They did (sort of). They were called demos and trials. But there was no DRM. FlexLM was easy to crack. The WWW was largely plaintext.

I sadly fried my Octane 2 at some point (and got my Indy's, DS10L Mac Pro G5 (also RIP and Suns to the garbage waste disposal). The Octane 2 specifically was also using a lot of Watt. But it was fun to play with, and of course it ran IRIX ;)

(I still remember how good the audio card in the Indy was compared to my PC's.)

I noticed other day prices are still high on eBay. Better off buying recent enterprise stuff (mind the Watts though).

One funny thing to note is SGI completely missed out on the AI era and boom.

FlexLM dev tools were supplied as part of the operating system distribution.

One could make a simple app to parse, check in, out, licenses and work from there.

Sure beats breaking out the low level tools!

Indy sound is great! I agree and had one playing music for years.