In November, 2010, one of my 6 monitors died and, well, it was time for a
change.
As happens all too often, it was only in retrospect that I, or we, had
any idea this was of interest to others, or that we'd been doing something
that was bleeding edge; we - or I - just implemented a 6 monitor environ
as soon as I was able to do so, at least as early as 1997.
Why document this? Simple? I got asked about it ALL THE TIME, and one day
I decided to put up this page to show folks how I did it.
I had so much going on I couldn't afford the time and
distraction of looking for the same things over and over and it made
more sense to leave windows open. And that required more screen
real estate.
I got a server class box and put three dual-head cards in it and got
on with things. But it never occurred to me to take photos. However, the
monitors were all stacked much as can be seen below in the first image.
The rest is mostly seen in the images below. But simnply: It's VASTLY
more efficient of one's time to do this. You just rotate your head or
just eyeballs instead of spending time opening or looking for something.
The ASUS monitor's I'd chosen had these brackets, which turned out to
to be fantastic.
I wanted to keep them because they provided up-down pivoting.
Here's what I made to go along with what I got from ASUS.
Of course the ASUS bracket is at the left, the other parts are, also
of course, pre-assembly.
Here, three pieces are welded together - I can do that! But brazing would
work, etc.
The assembly on each monitor looks like this before mounting to the
vertical pole.
I never bothered to crop off the excess threads because it's just not
necessary.
Here's one of the monitors fully mounted. Note that the base is just a
standard plumbing supply part, as is the vertical. I bought a few
"nipples" of the right diameter and length. The images make this fairly
self explanatory!
But if you have questions, you can call or write me. It's not that hard
though.
This is the result at the end of this day but of course it's not quite
complete.
As might be apparent, I had to deal with the fact the wood board I was
using didn't span over to the other side and so some issues yet
remained, though of course they were solved easily, just not this day.
FOR THE OBSERVANT...
The disk on the wall is an RL02 manufacured by Digital Equipment Corp
as a first 1 megabyte and then second-sided two megabyte disk drive.
This particular disk was a reject during manufacture and DEC used
these as awards, as seen here, by applying a plastic plaque to the
disk as seen here.
This disk was awarded in 1987 to our founder, Richard Troy, for
excellence known as the DEC Service Award, one of several he achieved.
