The mistake was that thinking the limited Indy hardware was supposed to run a real operating system. IRIX was a real operating system and to run it, you gave it max hardware. To do otherwise would be to put a single stroke lawnmower engine into a porsche 959.
I remember Geoff Fox having two twins from eastern Europe attempt a demo on a big SGI supercomputer in the 1990s which concluded with "never buy a gigabyte of cheap RAM". I knew another prof who bought an small SGI machine but couldn't do anything with it because it didn't have enough RAM, he left it plugged into the the ethernet and power for a year with the empty string for the root password.