Kidz Leads the Way

It’s the summer of 2000. Sophomore Chin Chin and five other teens from KidzOnline are rolling the cameras and handling all of the technology for a live webcast. They’ll capture all eight days of the Youth World Leadership Congress in Washington, D.C. and distribute it over the global Internet via iBEAM’s network.

A few days later the video cameras focus on Chin Chin and her computer screen as she teaches an advanced PhotoShop class. Fifteen miles across the Potomac River, 20 minority students key in questions for Chin Chin at their own computers, as they try to master what she’s teaching.

One video class at a time, one webcast at a time, the students at KidzOnline mean to close the digital divide, worldwide.

The nonprofit KidzOnline is dedicated to “kids teaching kids” how to use computers, software, the Internet and multimedia technology.  In the process, students learn valuable high-tech skills and share ideas with other kids across the country and the world.

More and more, video is their tool of choice, whether it be for a live webcast or a program written, recorded and edited by kids for kids at the KidzOnline training center. But because digital video eats up a lot of gigabytes, the kids needed monster disk-drive storage capacity.

The Atlas drives incorporate features specifically designed for the digital video user.  The Ultra 160 SCSI interface ensures adequate bandwidth for digital video applications—even the more demanding requirements of HDTV.  The Atlas 10K II’s peak sequential transfer rate of 40+ MB/second makes it one of the only drives in the world capable of streaming uninterrupted, uncompressed NTSC (National Television Standards Committee) video across 100 percent of the drive’s storage capacity, up to 72.4 GB.  In addition, two other design features help guarantee digital video users’ data will be delivered at a steady, predictable rate with none of the unexpected interruptions common to other disk drives:  a more effective bad-block management design and a sophisticated re-calibration feature that compensates for changes in the drive’s environment.

All of these features add up to a high-performance storage solution for Pinnacle Systems, a company that has already won six Emmy awards for technical innovation in television-editing technology.

 

Archive:  Published on Quantum’s website.