Railway
South African Railway
One of the first users of our X.25 software was the South African Railway (SAR). The topology of their communication network followed the topology of the railway network. During the time the civil unrest in South Africa, SAR's communication links were frequently disrupted. This created havoc when freight trains had to be unloaded, and no information was available about the contents of each freight car.
Using our X.25 LayGO software, SAR changed their data network to SapoNet, the South African X.25 Public Data Network. The implementation was done by Datakor-Mercedes in Johannesburg.
Burlington Northern
Burlington Northern used our PC.25e product with the LayGO/LAPB software to control their railway switches. The application software was developed by a third party.
Harmon Industries (now GETS Global Signaling, LLC) used our LayGO/LAPB PCMCIA to control railway switches. We implemented an FM0 encoding HDLC driver for them. The product was used by BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) in San Francisco.
A similar project was done for the New York subway.
For GETS Global Signaling, we ported our LayGO Toolkit, including the SDL WANic/405 driver, to VentureCom's Real Time Extensions for Windows (RTX).
Alstom New York
Alstom New York used our LayGO/LAPB PCMCIA to test railway switches for the Washington, D.C. Metro. We developed an HDLC driver for Alstom supporting multiple PCMCIA cards in the same system.
Shipping
WeatherNews, Inc.
WeatherNews, Inc. (formerly Ocean Routes) provides weather information to the international shipping industry, so ships can alter their routes depending on weather conditions. WeatherNews receives the weather information from the National Weather Service (NWS) in Silver Spring, Maryland. (They have a great website for the history of the National Weather Service.) Besides shipping route services, WeatherNews also provided weather information to local radio stations in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In the first phase of Advanced Relay's project with Open Routes (1986), weather data was received from the NWS on a PC using our PC.25 (Emulex DCP/88 ISA card) and forwarded to a Data General Nova 100 where the data were processed and forwarded to the international shipping.
In a second phase (1996), we used a Windows PC with our LayGO/X.25 (Comtrol Hostess ISA card) and a TCP/IP stack, to communicate to a Sun Workstation, where the data were processed.
For Nera ASA Norway, we developed a raw mode HDLC driver with receive-only simplex RS-422 signaling. The product is used to collect data from a buoy being dragged behind a ship. We used Comtrol's Hostess ISA card as the synchronous adapter. Because of the considerable cable weight, we used FM0 encoding, because the clock and data are superimposed and share the same wire.