On Storage
While not usually considered a venue for storage announcements, there were a variety of storage devices demonstrated at Seybold, especially for servers. Several companies demonstrated hardware on and off the floor.
In the Xserve section of Apple’s booth, attendees could catch a glimpse of the forthcoming XServe RAID. Due by the end of the year, the 3U rack-mounted storage unit will connect to the server with a Fibre Channel interface and support 14 drives. The unit matches the Xserve’s brushed aluminum look and has a set of softly glowing LEDs.
Grand Vitesse also introduced the Nomadic 1U, the company’s latest rack-mounted storage system. The Nomadic 1U uses a hardware-based RAID controller for 8 drive bays that can support a total on-line capacity of 1.6 terabytes. It can connect with a variety of host interfaces, including Fibre Channel, Ultra SCSI 320 and even FireWire. The base configuration costs $4,968.
While giving non-disclosure preview briefings in a suite off the floor, Maxtor still took the time to go public with a new line of very-high capacity drives, called MaXLine. The drives offer capacities up to 320 GB and offer a MTBF (mean time between failure) rating upwards of one million hours, the company said.
The MaXLine II line will have a rotation speed of 5,400 rpm, while the MaXLine Plus II series will run faster at 7,200 rpm but top out at 250 GB. Prices will start from $299 to $399 when the drives ship in the first quarter of 2003, the Maxtor said.
On Systems
Aside from Apple, there was little system-related news at this year’s Seybold San Francisco — a place in bygone days, where Unix and Windows vendors vied with the Macintosh for the desktops of content creators. Still, outside on the street, Sony parked a van showcasing its Vaio models’ performance with graphics applications.
Apple offered some illustrations about its key technologies in Mac OS X such as its Quartz imaging model, and new features of the Jaguar update. As mentioned in a previous column, Jaguar also adds support for the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), a printing service that supports PostScript Printer Description (PPD) architecture as well as Internet printer management.
The inclusion of CUPS now lets OS X take advantage of several other common Open Source Unix printing services, assisting in areas vital to many content creators: printer drivers and PostScript. Apple announced OS X-savvy installer packages for two important applications: Ghostscript, a PostScript interpreter, and Gimp Print, a package of printer drivers.
With Gimp Print, OS X can take advantage of standard Unix drivers for printers (and let vendors avoid the necessity of supporting a separate OS X driver). It also gives owners of older printers a better chance of using the hardware with OS X.
Of course, Ghostscript lets users display and print PostScript files.
The Corel booth — really an lounge section on one side of the show floor — featured demonstrations of the company’s applications, including its Graphigo collaboration environment for the Tablet PC, Microsoft’s forthcoming pen-based tablet platform.
The Tablet PC unit I got a look-see at was Acer’s TravelMate 100 Tablet PC. The forthcoming $2,000 device is a convertible model, meaning the screen can face the keyboard, as well as swivel and fold to work as a pen tablet (see figure 6.). I was concerned about the long-term reliability of the swiveling hinge.
Figure 6: It’s difficult to describe the twist-and-fold movement that turns the Acer TravelMate 100 into a pen input configuration. An illustration in Popular Science shows its various modes. On the Floor
For most of us, the words “digital workflow” signifies our familiar content-creation applications and color-imaging devices. However, these tools can also be used for fine arts printing.
For a number of Seybolds past, vendors such as ENCAD, Epson America, and Mutoh America, have underwritten a fine-arts printing demonstration on the show floor, called the Digital Atelier. The artists involved in the project showed their process of layering large-format images on a variety of unusual substrates such as aluminum sheets, plastic, and thin hand-made papers.
As you might imagine, most of these alternate materials don’t readily accept color inkjet dyes and pigments. However, several of the artists used a new precoating medium from inkAID. It’s very interesting gunk and comes in both clear and colored versions.
I was also impressed by the expressive power available from digital output. Photographer Stephen Johnson created a temporary gallery of his work on the show floor, including several of his large panoramic images.
One of the images was an immense 360-degree color panorama titled Dawn at Stonehenge, England. The image was printed on a single sheet and covers an entire wall. I chanced upon the image, turning a corner and looking up from my appointment sheet. It is truly striking in person, gaining impact from both the subject and its hardcopy realization.
Could a traditional photographic process create such an image? Doubtful.
According to a rabbinic saying: “Better a little with beauty than much without it.” Thanks to digital imaging tools and the creativity of folks like Johnson, we can have beauty and sometimes even a lot of it.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on September 19, 2002
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