That photos brings back some 1999 memories of
our first 2 and 9 gigabyte Seagate SCSI drives used
for Video Production on our DPS Perception Digital Video
Recorder system. I think we paid $22,000 for the whole
shebang. For that money I can now get a triple 24 inch monitor
setup attached to an ATI 4-port Fire-GL OpenGL Professional
Card AND a DPS VelocityHD in Quad processor motherboard
and system equipped with 8 One-Terabyte 7200 RPM
hard disks and 16 Gigabytes of RAM memory
How time flies....
I think that big disk photo is a large-scale MOCKUP of how
they manufactured drives in the pre-2000's and was used for
display purposes only at trade shows such as CEBIT
or even Comdex!
Although I do remember in 1988 (Holy Smokes does that
make me old!), I remember the biggest disk farm I had ever
seen in Calgary (i think is was at Shell Oil in Calgary)
where they had whole floors of disk drive and tape drive
racks where the total data stored was in the Petabyte range
using these MONSTER Ampex tape racks - these things
weighed literally TONS and were installed on reinforced floors.
It was used to model 3D Synthetic Seismic data where the
data was massaged and logged in Calgary and sent via
a dedicated VIDEO-encoded multi-channel satellite stream
to London, England to be computed as giant HPGL plotter files
on Royal Dutch/Shell Group Cray, IBM and other brand
Vector processors or Super-Mainframes which then
sent the data back over satellite to be printed out
on 36 inch wide 6-pen colour plotters which were tiled together
and posted on giant 40 foot by 10 foot high wall boards
which formed a printed colour 3D oil & gas reservoir
visualization. We didn't have multi-monitor video walls
in commercial production in 1988 !!!
Nowadays we grid multiple monitors together to form
100,000 pixel wide by 10,000 pixel high video walls
for REAL-TIME 3D visualization.
See these links:
Nasa Hyperwall-II:
gizmodo.com...
and
www.llnl.gov...