buffer on the XZ gave it an edge in large viewports with complex geometry despite the R5K's superior floating point speed. I think some of the benchmarks on his site reflect this.

Lady Serena Kitty: Yep, that widely-touted $5,000 starting price was just marketing puffery. You didn't even get a CPU with secondary cache until the price hit the $15,000 mark, and that STILL only included 16MB of RAM, most of which would be consumed by IRIX 5, which was a bloated mess when it debuted (famously documented in a salty USENET post by an SGI engineer at the time). Upgrading to 32MB through SGI cost an additional $1,500, which was roughly triple the street price of the 72-pin parity SIMMs that you could buy at retail instead.

RE: SG Indy Pricing from 1993 issue of Digital Video magazine - hamei - 07-08-2020

(07-08-2020, 02:05 AM)Silicon Classics Wrote:  Lady Serena Kitty: Yep, that widely-touted $5,000 starting price was just marketing puffery.

I remember that the Indigo was supposed to be the low-price spread. If Jim Clark had only remained, we might be laughing at the bankrupt Mickeysoft and Dell :(

To be fair, I bought a (used) HP Vectra a few years earlier. 286, 13" color monitor, DOS 3.1,  $4600. Luckily I bought it used so ran about half that price, but even a tape punch was around $2,000 at the time.

I'm not so sure that life got better as computers got cheaper ... up until the PPro and Octane and win2k days, things got better but since then, meh. 

My idea of perfection would be a dual head, 2p 800 mhz Octane with better support for usb and a 1/8" wider center section so you could stick a cdrom in there. SATA disks that you can boot from and quieter fans and I'm set for life.

RE: SG Indy Pricing from 1993 issue of Digital Video magazine - Lady Serena Kitty - 07-08-2020

(07-08-2020, 02:05 AM)Silicon Classics Wrote:  Lady Serena Kitty: Yep, that widely-touted $5,000 starting price was just marketing puffery. You didn't even get a CPU with secondary cache until the price hit the $15,000 mark, and that STILL only included 16MB of RAM, most of which would be consumed by IRIX 5, which was a bloated mess when it debuted (famously documented in a salty USENET post by an SGI engineer at the time). Upgrading to 32MB through SGI cost an additional $1,500, which was roughly triple the street price of the 72-pin parity SIMMs that you could buy at retail instead.
Yea, I've got a 100MHz R4400SC, and XL-24. When I acquired this machine last year it had a 1GB disk and 64MB memory. Now it has a SCSI2SD board with a 16GB SD card (planning on moving to a 64GB card soonish) and 96MB memory.

RE: SG Indy Pricing from 1993 issue of Digital Video magazine - Raion - 07-23-2020

Related:

https://ogs.state.ny.us/purchase/prices/75014T960230Prices.pdf