On Tuesday 27 December 2005 21:16, Rony Bill wrote:
JTD wrote:
Both. From scratch. Actually wrote tons of assembly for controlling the ccd, steppers and thermal head while compressing bitmaps to MR and converting to hdlc fax frames. Punit (my wife) and I could tell you what frame was sent by listening to the sound and in many cases the fax machine at the other end.
Its just so amazing. :) Its like meeting the God of technology. Why didn't you create your own brand and mass produce it. We were busy selling foreign brands and here there was an Indian who made the Nation proud. I feel very sad that Indian talent is not reaching mass production.
The "fun" part was writing the hdlc stack (for fax) by reading ccitt manual in z80 assembly. The ridiculous part was that DOT guys had a rule (upto 1987 afair) which made connecting a fax machine a criminal offence - just like carrying a wireless non gsm cdma handset is today. The best tech is not necessarily the most successful. More often than not it is poor quality tech (which transalates to lower capital costs and easy to explain stupid features) which sells. In this case apart from these reasons, marketeers like L&T, Bharti etc got cold feet because it would result in canabalising their existing market lines and would require hardwork for creating new tendering norms. so why educate the customer if he is ready to pay big money buying crap. Also I myself saw fax technology as hitting a deadend in a few years - notice how color faxes are an expensive oddity and color scanners are 1/10 the price and x100 the performance of a color fax. Fax killed telex, the email killed fax, and wireless will kill GSM / CDMA and the phone companies.
Precisely these reasons hinder the widespread use of foss. The big difference is that foss is not a Company that has to think of cash infusion today to fund tomorrows market or worry about someone else's business going phut. All you have to do is focus on technology.
rgds jtd