In the years after that I worked with them to write a custom application based on a Bluefish444 card combined with some ATTO fiber channel storage just to get the frames to disk fast enough. A lot of custom code, overlapped I/O, that kind of thing. We had a beast of a JBOD RAID setup, must have been about 12 spinning disks.
The only alternative in those days were systems that stored to tape, but could only do so in a compressed format (I think Sony had a solution that did 4:2:0 instead of the 4:4:4 coming out of the Viper). People were scrambling for these storage solutions so much that we even got Arri to lend us their prototype D-20 camera (which turned into D-21 which turned into Alexa) just so we could make sure our storage system worked with their camera. We just had this amazing prototype camera sitting around our office for what must have been a year. They just lent it to us. Wild. I think our only main competitor at the time was Codex, which admittedly had a much slicker system.
We visited the CINEC trade show and got a ton of interest. I think I still have a business card of the DoP that did all the miniature work in Lord Of The Rings. He loved the fact that we would store things uncompressed, which would make things like compositing a lot easier.
Unfortunately, mismanagement caused the whole thing to collapse. Oh well. Nowadays you just use a CompactFlash card :)