The reason for more than one monitor is purely a question of space. A lot of software is giving you a real time display, and yes you could scrunch it all onto one Monitor for sure, but the detail and information is lost because of the small size.
This pix is a single computer running three monitors, arranged so that the Mouse cursor flows up and to the right from the main screen to extended screens. That way each section of the software can be split between the monitors and kept at a nice comfortably observable size. Imagine all this squeezed onto one screen (you could to that if you had a 50 inch monitor I suppose, but you'd have to sit in another room to use it …
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For interest the software is SDRConsole running off an Airspy HF + SDR (a radio about the size of a Swan Vestas matchbox which covers an enormous frequency span of 2 GHz, all the controls being put in place by the computer software … hence SDR = Software Defined Radio.)
Bear in mind this is in real time and when you're struggling with a weak signal, these displays are very useful and wouldn't be anywhere near as good squeezed into one screen.
One monitor is fine if yer just reading a newspaper. I've yet to see a laptop that was worth a shit when it comes to SDR unless you can extend the screens, however, having said that my old Toshiba Quosmio has a VGA and HDMI output so I can have two extended monitors on it, which makes the inbuilt 17" screen a bit naff, somewhere to park a newspaper maybe …
(Of course there maybe some old timers out there who yearn for the days of a black and white 9 inch 405 line television receiver … but they should have all been taken out back and shot years ago.)
