Macs Running the Home of the Future Now and the IRIX File System

MacWorld unveiled a "home automation tool" called Indigo. Supposedly it lets you do things like turn on your lights with your cell phone and change your sprinkler schedule from your laptop in bed. The epitomy of laziness and complete convenience. I read about it on the O'Reilly Network. Adam Goldstein profiled Indigo and its uber sci-fi cache of stunts like determining how to turn on the coffee pot 5 minutes before sunrise. For parents, it has the ability to turn off things like fans and heaters in the kids' rooms without going in and waking them up. Pretty spiffy.

I couldn't get over the name Indigo, however, because I knew it had been used before... then I remembered there was an SGI Indigo. Wikipedia says it first came out in 1990 (I feel old). It ran IRIX and NetBSD. It had a 32-bit MIPS R3000A RISC processor. Ooh, ahh. I'm dripping with nostalgia, recalling the first time I saw one of these babies in a dorm room at Iowa State University. It had this really cool 3D file system demo that I'll never forget, because every time I see the movie, "Hackers", it jogs my memory. In the film, they have a pathetic GUI for their security system at this big evil company where they observe files being attacked from different ports. It's completely hokey but I'd be willing to bet the special effects team got the idea from the much smoother IRIX. I digress...

Did tech suddenly run out of words? All of the sudden, Steve Jobs declared that it's open season on usage of the same word twice to describe different technical products? iPhone and Indigo were this week. What's next week?