Background

The first driver I worked on was an 8-line 300-baud modem answering system. What the driver did was answer the lines as they rang and receive the data and store it to tape in real time. Eight lines could be answered by the single system. When the modem speed increased the system lost data because of the speed of transmission but I was able to build a better mousetrap that could receive data on all 8 lines at higher speeds, write the data to tape, write it to a hard disk drive, and send it to a printer in real time. This exercise required me to debug the original manufacturer's tape driver, disk driver, and printer driver and replace them all with a driver that could handle a number of different pieces of equipment simultaneously without losing any data.

While I always enjoyed the technical challenges of innovation I was always mindful of the need to show an economic benefit. What these driver designs allowed was to build a charging system into the drivers so that at the end of the month any reports could be produced involving any driver usage including the number of pages printed, total print time usage, and customer processor usage. In fact every criteria for charging could be documented in real time in a system log. Today this is commonplace but it was pretty innovative for 1979.