Twice a year, the top executives get together with the board of directors from the parent company to review the state of the company. This "board of directors meeting" had everyone scrambling to get their overheads to the graphics department for conversion to 35 millimeter slides.

That's right. Slides. As in slide projectors.

There was a tremendous bottleneck as the slides went through countless revisions at the last moment. Couriers were on hand to rush film for processing.

The CIO was in a bit of a jam. He wanted to jazz up the meeting a bit and show the board how his information systems group could add value to the organization.

I had just completed a multi-media demonstration of Lotus Notes, and he asked me to do the same thing for his meeting.

It would have been easy if we could have used data projectors. Unfortunately we needed to display two languages to each of the participants sitting around a rectangular table.

I took the "cable TV" approach, using a network of distribution amplifiers to feed dozens of monitors. It was all set up to be fault tolerant, with extra cables, amplifiers, and PCs pre-positioned to handle failures.

The business community loved it. Each of the major departments received two workstations -- one for each language -- and they could work on their presentations up to the last minute. Everything was stored on a LAN server until the day of the presentation. Using PowerPoint templates, the entire meeting had consistent feel, and the stress level was decreased a few notches.

The meeting went off without a hitch, and the same process and equipment was used for years.

A long side view of the meeting room. Note the dual-monitor setup -- one for each language.





Side view of the same room.





Workstation close-up.





Detail showing distribution amplfiers. Linen tablecloth was used as a shroud.





Tucked away in a corner was the control center. Note the videotape player and mixing panel -- we had special hardware to feed video through the PC monitors.





The meeting alternates between the local headquarters and the parent company overseas. Here is the overseas setup using data projectors.





Cabling on the tabletop just wouldn't do. These cables connect the projectors to the control center.