Your memory is correct. This was the default setup for WSI’s TV weather system. Early systems used Indy/Indigo^2 boxes instead of the O2.
In later revisions, they had terrain mapping but it required 8 gigabytes of ram for the texture mapper, at a cost of $60,000.
That was all ripped out and replaced with Dell hardware running Red Hat in 2005. The trusty O2 ran crawls and alerts, spooled WSI’s AWIPS data feed into iNews (how TV news produces the show) for another decade. It could still be there, running.