“Engineers at ILM, the technology arm of the Lucas empire, have
been creating and fine-tuning everything from cameras to disk
arrays to controllers and networks for roughly two decades, all in
an attempt to make the real and virtual worlds mesh so well that
moviegoers can’t tell where one ends and the other begins…”
“We’re continually inventing new black boxes; we find that often
the off-the-shelf products don’t perform at the speeds we need,”
said Meyer. “We build controllers that link the various boxes
together. We’ll buy things like a disk array, frame buffer and some
other off-the-shelf products and build them into a usable system.
Some are simple and some are very complex.”
“Among the simple ones is a 386 box that has run Linux without a
glitch for nearly five years. Called Robot, it handles routing
commands so that one of the systems can be accessed from any
terminal in the system. Another “cheap PC with Linux on it” houses
a TTL data-acquisition card that saves Meyer and his cohorts plenty
of time when systems have to reboot.”