When I started at Softimage back in 95, the only machine on my desk was an SGI Indy. I had come from a hard-core UNIX software dev shop, so I was pretty comfortable with that. Eventually I got a Windows NT box too, but I held on to the Indy until 2000.
Here’s a few pics of SOFTIMAGE|3D running on SGI hardware that I found through google:
From the Summer 97 Softimage Resource Guide:
And the Indy specs from 96: