As a Leeds University graduate, I got to see what were
possibly the first few Indys in the UK (this was also true of SGI's predecessor
(Indigo) machines that were in the undergrad labs
when I started my course, circa 1992. In fact, their native Irix -version 4 of
the OS- went through numerous revisions due to bugs we found in it,
but I digress).
I got one of the early-Indy machines as a desktop box with the post-graduate
job I took on: 19" monitor, half-gig SCSI HDU, Irix 5.2, IndyCam (nowadays
you'd want the 64-bit Irix 6.3 (or better) on them, not least because it's
Y2K-compliant ...but in .5G??? Nope [*]).
One of the cute features is the PROM, which does network boot and
TFTP without the need for anything on the hard disk - especially handy if you
want to temporarily use a different kernel or kernel configuration (and have a
network, natch). Hence this is the first step to installing some of the
Linux-to-MIPS ports (eg. Simple, HardHat (RH5.1), Debian,
Red Hat 7.x; see also MIPS Linux node for resources) that are out there
now. Early Indy PROMs (like that of my machine) understand
only the ECOFF executable format and the Irix EFS filesystem,
but later ones are a bit more worldly-wise.
[*] postscript - this may not be a first generation Indy (or if it
is, it's not the low-end model); either way, it's close...
in which case you got all of 16MB RAM and 384MB of HDU!