Company Background

Digital Resources, Inc. (DRI) was formed in 1981 by a former product development manager for the North American Philips Communications System Division, a wholly owned subsidiary of Philips NV. DRI is located in the northernmost area of New Jersey, 35 miles northwest of New York city. One DRI location is used for fabrication, system integration, factory acceptance testing, training, and hardware and network technical support. Another location is used for software development and administrative offices.

DRI’s founder participated in the hardware and system design of the Philips store-and-forward message switching systems in both the Netherlands and the U.S.A. These communication systems were installed throughout the world in AFTN, Telex, weather message distribution systems, international CCITT F.31 message switching systems, and industrial/commercial microprocessor-based message preparation and delivery systems.

DRI’s initial product development efforts supported the Philips installed customer base by providing state-of-the-art extensions, such as main-memory and advanced peripheral subsystems that greatly increased the capacity, reliability, maintainability, and system life cycle of the original Philips systems. The first DRI product was installed in the FAA Weather Message Switching System (WMSC) in Kansas City. This product replaced the original CPU memory with the first error-checking-and-correction (ECC) memory, combined with what is now termed ‘flash-memory’, that was used in any store-and-forward message system then in operation. This same product was installed in message switching systems throughout the world.

The second product on the same WMSC system was a multiple microprocessor-based front-end-processor (FEP) that collected and distributed weather information throughout the USA. The combination of these 2 products extended the life cycle of the FAA WMSC system by at least 12 years. In fact, these same DRI products have extended the life cycle of the current FAA AFTN system (NADIN-IA), by 8 years to date. A very recent FAA NADIN-IA upgrade from DRI will extend its life cycle at least another 5 years (or beyond, if the ATN is further delayed).

Although the first main-memory product was entirely a hardware design task, all subsequent products, until recently, have been a combination of microprocessor-based hardware and software design efforts. Recent product development efforts have concentrated exclusively on applying commodity-level personal computers in a distributed networked architecture to implement communications systems.

The above products were installed and supported in a variety of communications systems throughout the world, such as : MCI, RCA Global, Western Union International, Unitel Canada, AT&T Canada, Canadian National, Venezuela Civil Aviation Agency, Sweden Civil Aviation Agency, Irish Aviation Authority, and USA Federal Aviation Administration. DRI continues to provide support to the FAA AFTN system on an annual contract basis.