Aimed at commercial and scientific high-end visualization markets, such as medicine, geophysics and meteorology, the original machine was advanced for its time, but sold poorly.

[3][4] The machine sold for $135,000, but also required a $35,000 workstation from Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics (in total, equivalent to $470,000 in 2023).

The original machine was well ahead of its time and generated many single sales, for labs and research.

This decision was the catalyst for Pixar to lay off its hardware engineers and sell the imaging business.

[8] "It was built to be part of a pipeline, but as we developed it we realized we were competing with Moore's law with CPU and we probably couldn't get far enough ahead of it to justify it so we actually stopped the hardware effort.

The government mass deployment that drove the PII-9 development occurred in the late 1990s, in a program called Integrated Exploitation Capability (IEC).

A Unix host machine was generally needed to operate it (to provide a keyboard and mouse for user input).

[13] Walt Disney Feature Animation, whose parent company later purchased Pixar in 2006,[14] used dozens of the Pixar Image Computers for their Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) and was using them in production up through Pocahontas in 1995.