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The man who may be most responsible for Woods' move to a Silicon Studio solution is the one who initially had the greatest doubts about the technology. Frank Woods describes Lee Clouse as Woods Lithographics' computer "point man." Clouse will oversee the company's internal training program for the systems and the overall integration of the new equipment into the company's existing computer environment.
"I went to a Silicon Graphics Contex demo as a devil's advocate," Lee Clouse remembers. "All I knew of Silicon Graphics was what I'd read in their advertising, and I tend to be a little suspicious of advertising claims. But after I saw what the system would do--it had the speed as well as the background processing which, in effect, doubles or triples the computer's already extremely high speed--I became absolutely enthusiastic. I came back and told Frank, 'We have to have Silicon Graphics computers, how fast can we get them?'"
Shortly after Clouse saw the Contex demo, he attended a Silicon Graphics event where an Indy workstation was running Alias Eclipse(TM). "I sat down next to the demonstrator," he says, "and said 'Show me what it can do.' She had a 100MB file and a 50MB file on the screen. She moved the 50MB file on top of the 100MB file in real-time. I started looking for the trick, but she said, 'Oh no, this is just a basic Indy. It doesn't have any special accelerators.' I'll tell you, it was very, very impressive."
The size of files that Woods Lithographic prepress department must cope with on a regular basis makes Silicon Graphics' multi-tasking capability a crucial one, Clouse says. "The background processing is very important to us, because we are working with extremely large files. On the Mac, when you go to load a high resolution 100MB file, you're waiting for an hour. And that isn't productive or cost-effective."
Frank Woods' vision and leadership has already brought his company a long way in sixteen years, and he has no shortage of ideas on where he hopes to take it in the future, though he'd just as soon not get too specific.
Can it be fairly said that Silicon Graphics systems' ability to serve as a "bridge" to other types of media interests him?
Woods grins and considers the question for a long while. "Yes," he says with a mischievous smile, "you could say that."