http://www.sgi.com/products/Indy/publish_main.html (Silicon Surf Promotional CD, 01/1995)
See Welcome to Indy for an article describing the power of the Indy and Indigo Magic user interface.
So, you bit the bullet and bought a Quadra 840, a SuperMac Thunder IIGX graphics accelerator card, and a 500-MB hard drive to keep your eyes from swimming while you waited for those Photoshop filters to apply. You thought your troubles were over, but they're not. You're working on more and more images electronically from creation to prepress, and you're demanding more and more from your equipment. Your file sizes have grown enormously and have become increasingly complex. Even after you add RAM, an accelerator card, and a bigger, faster hard drive to your Mac or PC, your system only goes so fast.
So you're thinking of something faster, maybe a Pentium system or a Power Macintosh. But unless you've had your head in the sand for the past year, you've also heard of the groovy new Indy systems from Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI). Each Indy comes equipped with everything under the sun that a color publisher could want in a computer: a workstation-class RISC microprocessor; Display PostScript; support for up to 256 MB of RAM and a 1-GB internal hard disk; a big-screen, high-resolution monitor; a host of snazzy multimedia amenities . . . the list goes on. Boasting that the Indy is well-suited to raster image processing, image retouching, and image serving, and that it can be easily integrated into a Mac or PC production environment, SGI is targeting the machine squarely at high-end electronic publishers.
But are you ready to plunge into the murky depths of UNIX? Is it worth it? If you stay with your current platform, you might be able to buy a faster system, but you'll be stuck with the same old software and that's like settling for canned tuna instead of dining on hamachi. If you go with the Indy, you'll get all the systems whiz-bang features and processing power plus some powerful native programs that take advantage of the UNIX operating system to give you new and powerful capabilities such as true multitasking. In the image editing arena, those programs are:
(When we were researching this story, we were unable to review Creative License 1.1, an image editing and image creation program for the SGI platform, because the publisher, Time Arts, was going out of business. As we went to press, Visigenic Software had acquired Time Arts assets and was selling the software. See Toolbox.) These programs offer something for every designer and production professional, as their capabilities run the gamut from basic cut-and-paste and color-correction functions to features you may have never even dreamed of.
Photoshop has been ported. See sidebar: Photoshop for the Indy.
This articles originally appeared in Publish, a magazine for electronic publishing professionals.
