More about DMS Design

DMS Design was founded by John Bass during the Fall of 1983 in Cupertino, California as the holding company for a new startup to be called Distributed Modular Systems. 1983 and 1984 were not very good years to attract venture capital funding for Computer System Manufacturer business plans. DMS Design became a UNIX and Macintosh consulting company as a fall-back plan to continue the dream. DMSD contracted with Fortune Systems and their VARs during 1984-1985 developing and porting a variety of products, including specialized SCSI host adapters and Disk/Tape products with offices both in Cupertino and San Luis Obispo, California.

In 1985 the company closed the Cupertino office, moved to all operations to San Luis Obispo, and took on several more employees to handle both client contracts and speculative hardware/software product development. Shortly afterward the team shipped the first Macintosh SCSI host adapter after publishing a version of the original design in the Sept. 1985 Dr. Dobb's Journal. In 1986 the DMS Design team completed SBC20, a state of the art, low cost, single board, M68020 UNIX V7/BSD system in a shoebox sized enclosure which supported up to 32 terminals, a 3-1/2" floppy, and a mix of SCSI disk/tape drives. In 1991 another DMSD team completed a short lead time SCO UNIX port to the Altos 1000 for SCO, merging components from both the SCO and Altos Unix ports.

In late 1994 the company closed the San Luis Obispo operations, and John engaged various several consulting contracts with extensive travel for a few years. In 1999 John stopped traveling, and setup offices in Loveland, Colorado.

Over the last 20 years DMS Design has completed a wide variety of projects.A sampling of diverse projects by John and DMSD teams include:

Founder of the Colorado Wireless Exchange Cooperative, a community based wireless networking company with a 400 square mile service area in the Northern Colorado Front Range area. Service is provided from several mountain top repeaters using 802.11 DSSS wireless networking equipment from Aironet. Given the limited spectrum available in the 2.4 ISM band, the coop's business plan is based upon cooperative development of the wireless infrastructure by multiple local and regional ISPs. The coop has an innovative structure where it both purchases bandwidth from ISPs for member consumption, and also offers transport services to member ISPs that they can resell value added to their customers. This allows coop residential customers that don't require ISP support and other value added services to get the cheapest possible service. It also allows coop business customers to be multi-homed with IP address space from multiple upstream sources for increased reliability and QOS routing options.
Symbios Driver support for new 53C875/876/895 features in x86 Solaris and Unixware. Performance assessment of high interrupt loading on server performance caused by simplistic SCRIPTS designs. T&M Contracts.
In-house client staff performance training. Performance by Design. Provided detailed instruction in regard to 486/Pentium CPU, Caches, and Memory Subsystem designs and the significant impacts that working set controls can have on performance. Presented models on performance stability and hysteresis problems resulting from step discontinuities in various resource's load/performance curves. Detailed problems caused by multi-tasking working sets and interrupts upon caches. Discussion of resource impacts in network file and database server environments. Provided suggested changes in coding and architecture in product to reduce or eliminate serious performance bottlenecks due to traditional design methodologies. T & M contract.
Developed a white paper on the effects that buffer overrun packet loss have on TCP/IP stability in large network configurations. Discussion of the ramifications this has on the success or failure of the Internet due to choices in router and switch designs for Ethernet and ATM equipment. Developed a model for buffer requirements in network components and protocol issues that drive these requirements. Discussion of how performance optimizations in Netscape cause concern.
MRI data acquisition subsystem performance review and redesign to provide real-time logging of MRI data to disk concurrent with interactive image reconstruction access. Tuning of application and SGI host platform to achieve concurrent image database access performance thru the SGI EFS file-system of greater than 1.5 mb/sec. Architecture review, development and design for next generation product and real-time data acquisition subsystems. T & M contract.
Provide support to VAR's and Dealers debugging difficult systems integration and crash problems on PC UNIX based servers. Data recovery services. End-User training and facility operations guides. Aid in the selection of system components, integration, and production.
Performance review of an SCO customer's point of sale application and data base activity to locate possible XENIX enhancements to speed up the customers operation. Provided several minor fixes to the XENIX file-system and I/O subsystem to meet the customers target performance goal. Fixed Price contract.
Performance evaluation, tuning, and OS internal bottleneck determination for relational database systems on SCO/MPX multiprocessor systems. Worked with RDBMS vendors, multiprocessor hardware vendors, and SCO staff to optimize TPC benchmark numbers. T & M contracts.
Ported SCO UNIX to the Altos 1000 series of 386/486 systems which have a unique architecture without any standard PC compatibility. Project involved merger of the ALTOS UNIX port and the SCO UNIX with significant redesign and development of machine specific code. We delivered an SCO custom installable product ready for shipment. Fixed Price contract.
Developed SCO ODT 1.0 graphinfo files to support enhanced SVGA resolutions for video subsystems based upon NCR77C22 chip-sets. Provided client with a custom re-cut of ODT 1.0 N volume diskettes with video and floppy driver changes to support clients systems.
Was part of the 5 member SCO ACE consortium team involved in the technical review, assessment, and negotiations for the MIPS reference platform hardware and OSF/MACH systems software. T & M contract.
Designed and delivered a bar code driven medical records/film inventory system for a large multi-office medical practice. The PC based system was implemented on top of SCO/ODT. It supported several concurrent laser scanner stations with fast patient search & lookup ( < 0.5 second ). Fixed Price contract.
Ported MS-DOS based semi-conductor process equipment control software to UNIX as a combination of driver and application code meeting clients required real-time specifications. T & M contract.
In-house client training regarding storage subsystem design and it's impacts upon stable server performance. Topics included impacts of various hardware, driver, file-system and application API's and architectures in terms of load capacity and failures. Discussion of issues in disk scheduling, partition management, file-system locality, and swap/paging management.
Developed a manufacturing test and field diagnostics test plan, developed high level control software with system level diagnostics, and integrated vendor supplied board level tests for a Unix based 256 to 1024 port network communications processor/front-end. T & M contract.
Ported a very large contact database and mailing system written in C from UNIX to DEC VMS for delivery to the Calif State Assembly for use on MicroVAXes located in each Assemblyman's Capitol and regional offices. System stored phone/mail contact information and provided for automated reply and followup assignment for the problems or issues raised. Fixed Price contract.
Provided technical review and guidance for the Calif State Assembly's Capital Building Local Area Network project. Included resolution of technical problems, project specification development, and cable plant contractor selection. T & M contract.
Reverse engineered from logic analyzer traces a proprietary communications protocol for controlling photographic printing equipment. This involved reconstructing the 8088 assembly language source, forth source, and providing the client with a high level "clean room" design specification for the data structures and algorithms. Fixed Price contract.
Designed and built several prototypes for a low cost, high performance, single board M68020/68008 UNIX system including diagnostics, firmware, and a UNIX V7/BSD port. System supported SCSI disks/tape, 3-1/2 & 5-1/4 floppies, and 8-32 serial ports in a shoebox sized enclosure.
Designed and delivered an WD1000MFM emulating SCSI host adapter as an adaptation of an existing DMSD host adapter design for the Fortune 32:16 system. Project included hardware design and prototype development, WD1000 to SCSI firmware and subsystem diagnostics. The design used an M68008 micro with address driven microcode techniques to perform zero latency pass-thru from SCSI to DMA port. Fixed price contract.
Designed and delivered a SCSI host-adapter based upon a shared memory 68000 co-processor and parallel port SCSI implementation to support Qualstar and Cipher 9-track tape subsystems. Developed co-processor firmware which implemented the low-level SCSI bus protocols, the UNIX tape driver, utility software and diagnostics. Fixed price contract.
Designed and shipped SASI/SCSI host adapters for the MAC 512 one year prior to the introduction of the Mac Plus. Published the original design in Dr. Dobbs Journal Sept 1985. Designed and shipped a Mac Plus compatible version concurrent with the introduction of the Mac Plus.
Developed software systems for a mailing house. Projects included a highly compressed walk-sequenced residential mailing address database (1.2 bytes/address) and a parser based address matching/correction system for updating/correcting/walk-sequencing customer lists. Fixed price and T & M contracts.