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For a short while, we were making more modems than anyone else in the world. But then, less than a year later, Rockwell came out with their modem chipset--and we were history. Yes, we demonstrated our modem to Rockwell, but I don't think they stole our design. All they had to hear was the one word, Digital. Up until then, modems were made with analog circuitry.

Our basic modem consisted of four microcomputer chips (processor and masked rom) and a crystal filter. Our microprocessors were socketed and each of the four microprocessors were identical. A different pin was held high on each of the sockets, and that's how the processors knew which section of code to execute. This allowed us to have the instruction in the manual: If the modem should fail, try moving pairs of microprocessor chips to each others sockets. (A failure was usually just some corruption of the masked ROM for one of the functions.)

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