the history of advanced media group from 1989 published may 7, 2016

Escaping the UNIX1 Tar PitProducing CD-ROMs in the UNIX Environment©

Authored & Published in January of 1991

Stan J. CaterboneDirector of CD-ROM Technologies for American Helix Technology Director of Advanced Media Group, Ltd.1857 Colonial Village LaneLancaster, PA 17601.Phone: (800) 525-6575Fax: (717) 392-7897

John S. GarofoloComputer ScientistNational Institute of Standards and TechnologyTechnology Building, Room A-216Gaithersburg, MD 20899Phone: (301) 975-3193Email: [email protected]

UNIX is a trademark of American Telephone and Telegraph, Inc. (AT&T). 2Disclaimer: Certain trade names and company products are mentioned in the text in order to adequately specify procedures and equipment used. In no case does such identification imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, nor does it imply that the products are necessarily the best available for the purpose.

Just when things are going smoothly, and we begin to feel a little too comfortable and too confident with CD-ROM technology, someone or something puts us in our place -- and thankfully so. It's these challenges that facilitate our progress toward broadening the horizons of CD-ROM technologies.

This article is intended to inform publishers and manufacturers of the problems that can be encountered in using UNIX tar-formatted files as a medium of data submission for CD-ROM production and some of the issues confronting the next generation of CD-ROM publishers. Databases developed on non-DOS-based3 systems which have performance requirements that exceed MS-DOS capabilities are becoming more commonplace. Ironically, the existing CD-ROM production infrastructure has been created and supported primarily by DOS-based systems. Although we are making progress in publishing data on other platforms, a large majority of the CD-ROMs published today are still designed on DOS machines for use on DOS machines. The current tendency to link CD-ROM with DOS is making difficult the implementation of CD-ROM technology on non-DOS systems and, therefore, slowing its widespread acceptance. 3DOS is a trademark of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) and MS-DOS is a trademark of the Microsoft Corporation.

The ensuing paragraphs illustrate the need for the CD-ROM industry become more in tune with the trends which are shaping information technologies. CD-ROM, which is one such information technology, is beginning to recruit a new breed of both users and publishers, which are hoping that CD-ROM will adapt to them, as opposed to them having to adapt to it. The Automated Speech Recognition Group of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is one such CD-ROM publisher.

The NIST Automated Speech Recognition GroupSponsored in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Science

History of Advanced Media Group of 195 Saturday, May 7, 2016History of Advanced Media Group Page 1 of 195 Saturday, May 7, 2016History of Advanced Media Group Page 1 of 195 Saturday, May 7, 2016

and Technology Office (DARPA-ISTO), the group designs and implements methods of performance evaluation for spoken language systems. These systems consist of natural language understanding as well as speech recognition components. Additionally, it distributes databases, or corpora, of speech recordings as standard reference material for the development and evaluation of these systems.

Traditionally, these speech corpora have been recorded and stored in a digital form rather than in an analog audio format. This allows the data to be easily loaded, stored, and manipulated in computers and prevents signal degradation in copies. The speech is digitized at a sampling rate of between 10 and 20 kHz., as opposed to the 44.1 kHz. sampling rate used in CD-audio. Digitizing speech at these sampling frequencies keeps intact the properties of the speech signal that are important for automatic speech recognition while minimizing storage requirements. These corpora typically consist of thousands of spoken phrases or sentences which are stored in separate files for ease of computer manipulation.

In the mid 1980's, the NIST began an archival/lending library for public domain speech corpora. The corpora were originally maintained and distributed on half-inch reel-to-reel digital magnetic computer tapes. Initially, these corpora were small, but as recognition systems became more sophisticated, their appetite for "training" data grew tremendously. By the end of the decade these corpora were each occupying 50 or more 6250 bpi. half-inch magnetic tapes and even larger databases were on the horizon. Managing these colossal databases of speech had become a real problem. Simply storing, copying, and distributing the corpora had become unwieldy. Furthermore, maintaining the integrity of the corpora was even more difficult as tapes were frequently damaged in shipment or by rogue tape drives.

NIST and CD-ROMBy early 1988, the NIST Automated Speech Recognition Group had begun investigating optical disk storage technologies as a means of replacing its tape archives. Initially, Write-Once Read- Many (WORM) technology was considered for use as a universal distribution medium but was found to lack adequate standardization. Fortunately, in the Spring of 1988, the ISO-9660 file format standard for CD-ROM was adopted and CD-ROM was chosen by NIST as a new "experimental" medium for distributing speech corpora.

NIST decided that the first corpus to be produced on CD-ROM would be the DARPA "TIMIT" Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus. Under DARPA sponsorship, TIMIT was jointly designed, recorded, transcribed, and archived by Texas Instruments (TI) , the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), SRI International, and the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST). The TIMIT corpus was designed to provide speech data for the acquisition of acousticphonetic knowledge and for the development and evaluation of automatic speech recognition systems. The corpus contains recordings of 630 speakers from 8 major dialect divisions of American English each speaking 10 phonetically-rich sentences. In addition to standard orthographic (text) transcriptions, TIMIT contains unique time-aligned phonetic transcriptions.

NIST felt that TIMIT's unique structure would be of great interest to speech researchers and, therefore, would probably be ideal for widespread publication on CD-ROM. NIST decided to publish two-thirds of the corpus on a "prototype" CD-ROM. Because of the ISO-9660 restrictions on filename length and format, the chosen two-thirds of the corpus to be placed on CD-ROM was restructured from a flat directory structure with lengthy unique UNIX filenames into a dense 5-level directory hierarchy, which reflected the design of the corpus and conformed to ISO-9660. The resulting directory structure contained 4200 bottom-level subdirectories -- one for each sentence-utterance, and 3 files per utterance for a total of 12,600 data files! This new organization required the use of the entire path and filename to uniquely identify a file but was "visually navigable."


To date, more than 200 "TIMIT Prototype" discs have been distributed to universities and speech research laboratories worldwide. The discs were well received by the speech research community and have been read on PC's, Macintoshes4, various UNIX systems, NeXT5 machines and MicroVAXes6. The "experiment" had proved to be successful.

As of this writing, NIST has produced four releases of speech corpora on eight discs. Recently, NIST completed production of its most ambitious speech disc so far. The new disc is a complete revision of the TIMIT Prototype disc and contains the speech for the complete 630-speaker corpus as well as all-new time aligned word-boundary transcriptions. The new TIMIT CD-ROM contains 25,200 data files (4 files per utterance) as well as more extensive documentation and software utilities.

After the production of the TIMIT prototype disc, NIST recognized the need to distribute speech 4Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. 5NeXT is a trademark of NeXT, Inc. corpora in a consistent format. Unfortunately, no standard file format existed for storing and exchanging speech signals. Compounding this problem, almost every speech research laboratory around the world used different hardware and software configurations for speech signal processing and analysis.

A UNIX-Based CD-ROM Preparation WorkstationIn order to implement a full scale CD-ROM production effort, the Automated Speech Recognition Group built a UNIX-based CD-ROM publishing workstation, which also doubles as a general-purpose speech research system. CD-ROM images are prepared on a Sun Microsystems server system with 32 megabytes of main memory, 3 gigabytes of high-speed magnetic disc storage, a 9- track tape drive, an 8mm tape drive, and of course a CD-ROM drive. The workstation contains two 1.2 gigabyte magnetic disc drives on which entire CD-ROM images can be assembled and simulated.

Each CD-ROM is now organized entirely in the UNIX environment. Many of the standard UNIX utilities and capabilities have proven ideal tools for CD-ROM preparation. Tar files are now submitted for CD-ROM replication on one 8mm tape, instead of 5 or 6 half-inch reel-to-reel tapes.

UNIX-based CD-ROM premastering software is planned to be added in the near future to help alleviate some of the complications NIST has experienced in submitting data for replication. By performing ISO-9660 formatting in house, an ISO-9660 image can be submitted to the replication facility. The ISO-9660 image can then be directly loaded into a mastering system – thus circumventing the problems which can occur downloading tar-formatted files.

NIST has developed strategies to maximize the portability of its CD-ROMs by organizing speech data into a consistent format and providing utilities which can be linked into each laboratory's unique hardware and software systems. To accomplish this, a flexible, object-oriented header structure was developed for the exchange of speech files, especially on CD-ROM. The header is an ASCII-based structure prepended to each speech file and allows an utterance to be uniquely identified (even if the file is copied from CD-ROM and inadvertently renamed) and describes basic attributes of the speech signal to aid in digital to analog operations. A set of software utilities have been written, "Speech Header Resources" (SPHERE), to provide a low-level interface for importing and manipulating these files. NIST now publishes all speech data in this more consistent format.

A Data Submission ProblemAll of the key components for efficient CD-ROM production were in place at NIST, except for a vehicle for data submission. When NIST initially delved into the world of CD-ROM production,


it was dismayed to learn that most CD-ROM replication facilities accepted only standard ANSI labeled or ISO-9660 imaged tapes as transfer media. The small Automated Speech Recognition Group could not justify the expense of purchasing a special-purpose premastering workstation dedicated to creating ISO-9660 tapes. Neither could NIST provide standard ANSI-labeled tapes because the simple structure of ANSI-formatted files would not preserve the extensive directory structure required by the many files typically contained in speech corpora.

The UNIX tar Answer?The tar-formatted tape is the standard medium of data exchange in the UNIX world and NIST had been successfully distributing speech corpora on "tar tapes" for several years. The UNIX tar (Tape Archive) utility was designed to create a portable archive format for UNIX files. The tar program generates a single file (usually on magnetic tape) which contains all of the information necessary for reconstituting directories, files, and UNIX-specific file parameters. What distinguishes the tar utility from most other archive programs is that the archive format it creates is portable across machines and operating systems. The key to the tar format's portability is in its simplicity. Tar does not employ any elaborate compression algorithms when generating an archive. It simply creates a byte-for-byte copy of each file to be archived with a prepended header block. The header block contains the path and name of the file (or directory), the file size, the time of last modification, and UNIX ownership and permission flags. Because the information in the each header block as well as the file itself is byte-encoded, the tar file can be read by any system which can recognize a stream of bytes. Of course, binary executable files are system-specific and cannot usually be implemented on differing systems. But text, source code, and binary data files can be easily exchanged.

To date, the tar program has been ported to many operating systems, including MS-DOS and VMS8 as well as the many variants of UNIX. Because the tar format is portable and preserves directory hierarchy, and because a tar file can be written to a standard ANSI-labeled tape or any other storage medium, NIST concluded that tar formatted ANSI tapes would be the ideal vehicle for providing a CD-ROM-ready file image to a replication plant. Unfortunately, NIST has found that most replication plants either refuse to accept tar-formatted files or they charge considerable "data conversion" fees to download the files into their premastering systems. To say the least, the acceptance of tar as an input medium for CD-ROM production has been less than universal by the CD-ROM replication industry. The replication facilities that have ventured into the "tar pit" with NIST have frequently encountered technical delays and cost overruns. In theory, the tar-tape to CD-ROM process should be simple.

But in reality, it has rarely been straightforward to implement. Pitfalls in Extracting a CD-ROM Image from a UNIX tar File The challenges encountered in producing a CD-ROM from a 630-megabyte tar tape, which contains over 25,000 files, can at first seem insurmountable. Several problems have occurred during production, some of which are still not completely resolved. Downloading and extracting a CD-ROM image from a tar file can be excruciatingly slow, taking 15 or more machine hours of time for a single disc image. If a tar file is packed with thousands of files, unforeseen complications can arise in the extraction process, and diagnosing and troubleshooting all of the subsystems involved can become painful for even the most experienced of engineers and technicians.

Extracting the file structure from a tar file for a CD-ROM such as the new TIMIT disc requires a great deal of time and attention because of the extraordinary number of directories and files. The subsystems involved in the tar extraction process require seamless integration. These include the PC hardware platform and MS-DOS operating system, the premastering system, the device drivers, controller cards, tape back-up systems, and the tar utility. Limitations inherent in the MS-DOS operating system, device drivers, and file structures can result in breakdowns in any one of these subsystems resulting in the loss of hours of man and machine time in the production process.


Eight-mm tape subsystems can be especially vulnerable when extracting exceedingly large numbers of files. This is because 8mm tape drives are mechanically suited for streaming operations. They are not as accommodating as 9-track tape drives in the quick stopping and starting movements, which become necessary when extracting many thousands of small files. Additional loss of efficiency occurs when 8mm drives must interface with a system, which has become bogged-down with overloaded magnetic disk sub-systems. The only way to optimize their operation is to load and buffer large blocks of raw data before it is tar-extracted. Subtle problems may also arise when the controller cards of some 8mm tape systems are not entirely compatible with the publishing system being used. These and other unforeseen problems can cause a tape drive to abort operations well before completion of the extraction process. Worse yet, because the tar format does not guarantee that directories and files are stored in any particular order, an entire tar file must be scanned to extract any subset of files contained in it. If the tar-extraction process aborts before the end of the tar file is reached, the entire process must be restarted from the beginning to insure that all files are loaded. These constraints require that special efforts be taken to prepare backup tapes and even second backup tapes during production. This is one area of risk where the insurance is well worth the effort, and is within one's control. Many of the other pitfalls are not as easy to anticipate or avoid.

One of the more frustrating problems encountered while downloading the TIMIT tar file was that of the overhead created while extracting the 18,900 small transcription files. To illustrate this point, during the downloading of the 632-megabyte tar file, containing the 25,241 TIMIT files, the process aborted on 650-, 850-, and 1200-megabyte partitions due to insufficient disc space!

On UNIX systems, the size of file blocks (similar to the ISO-9660 and DOS sector structures) can be modified. Although the ISO-9660 standard supports different sector sizes, the individual operating systems used in the premastering process may present problems. For example, MS-DOS 3.31 does not allow any modifications to sector size. Fortunately, MS-DOS 4.0 is more forgiving.

The TIMIT tar file contained 18,900 transcription files of under 2Kb each. A premastering system running DOS 3.31 with a 16Kb sector size would require over 300 megabytes of disk storage for these files, which actually amount to less than 32 megabytes of data. This results in disk overhead of 1 order of magnitude! However, by switching to DOS 4.0, the sector size can be reduced to as little as 512 bytes. This significantly reduces the overhead being used by the DOS partition. It is therefore important to adjust the sector size to accommodate the size of the database files to be downloaded. To maximize disk usage, the sector size should be set high when premastering a database with a few large textual files. But when a database (such as TIMIT) contains many small files, the sector size should be greatly reduced. Likewise, it is also important to allow for this kind of overhead on the CD-ROM itself. Although CD-ROMs are generally created with a 2Kb sector size, the sector size can be reduced on the ISO-9660 image in the premastering phase to as little as 512 bytes. By decreasing the sector size on the TIMIT ISO-9660 image to 512 bytes, potential disc overhead was reduced by about 32 megabytes.

Finally, a hidden source of potential problems lies within the implementation of the utility used to extract the tar file. There are currently a number of tar utilities that have been written and are in use today. Many of these utilities are suboptimal in speed and efficiency. The time required for downloading a tar file can become critical when extracting large numbers of files. Therefore, using the right tar implementation is a must.

The Real "Tar Pit" -- Universal OperabilityThe real problem facing the CD-ROM industry concerning the production of non-DOS-based


discs lies not in which utilities or platforms to use, but within the deeper abyss of universal operability. Universal operability encompasses the common methodology of transferring, publishing, and retrieving many different types of data across different platforms, while using different hardware and software systems. Attempting to extract a tar file into a DOS-based premastering system is a perfect example of why universal operability is the next technical challenge for the CD-ROM industry at large. If this issue is continued to be ignored, entire market segments will be left paralyzed because of the inability to publish information from beginning to end without experiencing compatibility problems. This bleak scenario could result in the CD-ROM industry losing the acceptance and respect it has worked hard to gain.

The Challenge AheadThis article has illustrated some of the potential problems, which can result when using the UNIX tar format as a data submission medium for CD-ROM replication. More importantly, it has shown that a much greater variety of CD-ROM applications could blossom if the CD-ROM industry embraces a diversification of CD-ROM platforms. The ISO-9660 standard has provided a good basis for the exchange of CD-ROMs across different hardware and software platforms. It is now time for the CD-ROM industry to address and overcome the many obstacles faced by the challenge of universal operability. The increasing need for a standard media- and platform-independent format for data submission is just one such obstacle. In the short term, manufacturers of CD-ROM premastering workstations should publish specifications indicating the limitations of their systems. This would allow publishers and replicators of "atypical" CD-ROMs to avoid many of unforeseen pitfalls they must now face. In the long term, these premastering systems must be made more robust.

The next generation of CD-ROM publishers and users will help CD-ROM technology reach new heights, but they will become far less forgiving as CD-ROM becomes more commonplace. For NIST, the UNIX road to CD-ROM has certainly been "the road less traveled." Currently, the development, production, and use of CD-ROM technology in UNIX and other environments is still in its infancy. However, by increasing support for development and production in these environments, CD-ROMs may someday be produced and used on a variety of platforms as easily as they are on MS-DOS-based systems today. It is only in this way that the CD-ROM will become the truly universal medium of data exchange that it was intended to be.

AcknowledgmentsThe authors wish to thank the following people which have helped them in their quest for solutions to the problems this article has outlined: Joe Bradley and Clayton Summers at Philips and Dupont 10Helgerson, L. W., "Universal Operability: The Technical Solution", Disc Magazine, pp. 36-39, October 1990. Optical Co., Dennis Clark, formerly of Meridian Data, Inc., Leon Whidbee and Gisele Venczel at Disc Manufacturing, Inc., Lance Buder and Sylvester Pefek at Optical Media International, and Tom Brown at Reflective Software.

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Escaping the UNIX1 Tar PitProducing CD-ROMs in the UNIX Environment©

Authored & Published in January of 1991

Stan J. CaterboneDirector of CD-ROM Technologies for American Helix Technology Director of Advanced Media Group, Ltd.1857 Colonial Village LaneLancaster, PA 17601.Phone: (800) 525-6575Fax: (717) 392-7897

John S. GarofoloComputer ScientistNational Institute of Standards and TechnologyTechnology Building, Room A-216Gaithersburg, MD 20899Phone: (301) 975-3193Email: [email protected]

UNIX is a trademark of American Telephone and Telegraph, Inc. (AT&T). 2Disclaimer: Certain trade names and company products are mentioned in the text in order to adequately specify procedures and equipment used. In no case does such identification imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, nor does it imply that the products are necessarily the best available for the purpose.

Just when things are going smoothly, and we begin to feel a little too comfortable and too confident with CD-ROM technology, someone or something puts us in our place -- and thankfully so. It's these challenges that facilitate our progress toward broadening the horizons of CD-ROM technologies.

This article is intended to inform publishers and manufacturers of the problems that can be encountered in using UNIX tar-formatted files as a medium of data submission for CD-ROM production and some of the issues confronting the next generation of CD-ROM publishers. Databases developed on non-DOS-based3 systems which have performance requirements that exceed MS-DOS capabilities are becoming more commonplace. Ironically, the existing CD-ROM production infrastructure has been created and supported primarily by DOS-based systems. Although we are making progress in publishing data on other platforms, a large majority of the CD-ROMs published today are still designed on DOS machines for use on DOS machines. The current tendency to link CD-ROM with DOS is making difficult the implementation of CD-ROM technology on non-DOS systems and, therefore, slowing its widespread acceptance. 3DOS is a trademark of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) and MS-DOS is a trademark of the Microsoft Corporation.

The ensuing paragraphs illustrate the need for the CD-ROM industry become more in tune with the trends which are shaping information technologies. CD-ROM, which is one such information technology, is beginning to recruit a new breed of both users and publishers, which are hoping that CD-ROM will adapt to them, as opposed to them having to adapt to it. The Automated Speech Recognition Group of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is one such CD-ROM publisher.

The NIST Automated Speech Recognition GroupSponsored in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Information Science


and Technology Office (DARPA-ISTO), the group designs and implements methods of performance evaluation for spoken language systems. These systems consist of natural language understanding as well as speech recognition components. Additionally, it distributes databases, or corpora, of speech recordings as standard reference material for the development and evaluation of these systems.

Traditionally, these speech corpora have been recorded and stored in a digital form rather than in an analog audio format. This allows the data to be easily loaded, stored, and manipulated in computers and prevents signal degradation in copies. The speech is digitized at a sampling rate of between 10 and 20 kHz., as opposed to the 44.1 kHz. sampling rate used in CD-audio. Digitizing speech at these sampling frequencies keeps intact the properties of the speech signal that are important for automatic speech recognition while minimizing storage requirements. These corpora typically consist of thousands of spoken phrases or sentences which are stored in separate files for ease of computer manipulation.

In the mid 1980's, the NIST began an archival/lending library for public domain speech corpora. The corpora were originally maintained and distributed on half-inch reel-to-reel digital magnetic computer tapes. Initially, these corpora were small, but as recognition systems became more sophisticated, their appetite for "training" data grew tremendously. By the end of the decade these corpora were each occupying 50 or more 6250 bpi. half-inch magnetic tapes and even larger databases were on the horizon. Managing these colossal databases of speech had become a real problem. Simply storing, copying, and distributing the corpora had become unwieldy. Furthermore, maintaining the integrity of the corpora was even more difficult as tapes were frequently damaged in shipment or by rogue tape drives.

NIST and CD-ROMBy early 1988, the NIST Automated Speech Recognition Group had begun investigating optical disk storage technologies as a means of replacing its tape archives. Initially, Write-Once Read- Many (WORM) technology was considered for use as a universal distribution medium but was found to lack adequate standardization. Fortunately, in the Spring of 1988, the ISO-9660 file format standard for CD-ROM was adopted and CD-ROM was chosen by NIST as a new "experimental" medium for distributing speech corpora.

NIST decided that the first corpus to be produced on CD-ROM would be the DARPA "TIMIT" Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus. Under DARPA sponsorship, TIMIT was jointly designed, recorded, transcribed, and archived by Texas Instruments (TI) , the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), SRI International, and the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST). The TIMIT corpus was designed to provide speech data for the acquisition of acousticphonetic knowledge and for the development and evaluation of automatic speech recognition systems. The corpus contains recordings of 630 speakers from 8 major dialect divisions of American English each speaking 10 phonetically-rich sentences. In addition to standard orthographic (text) transcriptions, TIMIT contains unique time-aligned phonetic transcriptions.

NIST felt that TIMIT's unique structure would be of great interest to speech researchers and, therefore, would probably be ideal for widespread publication on CD-ROM. NIST decided to publish two-thirds of the corpus on a "prototype" CD-ROM. Because of the ISO-9660 restrictions on filename length and format, the chosen two-thirds of the corpus to be placed on CD-ROM was restructured from a flat directory structure with lengthy unique UNIX filenames into a dense 5-level directory hierarchy, which reflected the design of the corpus and conformed to ISO-9660. The resulting directory structure contained 4200 bottom-level subdirectories -- one for each sentence-utterance, and 3 files per utterance for a total of 12,600 data files! This new organization required the use of the entire path and filename to uniquely identify a file but was "visually navigable."


To date, more than 200 "TIMIT Prototype" discs have been distributed to universities and speech research laboratories worldwide. The discs were well received by the speech research community and have been read on PC's, Macintoshes4, various UNIX systems, NeXT5 machines and MicroVAXes6. The "experiment" had proved to be successful.

As of this writing, NIST has produced four releases of speech corpora on eight discs. Recently, NIST completed production of its most ambitious speech disc so far. The new disc is a complete revision of the TIMIT Prototype disc and contains the speech for the complete 630-speaker corpus as well as all-new time aligned word-boundary transcriptions. The new TIMIT CD-ROM contains 25,200 data files (4 files per utterance) as well as more extensive documentation and software utilities.

After the production of the TIMIT prototype disc, NIST recognized the need to distribute speech 4Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. 5NeXT is a trademark of NeXT, Inc. corpora in a consistent format. Unfortunately, no standard file format existed for storing and exchanging speech signals. Compounding this problem, almost every speech research laboratory around the world used different hardware and software configurations for speech signal processing and analysis.

A UNIX-Based CD-ROM Preparation WorkstationIn order to implement a full scale CD-ROM production effort, the Automated Speech Recognition Group built a UNIX-based CD-ROM publishing workstation, which also doubles as a general-purpose speech research system. CD-ROM images are prepared on a Sun Microsystems server system with 32 megabytes of main memory, 3 gigabytes of high-speed magnetic disc storage, a 9- track tape drive, an 8mm tape drive, and of course a CD-ROM drive. The workstation contains two 1.2 gigabyte magnetic disc drives on which entire CD-ROM images can be assembled and simulated.

Each CD-ROM is now organized entirely in the UNIX environment. Many of the standard UNIX utilities and capabilities have proven ideal tools for CD-ROM preparation. Tar files are now submitted for CD-ROM replication on one 8mm tape, instead of 5 or 6 half-inch reel-to-reel tapes.

UNIX-based CD-ROM premastering software is planned to be added in the near future to help alleviate some of the complications NIST has experienced in submitting data for replication. By performing ISO-9660 formatting in house, an ISO-9660 image can be submitted to the replication facility. The ISO-9660 image can then be directly loaded into a mastering system – thus circumventing the problems which can occur downloading tar-formatted files.

NIST has developed strategies to maximize the portability of its CD-ROMs by organizing speech data into a consistent format and providing utilities which can be linked into each laboratory's unique hardware and software systems. To accomplish this, a flexible, object-oriented header structure was developed for the exchange of speech files, especially on CD-ROM. The header is an ASCII-based structure prepended to each speech file and allows an utterance to be uniquely identified (even if the file is copied from CD-ROM and inadvertently renamed) and describes basic attributes of the speech signal to aid in digital to analog operations. A set of software utilities have been written, "Speech Header Resources" (SPHERE), to provide a low-level interface for importing and manipulating these files. NIST now publishes all speech data in this more consistent format.

A Data Submission ProblemAll of the key components for efficient CD-ROM production were in place at NIST, except for a vehicle for data submission. When NIST initially delved into the world of CD-ROM production,


it was dismayed to learn that most CD-ROM replication facilities accepted only standard ANSI labeled or ISO-9660 imaged tapes as transfer media. The small Automated Speech Recognition Group could not justify the expense of purchasing a special-purpose premastering workstation dedicated to creating ISO-9660 tapes. Neither could NIST provide standard ANSI-labeled tapes because the simple structure of ANSI-formatted files would not preserve the extensive directory structure required by the many files typically contained in speech corpora.

The UNIX tar Answer?The tar-formatted tape is the standard medium of data exchange in the UNIX world and NIST had been successfully distributing speech corpora on "tar tapes" for several years. The UNIX tar (Tape Archive) utility was designed to create a portable archive format for UNIX files. The tar program generates a single file (usually on magnetic tape) which contains all of the information necessary for reconstituting directories, files, and UNIX-specific file parameters. What distinguishes the tar utility from most other archive programs is that the archive format it creates is portable across machines and operating systems. The key to the tar format's portability is in its simplicity. Tar does not employ any elaborate compression algorithms when generating an archive. It simply creates a byte-for-byte copy of each file to be archived with a prepended header block. The header block contains the path and name of the file (or directory), the file size, the time of last modification, and UNIX ownership and permission flags. Because the information in the each header block as well as the file itself is byte-encoded, the tar file can be read by any system which can recognize a stream of bytes. Of course, binary executable files are system-specific and cannot usually be implemented on differing systems. But text, source code, and binary data files can be easily exchanged.

To date, the tar program has been ported to many operating systems, including MS-DOS and VMS8 as well as the many variants of UNIX. Because the tar format is portable and preserves directory hierarchy, and because a tar file can be written to a standard ANSI-labeled tape or any other storage medium, NIST concluded that tar formatted ANSI tapes would be the ideal vehicle for providing a CD-ROM-ready file image to a replication plant. Unfortunately, NIST has found that most replication plants either refuse to accept tar-formatted files or they charge considerable "data conversion" fees to download the files into their premastering systems. To say the least, the acceptance of tar as an input medium for CD-ROM production has been less than universal by the CD-ROM replication industry. The replication facilities that have ventured into the "tar pit" with NIST have frequently encountered technical delays and cost overruns. In theory, the tar-tape to CD-ROM process should be simple.

But in reality, it has rarely been straightforward to implement. Pitfalls in Extracting a CD-ROM Image from a UNIX tar File The challenges encountered in producing a CD-ROM from a 630-megabyte tar tape, which contains over 25,000 files, can at first seem insurmountable. Several problems have occurred during production, some of which are still not completely resolved. Downloading and extracting a CD-ROM image from a tar file can be excruciatingly slow, taking 15 or more machine hours of time for a single disc image. If a tar file is packed with thousands of files, unforeseen complications can arise in the extraction process, and diagnosing and troubleshooting all of the subsystems involved can become painful for even the most experienced of engineers and technicians.

Extracting the file structure from a tar file for a CD-ROM such as the new TIMIT disc requires a great deal of time and attention because of the extraordinary number of directories and files. The subsystems involved in the tar extraction process require seamless integration. These include the PC hardware platform and MS-DOS operating system, the premastering system, the device drivers, controller cards, tape back-up systems, and the tar utility. Limitations inherent in the MS-DOS operating system, device drivers, and file structures can result in breakdowns in any one of these subsystems resulting in the loss of hours of man and machine time in the production process.


Eight-mm tape subsystems can be especially vulnerable when extracting exceedingly large numbers of files. This is because 8mm tape drives are mechanically suited for streaming operations. They are not as accommodating as 9-track tape drives in the quick stopping and starting movements, which become necessary when extracting many thousands of small files. Additional loss of efficiency occurs when 8mm drives must interface with a system, which has become bogged-down with overloaded magnetic disk sub-systems. The only way to optimize their operation is to load and buffer large blocks of raw data before it is tar-extracted. Subtle problems may also arise when the controller cards of some 8mm tape systems are not entirely compatible with the publishing system being used. These and other unforeseen problems can cause a tape drive to abort operations well before completion of the extraction process. Worse yet, because the tar format does not guarantee that directories and files are stored in any particular order, an entire tar file must be scanned to extract any subset of files contained in it. If the tar-extraction process aborts before the end of the tar file is reached, the entire process must be restarted from the beginning to insure that all files are loaded. These constraints require that special efforts be taken to prepare backup tapes and even second backup tapes during production. This is one area of risk where the insurance is well worth the effort, and is within one's control. Many of the other pitfalls are not as easy to anticipate or avoid.

One of the more frustrating problems encountered while downloading the TIMIT tar file was that of the overhead created while extracting the 18,900 small transcription files. To illustrate this point, during the downloading of the 632-megabyte tar file, containing the 25,241 TIMIT files, the process aborted on 650-, 850-, and 1200-megabyte partitions due to insufficient disc space!

On UNIX systems, the size of file blocks (similar to the ISO-9660 and DOS sector structures) can be modified. Although the ISO-9660 standard supports different sector sizes, the individual operating systems used in the premastering process may present problems. For example, MS-DOS 3.31 does not allow any modifications to sector size. Fortunately, MS-DOS 4.0 is more forgiving.

The TIMIT tar file contained 18,900 transcription files of under 2Kb each. A premastering system running DOS 3.31 with a 16Kb sector size would require over 300 megabytes of disk storage for these files, which actually amount to less than 32 megabytes of data. This results in disk overhead of 1 order of magnitude! However, by switching to DOS 4.0, the sector size can be reduced to as little as 512 bytes. This significantly reduces the overhead being used by the DOS partition. It is therefore important to adjust the sector size to accommodate the size of the database files to be downloaded. To maximize disk usage, the sector size should be set high when premastering a database with a few large textual files. But when a database (such as TIMIT) contains many small files, the sector size should be greatly reduced. Likewise, it is also important to allow for this kind of overhead on the CD-ROM itself. Although CD-ROMs are generally created with a 2Kb sector size, the sector size can be reduced on the ISO-9660 image in the premastering phase to as little as 512 bytes. By decreasing the sector size on the TIMIT ISO-9660 image to 512 bytes, potential disc overhead was reduced by about 32 megabytes.

Finally, a hidden source of potential problems lies within the implementation of the utility used to extract the tar file. There are currently a number of tar utilities that have been written and are in use today. Many of these utilities are suboptimal in speed and efficiency. The time required for downloading a tar file can become critical when extracting large numbers of files. Therefore, using the right tar implementation is a must.

The Real "Tar Pit" -- Universal OperabilityThe real problem facing the CD-ROM industry concerning the production of non-DOS-based


discs lies not in which utilities or platforms to use, but within the deeper abyss of universal operability. Universal operability encompasses the common methodology of transferring, publishing, and retrieving many different types of data across different platforms, while using different hardware and software systems. Attempting to extract a tar file into a DOS-based premastering system is a perfect example of why universal operability is the next technical challenge for the CD-ROM industry at large. If this issue is continued to be ignored, entire market segments will be left paralyzed because of the inability to publish information from beginning to end without experiencing compatibility problems. This bleak scenario could result in the CD-ROM industry losing the acceptance and respect it has worked hard to gain.

The Challenge AheadThis article has illustrated some of the potential problems, which can result when using the UNIX tar format as a data submission medium for CD-ROM replication. More importantly, it has shown that a much greater variety of CD-ROM applications could blossom if the CD-ROM industry embraces a diversification of CD-ROM platforms. The ISO-9660 standard has provided a good basis for the exchange of CD-ROMs across different hardware and software platforms. It is now time for the CD-ROM industry to address and overcome the many obstacles faced by the challenge of universal operability. The increasing need for a standard media- and platform-independent format for data submission is just one such obstacle. In the short term, manufacturers of CD-ROM premastering workstations should publish specifications indicating the limitations of their systems. This would allow publishers and replicators of "atypical" CD-ROMs to avoid many of unforeseen pitfalls they must now face. In the long term, these premastering systems must be made more robust.

The next generation of CD-ROM publishers and users will help CD-ROM technology reach new heights, but they will become far less forgiving as CD-ROM becomes more commonplace. For NIST, the UNIX road to CD-ROM has certainly been "the road less traveled." Currently, the development, production, and use of CD-ROM technology in UNIX and other environments is still in its infancy. However, by increasing support for development and production in these environments, CD-ROMs may someday be produced and used on a variety of platforms as easily as they are on MS-DOS-based systems today. It is only in this way that the CD-ROM will become the truly universal medium of data exchange that it was intended to be.

AcknowledgmentsThe authors wish to thank the following people which have helped them in their quest for solutions to the problems this article has outlined: Joe Bradley and Clayton Summers at Philips and Dupont 10Helgerson, L. W., "Universal Operability: The Technical Solution", Disc Magazine, pp. 36-39, October 1990. Optical Co., Dennis Clark, formerly of Meridian Data, Inc., Leon Whidbee and Gisele Venczel at Disc Manufacturing, Inc., Lance Buder and Sylvester Pefek at Optical Media International, and Tom Brown at Reflective Software.

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1990 STRATEGIC PLANNING

Executive Summary - 1989 Plan & Progress to Date

A. THINGS THAT WENT NOT SO WELL......1> Mastering

.. Mastering was a cost passed through to the client when our original plans were put topaper. Today Mastering is either included in the disc price, or a minimalcharge is obtained from the small or one time Compact Discs user. Thenet result has been a severe cut in the margin, particulary whenwe had targeted the smaller users.

2> Lower disc prices.. During the development of our plan disc prices had appeared to stabalize at the $1.50 -

$2.00 range for the smaller user, but over the last 12 - 18 months thesebegan to erode. This was driven by several large commodity producerstrying to obtain a larger market share, and attemping to drive offcompetition. The net result has been pricing as low as $.85 -$1.00 per disc, thus creating a further lowering of the margins.

3> Late start up.. The facility was not able to be occupied until mid-December, appoximately 90 days behind

our original targeted move-in date. Together with a few keycomponents arriving late, the net result being equipment start-upwas not able to begin until January 1, 1989. Creating a time lineabout 120 days behind our original targeted date.

4> Slower ramp up.. The actual start-up went very smooth, however the amount of time required to prospect

clients, receive orders, receive production ready components from theclient, and complete shippable product has been far greater thanexpected or projected. The net result being a much greater timespan to cultivate and turn around orders, thus slowing down anddelaying the projected revenue stream.

5> Interest.. Only basic interest charges were budgeted into our plan based on projections. In reality the

late start, the long ramp up, the lower margins, and the time lag in thecompletion of special projects that were added to the plan, haveresulted in higher than projected interest charges. The net result, amuch larger debt to service, lowering the margin.

6> Stay Focused..Looking Back - We could have focused more on operational issues. There are many

distractions that come about in the everyday life of a start-up,particularly when involved with high technology. During the past yearwe had a tendency to over-look the everyday tradtional functions andonly focus on the complex issues at hand. Administrative proceduresthat should have had more attention, such as order processing,customer service, and basic personnel management did not recieveenough attention.


In an effort to make our goals as projected, we had a constant fight to avoid putting blinderson to the things that were happening in our industry. Such as the timerequired to prospect a client, demand cycles within the industry, and thestability of pricing.

The net result is that with the plant now operational, we will be able to apply agreater amount of attention to these areas in 1990. This willresult in highly efficient operational tools, and give us a moreaccurate picture of our industry.

B. Accomplisments..WHAT WENT WELL....

1> Facility.. The facility was completed as invisioned and truely captures the spirit that was intended.

The net result being the facility has greatly aided us in capturingkey clients and resulted in the image being created we haddesired.

2> Qualified with majors.. CBS, GRP, CAPITOL, AND RCA, are all considered major forces in the industry. It is very

unsual for an independent production facility to qualify with major labelswithin their first six months of operations. The net result beingindustry prestige, higher volume, and longer runs per title.

3> Image.. To be succesful in todays global market a company needs more than good prices and

quality. There must be something that sets you apart from the rest,IMAGE. In our plan we identified that need and targeted a well definedimage that had to be developed. An image of High Quality Products,Special Services, Attention To Detail, Excellent Customer Service,Innovative Approaches To Problems, and The Ablility To Get The JobDone. We have that IMAGE, and the net result is a suberbreputation, which is now leading to good working relationshipswith high end clients.

4> Ahead of schedule in CD-ROM.. The CD-ROM industry is coming on strong and is about one year ahead of our projections.

The net result is Helix has established itself as a force in thedeveloping CD-ROM industry.

5> Pioneered sucessful new production technology.. The industry has carefully watched and evaluated our innovative production technology.

The net result is many of our competitors are now installingcomponents that have been developed and tested at our facility,further enhancing our image of being an industry leader.

6> Expanding plant capacity.. The 1989 plan had called for a doubling of capacity based on market demand. During the

fourth quarter of 1989 we will be installing our second production line,thus doubling our capacity. This expansion is being driven by twoforces, one is the increasing market and client demand we are


experiencing, and secondly the need for this facility to produce at ahigher output level to off-set the fixed overhead that we must suppport.Although driven by two distinctly different issues, the facility willbe expanding within the time frame that was projected.

II. Key Performance Measures

A. Audio

1> Plant Utilization a> 1990 Capacity, 3.6 Million Discsb> 1990 Projected Goal, 3.3 Million Discs

2> Plant Yield, 80% or 2.75 Million Discs

3> Order turn around, 3 weeks from time of order

4> Sales, .....

5> Bottom line .....

B. CD-ROM

1> Sales ....

2> Completion of CD-ROM projects

3> Bottom line....

C. Special Projects

1> Evaluation as needed....

III. Internal Analysis

A. Key Segments - Key Performance Measures

1> Administrative

Customer Service:

Providing accurate information:

Paperwork turnaround:

2> Manufacturing

3> Sales/Marketing


B. Summary of Strengths and Weaknesses

1> Strengths

a> Manufacturing ability

b> Marketing

c> Identifing and Analyzing problems

2> Weaknesses

a> Reliance on third party vendors

b> Fast turn around

c> Effective internal communications

C. Highlights of new insights influencing 1990 planning

1> Need for more effective communication internally

a> Executive team

b> teaching communication skills to 2nd level

D. Data still to be develpoed/analyzed and status of progress

1> Systems/Tracking development

2> Operating costs

3> Mastering

4> Premastering

IV. External Analysis

A. Industry Structures

1> Technology changes

2> Industry capacity VS demand

3> Third party dependant

a> Mastering

b> Premastering


c> Packaging

B. Served Market Changes

1> Market will get larger

2> Increased demand brings increased competition

3> Growth

a> Audio - medium

b> CD-ROM - high

4> Diversity will follow the growth rate

5> Less concentrated as industries grow

C. Key Competitors

1> US-Canadian trade pact adds two competitors

2> Shutdown of Shape Optimedia

3> Acquisition of Shape by Eurodisc

D. Nature of Competition

1> Key sucess factors

a> Audio

i> Priceii> Volume

iii> Turnaround

iv> Services

b> CD-ROM

i> Relationships

ii> Technical expertise

iii> Required equipment

iv> Turnaround


2> How we compete

a> Audio

i> Price

ii> Turnaround

iii> Services

iv> Image

b> CD-ROM

i> Relationships


iii> LASERTEX software toolsThe LASERTEX software tools incorporate the full service approach which most companies

need and are actively looking for.

iv> ImageAmerican Helix from the beginning has worked to develop a high end image which will be

very important in CD-ROM.

3> How they compete

a> Audio

i> Price

ii> Volume

iii> Turnaround

b> CD-ROM

i> Relationships


iii> Required equipmentMost replicators working in CD-ROM have already acquired the necessary premastering and

mastering equipment. This is an area where AmericanHelix can not compete.

iv> TurnaroundWith mastering other companies are able to offer a one day turn around on orders where we

can't bid on these contracts

4> Future Changes


a> Audio

i> Increased capacity

b> CD-ROM

i> Replicators acquiring softwareWe can expect replicators to actively seek relationships with software vendors to provide the

increasing demand from their customers. We should tryto turn this change to our advantage by marketing to thereplicators.

ii> Software vendors lowering pricesSoftware vendors will lower their prices in reaction to increased competition in the industry.

We must keep our competitive anaylsis up to date andsell more than just price.

iii> Relationships developingCompanies are scrambling now to develop relationships. We need to scramble at a faster

pace.

iv> Increased servicesAs time goes on more and more companies will adopt the full service approach. Only the

replicatore can truly provide the full service approach.

E. Threats and Opportunities

1> Threat

a> Audio

i> More competitors

ii> Increased capacity

iii> Technology changes

b> CD-ROM

i> More competitors

ii> Technology changes

iii> Missing window of Opportunity

iv> Inability to develop relationships

2> Opportunities

a> Audio

i> Gain market share thru special services


ii> Trend towards long term contractual relationships

iii> Expand product line (ie. cassettes)

iv> Market technology

v> Increase volume from demand

b> CD-ROM

i> Leadership roleThere exists today the opportunity to develop a leadership role in the CD-ROM industry by

providing full service and education at a time when theindustry is still young and confusion still exists.

ii> Increased marginsMargins are generally higher due to the fact that the industry is still very young.

iii> Develop solid relationshipsMany companies are looking for relationships with optical publishing experts to add additional

services to their company.

iv> Expand product line (ie. WORM)American Helix must continue to look for additional products and services to provide its

customers to increase the customers dependancy onHelix.

V. Strategic Issues For 1990

A. Utilize plant capacity

<Impact> Directly related to plant utilizationCharts: Start-up ramp this year 1990, expansion ramp up

Break-even vs utilization

B. Niche services

1> Multicolor and full color label printing

<Impact> Value added service that helps to increase margins and our ability to attract newcustomers

prices............

2> Premastering ala Boyer

<Impact> Enhance our ability to turn around orders in a timely manner, increase margins,and limit our dependancy on outside vendors

pricing............


C. Control cost of mastering

1> Discs per title

2> Reducing outside vendor cost

3> Increase fee to client

4> Acquire mastering capabilities

<Impact> Enhance our ability to turn around orders in a timely manner, increase margins,and limit our dependancy on outside vendors

D. Practice better communication

1> Internally through training programs

<Impact> Positive impact on all performance measures

2> Externally through industry articles

<Impact> Positve impact on sales

E. Manage our bottom line

<Impact> Positive impact on our bottom line

F. Implement LASERTEX/Advanced Media Group

<Impact> Enables us to complete projects, sell, and have a bottom line

G. Research vertical revenue streams

<Impact> Increases market and industry awareness

VI. Training and Development

A. Technical Training

1> Vendor sponsored training for production people

B. Management Training

1> Excel for communication skills & other weak areas

2> Computer and other courses

VII. Vision


A. A company we as customers would feel good about dealing with and as employees beproud to be associated with.

B. Grow with Audio

C. Develop high end niche services

D. Leadership role in CD-ROM

E. Public executions

VIII. Key Investment Strategies

A. Mastering

B. Continued expansion


PROJECT DESCRIPTION STATUS FOLLOW UP NOTES1 NOTES2

Mansco, Inc. Develop Images Pre-Qualify Question 2/10/1990

Called 03/07/90 Jim Dering/ In Contact

National Assoc Of Watch & Clock

Collector Pat Tomes/ Paul Wills

Develop Multimedia Applciation Pre-Qualify Question 1/5/1990

Bid $ 47,500 2/21/1990 Informal Budget Approval 02/25/90

General Council Meeting July Contact 04/05/90 Test Image 05/31/90 Storyboard

Parsons & Brinkerhoff Engineers Develop Technical Application

Project 4th on Priority 6-8 Weeks

Send ROM Information 4/25/1990

Tao Matlock Marcia Earle Pre-Qualifying Quest 1/27/1990

Meeting 03/28/90 General Discussions

Call 05/31/90 Contact Tao /Status

Ford New Holland Replication Bid 2/8/1990 Commitment to DATAWARE Robert Shively Carmen Martin Bid W/Steve Swan ? Keep in Touch

Mobil Oil, Inc. Lynn Hyland

Legal Documentation Bid $47,500 1/13/1990

Verbal Approval 03/08/90/S. Robertson June or July Start Date

Contacted 06/01/90 Left Message

Generic Software, Inc. Develop Software and Technical Docs CONTACT

Mark Wiley? Pre-Qualify Question 2/5/1990 Indiana Bell CONTACT Ref Bruce Kline Congressional Info Systems CD-DIAGNOSTICS

Sent Version 1.2 CONTACT & Technical Specs

Microsoft, Inc CD-DIAGNOSTICS License Agreement CONTACT Evaluate 02/28/90 Tech Docs 03/08/90

Bell Atlantic Develop Directory Sample Date by Cost Meeting for

Ken Clark PAPER GLUT 3/20/1990 Prototype & Present �Invoice Story $1,000 Called 05/31/90

Storyboard 04/12/90 CD-ROM $450 Left Message Data?

Info for Demo Send "CD-ROM TECH" Will verify Data & Qty

3/20/1990 3/26/1990 5/3/1990



Tandy Electronics, Inc Develop 2000 Images Submit Data ? Contact D. Williams CDD Rev 1.4 to Phil

Technical Document M. Grubbs "get data 05/02,03,05/90 No Ans. Debord 05/31/90

Mike Grubbs from D. Williams" Called M. Grubbs

Dave Williams Meeting 03/15/90 4/29/1990 Letter to Dave Willims Left Mssg 05/31/90

Phil Debord/Cdd Action Plan 03/22/90 CDD rev1-4 5/8/1990Storyboard Demo PBS

Exxon Research And Production Multimedia Application Action Plan 03/22/90 D. Benfer "having

to D. Benfer 06/01/90

Company Technical Application trouble w/security Dave Benfer Sample Data ?? clearance for data"

Meeting 03/15/90 D. Benfer "will deliver 5/2/1990 soon" 04/09/90

Compaq, Inc CD-DIAGNOSTICS Revised CDD 1.2 License Agreement With Tech Docs

Ken Shufflebeam 3,000-6,000 users 3/7/1990 KEEP IN TOUCH letter 03/29/90

Ipsoa CD-DIAGNOSTICS License 8,000 Users Send CDD Rev 1.2 32939

Veda, Inc. Air Force Tech Docs 05/31/90 "Moving Slow Writing Specs for Bid"

Dave Tuemler Called 03/26/90 Call back 04/26/90 Will Call when he has

any news---influence Cbis, Inc Network Solutions Send Questionairs

other Docs Library Of Congress Refferal Relationship 4/20/1990 Jim Young Meeting 04/12/90 Call for Visitation Drew Lewis Demo Retrieval Send Follow Up Wayne Called on

System to Comittee Package 03/22/90 04/25/90 -- Data ??? 3/14/1990

Called on 04/04/90 Sent for RFP'S for Replication Bid 05/18/90 -- 05/28/90

Commodore Business Machines, Inc Replicate on 01/15/90 Meeting Developer Application Mike Kawahara 3/14/1990 In 05/22/90 Gail Wittenberg

Action Plan 04/19/90 Developer Package Out 05/31/90



Amp, Inc Replicate on 03/09/90 PO #30246784 @100 Ed Beauregard $3,000 Run 05/04/90 - 05/11/90

Reorder 100 03/22/90 $3000 / $7250 $200 PO # N/A @2500

Run 06/11/90 - 06/15/90 U. S. Postal Service Paul Jackson Telephone Tag

CONTACT

Arthur Anderson Replicate 2 IBM Discs Bid World Bank Project Tapes 03/27/90 32952

At&T / Data Dev. 200,000 Images Steve Swan

Waiting For Tapes From Steve Swan

Bancroft And Whintney 965,000 PAGES OF Steve visit 04/10/90 Ddi / Steve Swan CA Legal Statutes

Wayne prepare Demo Specs on 03/31/90 Never Finished

National Institute Of Standards Replication Bid Due Referrals given 04/25/90 05/09/90 Award Contract And Technology 3/30/1990 John Garfolio Test Tapes on 04/16/90 Verify "excellent rec." $20,000 Replication

To Distics 04/18/90 "ok" on 05/03/90 Order As Needed

American Bankers Association Complience Manuals Meeting At Helix Meet At ABA Lucy Griffen & Regulations 5/29/1990 06/15/90 @11:00

GOOD Meeting Schedule at ABA

Pa Blue Shield Develop KIOSK System Present Storyboard Logistics 05/08/90 For Companies on 04/30/90

Jim Cartmell Present Cost on Draft Story 05/30/90 Frank Ryan DVI, BENEFITS, ETC 5/4/1990 'DISASTER"

$4,700 Accepted Dave jeff/06/04/90 American Bond Buyers Convert Bond Meet 05/26/90 Slavek Rotkiewicz Offering Prospectus GOOD mtg. \Pentagon

to CD-ROM Sample Scan 60,000 issues / 120 pp. $1,000 Proto/Story ??

HEARST Publications Cataloque To CD-ROM Bid Due Out 06/05/90

"Good Things" @ Us Product KIOSK Systems For


PROJECT DESCRIPTION STATUS FOLLOW UP NOTES1 NOTES2Systems Retail Merchants

Internall Rotory Club LeadMike Rogers

Nasa Replication Bid Goddard Due 06/18/90Space FlightCenter 3 Masters @21,600 To 27,000


CD-ROM BUSINESS ACTIVITY( * Denotes Microsoft Conference Lead )

REPLICATION PROJECTS

*Arthur Anderson - IBM Demo Disc; under contract for March; 5 discsWorld Bank Disc; Currently under Bid; 20,000 to 400,000 disc;Completetion by Oct. '91

National Institute of Standards and Technology - (NIST) Requestfor Quotation by 03/30/90;100 to 500 disc including premastering.

Commodore Computer - Sampler Disc; Will bid in Fall of '90.

AMP, Inc. - Expected to manufacture 2 additional CD-ROM's in next 60days.

Library of Congress - Request for Proposal expected in 60 days

DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS

National Association of Watch & Clock - Bid Presented on 02/24/90-- $47,500; Goes before General Counci in June for final approval

Mobil Oil Company - Bid Presented on 01/17/90 -- $48,000; Verbalapproval; June start date

*TANDY Computer - under considerations for technical manuals onCD-ROM

*EXXON Oil Company - under considerations for exploration data toCD-ROM

BELL Atalantic - evaluating sample data for cost estimate of prototypedisc

Library of CONGRESS - Request For Proposal expected out in 60 to120 Days

CUSTOMIZED SOFTWARE PROJECTS:

*COMPAQ COMPUTER: Evaluating CD-Diagnostics for licenseagreement for 3,000 to 6,000 support personel;


*IPSOQ - Large company in Italy, evaluating CD-Diagnostics for 8,000support personel;

*Microsoft - Evaluating CD-Diagnostics for licensing agreement forsupport personel


January 25, 1991

S. Dale HighHigh Industries, Inc.,1848 William Penn WayLancaster, PA 17604

Dear Mr. High:

I have been put in an unfortunate position, and because of your interest and investment intoAmerican Helix, I thought that I would seek your advice.

As you are aware, I have elected to continue and grow the CD-ROM business after AmericanHelix decided to discontinue the funding of such business. I have since built a strong andsuccessful foundation for the CD-ROM business with my own resources, including capital,knowledge, and marketing.

I was also finally able to negotiate a contract with David D. Dering, in November, after beingat risk without a contract since July, foolishly continuing to invest my capital in the business.The present terms of that agreement are in effect until at least 30 days after the NationalInstitute of Standards and Technology contract 43NANB014395 expires, sometime aroundMay of 1991.

On January 19, 1991, I was "locked out" of American Helix, and consequently my business.For unexplained and more importantly unjustified cause.

My real problem is that my business is suddenly exposed to undue and uninsured risk, inwhich I have no way of preventing this occurrence from happening again.

To give you a proper perspective on the preceding issues, consider the following:

A> My investment into "digital technologies" and my business dates back toFebruary of 1987, during which time I was producing the first "digital" movie,from set to theatre, with Power Station Studios, Flatbush films, and a proposedjoint venture with SONY. (See attached)

B> I have been responsible for all and any CD-ROM projects that American Helixhas participated in, excluding Lasertex business.

C>I am the only American Helix professional with any working or technical knowledgeof CD-ROM. (Just ask for a demonstration of a CD-ROM by anyone else, withno advance preparation)

D>I have always elected to include American Helix, in my credits when beingpublished or cited for my CD-ROM efforts.

1


E>I have contributed my own time and efforts toward administering andtroubleshooting all computer related systems at American Helix, withoutcompensation.

F>I have contributed in giving American Helix a well respected reputation in the CD-ROM industry, due to my efforts in administering and prescribing the requiredtechnical specifications, of which American Helix quality assurance personnelwere not familiar with, and had no working knowledge thereof. This respectcan be exemplified by the designation of a regular columnist by HelgersonAssociates, the leading publisher for the CD-ROM industry, and by thecontinued awarding of the National Institute of Technology and Standards(NIST) contracts, which require such expertise for production that only myselfand Phillips DuPont had ever elected to compete for.

G>I have include American Helix in my credits for the article "Escaping the Unix TarPit: Producing CD-ROM in the Unix Environment", which will be the featuredarticle of Disc Magazine, the leading technical magazine for the CD-ROMindustry, which was also approved for government publication by the NationalInstitute of Standards and Technology.

H>I have sole and exclusively built a steady flow of revenues for CD-ROM replication,and have increased revenues substantially.

I> I have produced a 197 page proposal for the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA),of the Department of Defense contract DMA700-90-0011 $2.6 million CD-ROMproject. Furthermore, I have negotiated in a competitive and fierceprocurement, finally yielding to SONY, however successfully bidding theproject within 5% of the award winning pricing schedule submitted by SONY.

J>I have developed a long term business relationship with technical respect fromAMP, Inc., for the production of transporting their parts catalogue to CD-ROMwhich is a steady customer, and still in its beta testing stage. Full productionis expected in the forthcoming months.

K>I have developed a market demand for CD-Diagnostics, a software program for theinstallation and maintenance of CD-ROM drives, owned by myself and TomBrown, a software engineer. This program has technical reviews from severalCD-ROM publications as one of only two such programs in existence, the otherdeveloped by SONY. Although this is only a $69.95 item, it continues toproduce a steady stream of solicitations from all parts of the world asfrequently as 5 to 10 per week, which are also prospects for other relatedtechnology products and services.

L>Dr. Barry Glick, of Donnelly Geosystems had called me personally in the later partof December, after seeing an advertisement that I had placed in CD-ROMEnduser, for the purpose of meeting to discuss my efforts and activities in"digital" technologies.

It is from several meetings that the issues of an acquisition or merger of AmericanHelix by Donnelly for the purpose of focusing the plant on CD-ROMtechnologies came to fruition. It was my opinion and suggestion to Dr. BarryGlick that such an opportunity may fit into the strategic plans of Donnelly, and

2


in the interests of High Industries.

As you can see, I have a tremendous amount of time, energies, knowledge and moniesinvested in this business. Furthermore, we collectively can be more successful building acommon business, with common missions, than conducting our respective businesses in theconfines of self-serving interests.

Additionally, I can not build and facilitate the growth of my respective business activities,while at the same time expending unnecessary time and energies protecting those same saidinterests. The technology marketplace is much to competitive and demanding for suchcircumstances.

Unfortunately, you do not know me, however, let me say that I have always been asuccessful businessman, no matter what people may say or think. And this includes myformer company Financial Management Group, Ltd.,. I built one of the more innovativefinancial firms in this area, at the age of 28, raising more than $80 million in capital in itsfirst year. Even withstanding the circumstances of its demise, I had sold my stock for a500% increase in a 2 year period, in fact I am the only principal shareholder to have eversell the stock at a profit.

And I am successful by conducting my business following a very simple acronym HIRA --Honesty, Integrity, Responsibility, and Accountability. That I guarantee is a foundationfor success.

If High Industries and or American Helix no longer wishes to continue a relationship, thenlets find an equitable and efficient means to resolve our relationship. I can only provide aliving for myself, by earning and producing my paycheck. And when that has beencompromised by unknown and unexplained reasons I get nervous. And this puts mybusiness, my investment, and my future at risk.

Mr. High, I apologize for taking your time with these issues, however myself and you seemto be the only persons with financial risk exposure due to American Helix.

I am certainly not expecting any response, however I would be more than happy to discussany of the preceding issues with you at your convienence.

Thank You for your valuable time.

Regards,

Stan J. Caterbone, Director

ENCLOSURES

3


January 9, 1991

James TritchHigh IndustriesGreenfield Corporate Center1833 William Penn WayLancaster, PA 17601

Dear Mr. Tritch:

We represent a (type of company) that is interested in pursuing the CDtechnologies business. We understand that High Industries owns and operatessuch a company, specifically American Helix.

Stan Caterbone has been advising us in these technologies and has indicatedthat there may be opportunities for investment or purchase in your AmericanHelix company and the CD-ROM technologies.

This letter is a simple letter of interest in efforts to move toward discussionspertaining to the above.

If you have any interests in continuing these discussions, we would like theopportunity to meet and visit your facility.

You may respond by calling or writing: (name)(address)(phone), (fax)

Respectfully,

(name)

cc: David D. Dering, President American Helix Allon Lefever, High Industries S. Dale High, President, High Industries Stan J. Caterbone, Director, Advanced Media Group, Ltd.,


August 16, 1990

Linda HelgersonHelgerson Associates, Inc.510 North Washington Street, Suite 401Falls Church, VA 22046-3537

Dear Linda:

As promised, enclosed are a few photographs of ourmanufacturing facility. Unfortunately, we have submitted ourbetter photos to another publisher a few days before we spoke.I hope these will suffice. I will attempt to caption each photo,however, please feel free to edit as you see fit.

LARGE PHOTO - "The CD-ROM replication process begins withthe injection of high grade polycarbonate resin into the injectionmolding machine. Above, the polycarbonate resin is shownbefore molding, at the American Helix facility".

CINCINNATI PHOTO - "American Helix has engineered state-of-the-art manufacturing technology, using a CINCINNATIMILICRON injection molding component. The quality assuranceengineer is seen inspecting a clear CD-ROM disc, which nowcontains the CD-ROM data.

OTHER PHOTO - "After the disc is molded, the Adept robottransports the disc to the metalization chamber. The aluminumcoating allows the CD-ROM player's laser to reflect theinformation, or the pitted surface of the disc. The AmericanHelix engineer is seen inspecting the surface quality before theprotective coating is applied."

Linda, please see that the photos are returned when you arefinished. I hope that they are helpful, and I am sorry the betterphotos are not available.

Thanks!!

Regards,

Stan J. CaterboneDirector, Advanced Media Group, Ltd.,

FED EX/photos


August 29, 1990

Phillip W. PrattTRW Defense Systems1555 N. Newport Rd.Colorado Springs, CO 80916

Dear Mr. Pratt:

In response to your request for information, please find theenclosed. The Advanced Media Group, Ltd., is a full serviceoptical publishing company featuring end to end productioncapabilities.

If we can be of any service, please give us a call.

Regards,


ENCLOSURE


August 29, 1990

Li YuMoodys Investor Services99 Church StreetNew York, NY 10007

Dear Li:

As per our conversation, please find the enclosed materials andinformation on our company and services.

With regards to your project, we would be interested indiscussing your requirements in further detail. We will look atseveral alternatives that may accommodate your specificenvironments, along with sufficient features and capabilities fortext and fielded data.

If you would like to continue our discussions, please give mecall.

We look forward to supporting your CD-ROM efforts.

Regards,


ENCLOSURE


August 29, 1990

Contracting Officer, (90C)VA Medical Center #500113 Holland Ave.Albany, NY 12208

Dear Sir or Madam:

Enclosed is an information kit about our company, and ourservices supporting the CD-ROM marketplace.

I would appreciate it if you could include us in your bidders listfor any future contracts dealing with such services.

I appreciate your considerations regarding this matter.

Regards,


ENCLOSURE


August 29, 1990

David D. Rothchild820 South Sharp StreetBaltimore, MD 21230

Dear Dave:

Please find the enclosed prototype disc for your enjoyment.This is a project that is in the preliminary design stages.

For faster response, copy the disc contents to your hard drive.You must also have 520K of memory available for the program.

I have enclosed a copy of the text contained in the program.This represents one of several hundred articles published inscientific journals that will be produce on CD-ROM. I have alsoenclosed a printout of the HELP documents.

Call me if you have any problems.

Regards,


ENCLOSURE


August 29, 1990

Linda HelgersonHelgerson Associates510 North Washington StreetSuite 401Falls Church, VA 22046-3537

Dear Linda:

As per our previous conversation, I have enclosed a copy of theCD DIAGNOSTICS program for your review and evaluation.

The software is intended for CD-ROM endusers. Its purpose isto provide the users with support during the installation andmaintenance of CD-ROM drives. The software also provides aplay utility for audio discs.

Some of the features also include performance tests of thedrive, and data tests of the CD-ROM disc itself.

I look forward to your evaluation.

Best Regards,


ENCLOSURE


Date: May 10, 1990From: Stan CaterboneTo: Skip Langley

SUMMARY OF MEETING ON 5 - 10 - 90

OVERVIEW - The purpose of our (Wayne, Stan, Skip) meeting was to establish an equitable, productive and profitable relationship between AMG and ESSCOMP. The goals and objectives of this relationship will be as follows:

ESSCOMP:

1. To provide data and information retrieval software and technologies.

2. To provide data and information preparation for projects that are contractedby AMG.

3. To provide other software products and utilities supporting the information technology industries.

4. To develop a library of utilities that can evolve into an authoring system for the CD-ROM industry.

AMG:

1. To market and contract CD-ROM development projects that will utilize the services of ESSCOMP for the production and retrieval of the informationas specified for the projects.

2. To develop market and industry recognition for the technologies and products that are developed by ESSCOMP.

3. To create new markets for the technologies and products produced by ESSCOMP.

4. To provide additional credibility for ESSCOMP through the use of the AMERICAN HELIX technologies, facility, corporate identity, and the association with High Industries, Inc..


2

SUMMARY (CONTINUED)

AMG & ESSCOMP

1. To position ourselves as a technological leader in the information technology industry through the following: superior products and services; dedication and commitment in the delivery of products and services; highest regards for quality assurance, and customer service; a realization that performance is the only measure for success.

2. To develop new technologies, products and services for the information technology industry.

3. To make a contribution toward the betterment of our society through our products and services, with specific regards for educational institutions.

EXCLUSIVITY ISSUES SUMMARY: It was established that ESSCOMP & AMG will require exclusivity agreements inorder to avoid and potential conflict of interests in conducting business.

ROYALTY & PROJECT INCOME

SUMMARY: It was established that the primary revenue sources for ESSCOMP would be royalty income (per disc/retrieval) and from the production services provided for CD-ROM projects.

DEMO & PERFORMANCE ISSUES

PERFORMANCE ISSUES: It was established that AMG will be at risk when securing contracts for the production of CD-ROM projects due to the unproven and untested technologies of ESSCOMP when applying those technologies to CD-ROM. It is also apparentthat because of the lack of experience in performing those production processes, AMG will experience a considerable amount of risk in bidding such projects, and committing to delivery dates.

CD-ROM DEMO: It was agreed that it is imperative to develop a demonstration of the ESSCOMP retrieval technology on or before July 1, 1990. ESSCOMP has agreed to at least produce a demo using the FARS data. ESSCOMP has agreed to finance the production of the project up to the 9-Track tape. AMG has agreed to finance the premastering, mastering, and replication of the demo.


3

CD-ROM DEMO (CONTINUED)

It is further understood that a demo of at least 100 MB is critical in providing any credibility to the technology. The demo of the FARS will at least help alleviate some of the fears of the "VAPORWARE" allegations.

RELATIONSHIP ISSUES

SUMMARY: The key to our success will be to provide for a relationship that will allow bothAMG and ESSCOMP to operate efficiently, productively, and successfully, as a unified organization. It will be of utmost importance that we collectively focus our energies and resources toward the same goals and aspirations and that we compliment each others efforts when conducting business. It will be of even greater importance that the market and industry at large perceive our organization as a unified entity with a common mission.

Because of the already complex structure of AMG, it will be necessary that we take the time and energy necessary to get our relationship synchronized. This will involve a considerable amount of sensitivity for all potential conflicts of interest.

WE CAN ACCOMPLISH THIS!

We must realize that this does not have to happen today. There is a lot to be said for approaching our relationship slowly and carefully in order to at sometime in the future operate in harmony, rather than rushing and never giving each other the chance we both deserve.

EQUITY ISSUES

EQUITY PARTICIPATION: There are two assets that are of potential value; AMG and ESSCOMP'S technology. Considering that we are both providing resources to appreciate the value of not only our respective assets, but also each others; an equity participation program would help to provide a more secure interest in each others efforts. However, thiswould also have the potential to contribute to an unproductive relationship if we find that for reasons beyond our control the chemistry just isn't right, or our respective aspirations are not compatible.

We should give ourselves the opportunity to test the waters before implementing any such program.


4

PLAN OF ACTION

SUMMARY: In light of the above issues, it will be imperative that we collectively protect our respective interests in pursuing our businesses. To accomplish this, and to aggressively pursue our goals, the following terms and conditions will be suggested.

PROBATIONARY PERIOD: Until both organizations have a comfortable position, it will beto both parties interest to carefully approach a long term relationship with formal contracts and agreements. We will establish a six (6) month probationary period to establish our businesses and to synchronize our operations. This will give both parties the necessary time to effectively evaluate our situations, making for a more successful attempt at our agreements.

We will for the most part enter into an agreement in principal to accommodate eachother with the necessary resources to conduct business in the same manner that we would expect to with our formal long term agreements.

OPERATIONS: We will operate on a project by project basis. ESSCOMP will provide bids for all contracts secured, along with firm commitment dates for delivery. We will mutually agree to pursue our long term business strategies, and we will maintain our unity. We will both agree in principal to a mutual exclusivity clause that will protect the interests of both parties. AMG will market and promote ESSCOMP'S technologies, and ESSCOMP will providethe quality and performance standards that is within its capabilities. Both parties will mutually agree to adhere to these terms and conditions that are reasonably acceptable.

FINANCIAL: Both parties will be responsible for their respective costs incurred while conducting business. It will become necessary to share certain costs and expenses that will be considered joint efforts for conducting business. These will be handled on a case bycase basis. ESSCOMP will receive income from both project production services, and also any royalties that may apply (50/50).

EQUITY: AMG will reserve equity for participation, and both parties will agree to define the terms within the probationary period.

GOOD FAITH: Both parties will agree to utilize these six (6) months to ramp up the operations, to get comfortable with the products and services that we are producing, and tobecome efficient in conducting business with one another.

This agreement can be executed with a simple hand shake, or with a legal agreement. All that we need to do is to get the job done!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


DIGITAL VIDEO INTERACTIVE (DVI)BETA SITE PROFILE

PROPOSED APPLICATION:American Helix proposes multiple applications in education training and entertainment.Currently American Helix is working with National Geographic Society to developeducational programs for school systems and museums. American Helix also proposesdeveloping authoring software for DVI development as well as educational programs tosupport companies developing DVI applications.

REQUESTING COMPANY:American Helix Technology CorporationContact:Scott RobertsonAddress:1857 Colonial Village LaneLancaster, PA 17601Phone:(717) 392-7840

BUSINESS PROFILE:American Helix was formed in 1988 as a full service optical publishing and replicationsite servicing all forms of optical technologies on compact discs. The company is a 4.5million dollar start up project funded by High Industries Inc., a Lancaster based firmwhich owns 37 companies involved in Real Estate, Construction, Bridge Building,Concrete, Food Services, Hotels, Cable TV, Retail Computer Stores, and a number ofother diversified companies. American Helix has since entered into joint ventures withNetwork Technologies to develop and market worktools for multimedia applicationsdevelopment for CD-ROM. LASERTEX worktools are available to companies large andsmall for in house publishing activities or for a production environment to serviceclients wishing CD-ROM products.

HISTORY & PLANS FOR INTERACTIVE MEDIAAmerican Helix's experience is summarized above. We plan to focus on up grading ourpresent authoring worktools to include DVI capabilities and adding to our presenteducational program to include DVI training.

DEVELOPERTom Vreeland with Network Technology Corporation


DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE & RESOURCESTom is the developer of the LASERTEX worktools and a number of mutimediaapplications built on the LASERTEX system. Network Technologies has a staff of 12people and extensive equipment for multimedia CD-ROM development. In addition toNetwork Technologies resources, this project has the full support of American Helixequipment and personnel. American Helix has a complete optical disc replicationfacility as well as CD-ROM authoring capabilities.

DVI APPLICATION DESCRIPTION

Customers: anyone looking to develop DVI applications

Product Description: In addition to authoring tools American Helix is also working withNational Geographic to develop educational programs for schools, museums andlibraries.

SALES VOLUME & LEVERAGED OFFSHOOTS

The DVI worktools will be available to anyone developing DVI applications

The Educational programs would be distributed through National Geographic's currentdistribution network

DEVELOPMENT TIMEWith cooperation from Intel, the worktools could be completed in 4 to 5 months.

The first National Geographic product would be completed in approximately the sameamount of time

RESOURCES REQUIREDNumber of Beta Systems 1

Designers None required

Programers None required

Video/Audio Production Required Appoximatly 30 minutes of video

Custom Software Required None known

Custom Hardware Required None known

Other


DVI VENTURE SUPPORT REQUIREDCompression Approximately 30 minutes

Programing Consultation

Production None known

Other

FUNDINGThe Worktools will be funded through a joint venture with American Helix and NetworkTechnologies

The National Geographic project will be funded through a joint venture with NationalGeographic and American Helix

Both projects have the complete financial and technical support of American Helix andHigh Industries

Prepared By Scott Robertson 05/15/89


1

March 6, 1991

PRESS RELEASE

COMMODORE CDTVSTRATEGIC ALLIANCE

The Advanced Media Group, Ltd., has recently signed a licensingagreement with Commodore International, Ltd., the WestChester computer maker. The strategic alliance is aimed atcombining the digital technologies expertise of the AdvancedMedia Group, Ltd., with the development of the CommodoreCDTV multimedia machine. The new system was officiallyintroduced at the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas thispast January. The first shipments are expected to followimmediately after the MICROSOFT CD-ROM Show, which will beheld in San Jose, CA in a few weeks. The show is the largestCD-ROM trade show for this new and emerging technology.

The CDTV is one of the boldest attempts of a computer maker tocreate a new category in the elusive field of consumerelectronics. The field of competition is intense, including, AppleComputer, Inc., International Business Machines (IBM), andTandy Electronics. The systems will support "game", reference,and also educational applications from the arms of film giantsLucasfilm and Disney.

Mr. Bushnell, who sold Atari in 1976, is challenged with amission to effectively integrate the best aspects of televisionwith computing. The foundation of the technology is builtaround CD-Audio and CD-ROM subsystems. The vast amountsof storage capacity inherent in CD-ROM technology coupled withthe "interactivity" of multimedia presentations give the systemsunlimited potential.

However, what makes the CDTV unique is that the completesystem is only the size of a conventional CD player. Any TVmonitor can be used without the need for a computer. Thesystem is operated with an infrared remote control. The systemcan also be adapted to an entertainment system and can playboth CD-Audio or CD-CDTV discs. This will make it the firstsystem to link the bridge between the conventional computermarkets and the consumer markets driven by CD-ROMtechnology. The retail price is expected to be under $1,000.

Stan Caterbone had manufactured the first CD-ROM disc forCommodore International Ltd., more than a year ago. TheAdvanced Media Group, Ltd., had been working withCommodore during the early development for the system overthe past year.

The licensing agreement will establish the Advanced Media


2

Group, Ltd., as one of two domestic premastering sites for thecountry. Because of the proprietary operating system, allapplications developed for the systems will require that theapplications be processed at one of the two sites. There iscurrently one site in the United Kingdom for the internationalmarkets. The Advanced Media Group, Ltd., will also provideend to end manufacturing for the CDTV discs.

The Advanced Media Group, Ltd., will also develop its ownportfolio of educational applications for the new systems.Several products are currently in the exploratory phase.

Negotiations are currently being held with DONNELLYGEOSYSTEMS, a division of R.R. Donnelly, of Chicago Illinois.This strategic alliance will allow the Advanced Media Group,Ltd., to provide CD-ROM technologies and capabilities to theincredible portfolio of information assets that R.R. Donnellyprints, publishes, and manages.

The Advanced Media Group, Ltd., is currently designingeducational applications for K through 12 grades that willproduce multimedia interactive lessons.

Since its inception, the Advanced Media Group, Ltd., has citedthe educational market as its primary area of interest.However, the markets' evolution is challenged by the falteringeducational infrastructure and the lack of financial resources.Fortunately, there is a consortium of larger corporations thatfeel a real sense of social responsibility to contribute toimproving the educational system at large. Interactivemultimedia technologies is expected to play an important part.Some of the corporations chartering this movement includesIBM, Xerox, and Lucasfilm, to name a few.

The Advanced Media Group, Ltd., capabilities and humanresources include extensive experience in Engineering,Instructional Design, Graphics Technologies, and CoursewareDevelopment for the interactive educational multimediamarkets. These capabilities are coupled with a strong andsuccessful foundation in the optical publishing industry. CD-ROM, IVD, Videodisc, CDTV, DVI and Worm technologies are allincluded in it's capabilities. Multiplatform authoring systems,Graphics Librarian, and CD-ROM Search Engines have beendeveloped by the engineers of the Advanced Media Group, Ltd.,

Educational courses that have been designed include:Composite Materials Manufacturing; Accounting Principles;Teacher Induction Training; and Interactive Math 1 & 2 (K-12,13 & 14) operating on CD-ROM & IVD concurrently.


Optical Publishing, Inc.

Business Plan for

Call Report Database

October, 1988

Serial #

This Business Plan is the property of Optical Publishing,Inc. (OPI). Because it contains confidential informationproprietary to Optical Publishing, Inc., no copies may be madewhatsoever of the contents herein nor any part thereof, norshould the contents be disclosed to any party not authorized todiscuss said contents by Optical Publishing, Inc. officers. Uponrequest, this copy must be returned to Optical Publishing, Inc.

Optical Publishing, Inc. 155 West Harvard~ Fort Collins, Colorado 80525 (303) 226-3466SUMMARY

Introduction to Company

Optical Publishing, Inc. (OPI) is a company in the opticaldisk publishing field, which is responding to the needs of thegovernment and commercial entities currently publishing anddisseminating information in paper, microfiche, microfilm and on-line medias. The advent of high powered personal computersapproaching speeds previously attained only by large mainframecomputers coupled with the declining costs of optical disks andplayers has created an explosion in the information industry fordistribution of information on low cost optical media. Theoptical publishing marketplace is currently in the infancy stage.The PC explosion in the business work place has created anatmosphere for the Compact Disk Read Only Memory (CD-ROM) andWrite Once Read Many times (WORM) market to grow at an unusuallyfast pace. OPI has responded to this market need by providing(i) commercially available software running on IBM mainframes aswell as MS-DOS personal computers, (ii) services for otherpublishers, and (iii) databases for sale to the government andcommercial marketplace. OPI started production of its firstdatabase product, NAVLOG, in June of 1988. NAVLOG is a largedatabase consisting of two CD-ROM disks. The data contained isthe Allowance Parts List, which is a compilation of allcomponents and component/part information utilized by the UnitedStates Navy. This database is used by thousands of U.S. Navy


personnel world-wide. Because the APL is being released to theMarketplace in October, OPI has now initiated action to begin itsnext database product referred to as the Call Report Database.

The Data

All commercial banks doing business in the United States arerequired to file a quarterly consolidated report of income andconsolidated report of condition. The Call Report Database willcontain these quarterly reports both current and historicallyback to 1985.

The Product Line

The products will be delivered in two formats, CD-ROM andFloppy diskette. The CD-ROM product will contain all informationboth current and historical for all banks in the United States.The floppy diskette version of the product will be customtailored to the particular geographic region of interest for thecustomer.

Market

The total estimated market for the CD-ROM version of the ~Call Report Database is 3,000 potential customers. The subsettedfloppy disk version of the product would have a potentialmarketplace of over 13,000 commercial banks.

Production

OPI will provide complete data processing services for dataconversion, application programming, pre-mastering, andmastering. In addition OPI will be supplying all retrievalsoftware for use with the product on the customer's personalcomputer.

Financing Required

The Call Report Database will require $265,000 to fund thedevelopment and implementation of the sales and marketingstrategy. This figure includes all data acquisition, all dataprocessing costs, and all sales and marketing costs necessary tolaunch the product. Any other necessary business expenses of CallReport will be charged against future sales revenue from sales ofCall Report.The Product Line

Overview

For the past three months OPI has employed a Consultant fromthe banking industry to investigate the possibilities ofproducing a financial information product. We found thatCommercial Banks, Bank Holding Companies, and Savings and Loan


Institutions are all required by the Federal Reserve to filequarterly financial reports to the government. This data isprocessed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)into a machine readable format for use within the government. Wehave decided to first focus upon the Commercial Bank marketplace.The following is a brief description of our market study.

The Data

The Federal Reserve requires all commercial banks doingbusiness in the United States to file a quarterly consolidatedreport of income and a consolidated report of condition. Thereare four categories in which a bank may fall total assets under$100 Million, total assets between $100 million and $300 million,total assets over $300 million, and banks with foreign officesregardless of assets. The required reports are slightly differentfor each of the four categories, but the majority of theinformation is common to all categories. The reports are brokenout into many sections with detailed line item accounting forschedules such as income statement, changes in equity capital,charge-offs and recoveries and changes in allowance for loan andlease losses, balance sheet, past due and Non-accrual loans andleases, etc. (See appendix for a sample report). There areapproximately 15,000 commercial banks filing these reports on aquarterly basis.

The Products

The products shall be delivered in two different formats,CD-ROM and floppy diskettes. The CD-ROM product will contain allof the information for all 15,000 commercial banks. The floppydiskette product will contain all of the information for aspecific banking area, i.e. city, county, zip code(s). Allproducts will be updated quarterly. The users will be able tocreate their customized formulas as well as customize subsets ofthe banks. For example, a bank in Denver, Colorado may want tocompare itself with 10 banks located within a three mile radiusto create a meaningful report on market share. The software willallow the banks to easily manipulate the data.

The Market

The total market for the Call Report Database is estimatedto be around $10 million.

The Customers

The CD-ROM version of the product will appeal to all bankswith net assets over $1 billion, bank holding companies owning alarge number of banks throughout the country, brokerage houses,and financial analysts. We estimate this group to number over3,000 potential customers.


The subsetted floppy disk version of the product would havea potential marketplace of over 13,000 commercial banks. Ourmarket studies indicate that a price range of $200-$500(depending on the size of the subset) would create a tremendousresponse.

The Competition

At this point in time there is only one major competitorselling this data. The company, Sheshunoff & Company, is locatedin Austin, Texas. They currently sell this data in CD-ROM formatand in hardcopy. The CD-ROM version of the product sells for over$9,000 with no discounting available for smaller subsets of thedata. This product is marketed and sold by the Lotus Corporationin Massachusetts and has very little market penetration. Wesuspect that price has a lot to do with that. The hardcopyproducts are produced twice a year, subsetted only to the statelevel and create a large amount of manual work both in locatingthe data desired and in key entry at a bank for the formattingand creation of pertinent reports. Despite these shortcomingsthis product has over a 75% market penetration and sells for $600per year. Sheshunoff has no direct sales force and markets theirdata through direct mail, banking trade shows, and advertisementsin banking periodicals.

The Sales and Marketing Plan

Sales Objectives

The sales objectives here reflect the 250 copy CD/3000 copyFloppy disk spreadsheet (see appendix).

Sales Objectives for Optical Publishing Inc.

Target Sales 1989 1990 1991 1992

X $1,000 500 1,500 3,000 6,000

Marketing Strategy

In the early stages of product development a product managerwill be hired to develop the marketing literature, prepare thetelemarketing "sales pitch", develop the necessary advertisingpieces for the banking trade newspapers, and arrange booth spacefor the two national banking meetings held every year.

Marketing Literature

OPI currently has a name and address database of all 15,000commercial banks. One month before product introduction, a mailerwill be sent out to all the banks announcing the new product andoffering a free floppy disk demonstration system.


Telemarketing

Although there may be some direct sales of the CD-ROMversion of the Call Report product initially, OPI believes that agood telemarketing individual will be able to sell 10 copies ofthe CD product per month. The telemarketing individuals will haveliterature, floppy disk demos, and good customer referrals assales aids to assist in the sale's close.

Advertising

There are two primary banking trade journals which will beutilized for advertising the Call Report product.

Trade Shows

The banking community holds two national meetings per year.One of the meetings is a two day affair, while the other meetinglasts for a week. Companies, which have products or services tosell to the banks, are given the opportunity to do so. Apavilion area is set up with booths during the day, and manycompanies open up hospitality suites at night in the hotels to ~continue the exposure and sale of their products. OPI intends tohave representatives at both of these meetings.The Production Plan

The production will be handled "in-house" by the OPItechnical staff at the OPI facility in Fort Collins, Colorado. Wewill provide all programming and technical support as well as allcustomer service support for the product line.

Equipment

The type of data processing that is necessary for opticaldisk publishing is extremely Input/Output (I/O) intensive. Forthis reason OPI is running an IBM 9375/model 60 as its primarydata processing system. We currently have 7 Gigabytes of harddisk data storage and 4 high speed tape drives. We have capacityfor 38 users on our mainframe computer system as well many highspeed IBM compatible 286/386 personal computers.

Software

The appendix contains a complete list of the softwarewhich will be utilized in the production of the product andutilized on the PC level for the retrieval of the data.

Facilities

OPI occupies a 3,000 square foot facility in Ft. Collins,Colorado, with an option to expand into another 4,000 square feetas necessary.


The Management Team

The officers of Optical Publishing, Inc. possess a strongtechnical background in all areas of data processing. Each memberhas started and successfully run his own consulting business.

Management

Joseph August, President

Gary Zola, Vice President of Sales and Marketing

Dr. Mervyn Jacobson, Financial Controller

Michael Fleischmann, Director of Data Services

Gail J. Bratz, Administration

Management Philosophy

Many studies have been done and much has been written aboutthe problems of American business today. Most of the problems canbe traced back to poor management. This is the reason the currentmanagement team was selected. The basic philosophy of the companymanagement is three fold:

1. Provide good quality service and be responsive to the customer's needs.

2. Use human resource management by showing respect for the individual in the work place, and viewing all workers as an evolving human resource. Encourage employees to learn new skills to help build a large base of highly skilled individuals.

3. Apply technology to develop and maintain high quality products for the consumer at a reasonable price.

Team Leadership Background

Mr. August

Mr. August has extensive training in computer hardware,software, and marketing, during his 22 years in the computerindustry. This experience is invaluable in today's ever-changingcomputer marketplace. Having spent nine years working for IBMCorporation in New Jersey, Mr. August was involved in all facetsof the large computer industry. The initial training inmanagement received at IBM provides a well-balanced backgroundfor good company leadership. Also having run his own computerconsulting business for 4 1/2 years developing personal computersoftware, Mr. August has a very good understanding of the currentsoftware marketplace.


Mr. Zola

Mr. Zola has an extensive background in the informationindustry. His experience includes programming, system analysis,sales training, sales, marketing, and product development. He hasheld various positions such as Director of Data Processing,National Training Manager, and Vice President of InformationSystems. In addition he started his own consulting firm designedto help companies market and sell their products to thegovernment. Mr. Zola's understanding of the sales and customerservice areas of the business allows OPI to bring products tomarket which will be user friendly and easier to support.

Dr. Jacobson

Dr. Jacobson is a medical practitioner who now lives inLuzern, Switzerland, and is CEO of the Datalab Group of Companieswhich is active in medical management, medical supplies, newproduct development and financial planning, with offices inAustralia, Honolulu, Colorado, Switzerland and the Netherlands.Dr. Jacobson brings to OPI his valuable expertise in businessplanning, management and financial control, which is sometimesoverlooked by young high-tech companies boasting a concentrationof specialized technical staff.

Mr. Fleischmann

Mr. Fleischmann has extensive experience developing PC basedsoftware and has a very broad educational background in ComputerScience and Electrical Engineering. Having a good understandingof the operation of the hardware allows Mr. Fleischmann todevelop software that is much more versatile, and executes at amuch faster speed than currently available products in the marketplace.

Miss Bratz

Miss Bratz majored in journalism and public relations andfor the last seven years has worked for the Datalab Group withspecial responsibility for management and administration ofEuropean and American investments. Miss Bratz will concentrate onadministration and OPI expansion into the European markets.

Officers and Directors

Joseph August, President and DirectorGary A. Zola, Vice President and DirectorDr. Mervyn Jacobson, Vice President and DirectorGail Jean Bratz, Vice President and Director

The Financial Plan


Current Financing Objectives

Management has determined that a total of $265,000 isnecessary for the implementation of this business plan.

Proceeds will be used to:

- Data Acquisition

- Conversion of all tape files to PC compatible format

Complete all application programming

Fund sales efforts includes initial telemarketing, literature, and advertising

Any other necessary business expenses of Call Report will becharged against future sales revenue from sales of Call Report.Investors will not be asked to contribute additional capital.APPENDIX

Resumes

Joseph E. August

Joseph E. August1200 Grovewood Ct.Ft. Collins, CO. 80525(303) 226-3594

Experience

CPU Hardware Experience:

IBM System 360 30,40 IBM System 370 3115, 3125, 3135, 3145, 3158, 3031 IBM System 4300 4341

Peripheral Hardware Experience:

IBM 2821, 2540, 1403 2841, 2311, 2314 3830, 3330, 3340, 3350, 2305 Drum 280X, 24XX 380X, 34XX 2848, 2260 3270, 3271, 3272, 3277, 3278, 3279

STC All Tape and Disk Sub-Systems

CDC All Tape and Disk Sub-Systems


Assembly Language Experience:

8080 Z-80 6809 8088/8086/80186/80286 8051 IBM System 360/370

Higher Level Language Experience:

PASCAL "C" FORTRAN MinorOperating Systems Experience:

CP/M Versions 1.0 to 3.0 UCSD P-System Versions 2.0 to 4.2 PC / MS-DOS Versions 1.0 to 3.2 Concurrent PC-DOS Versions 1.0 to 5.2 XM IBM Disk Operating System (360/370) VM/CMS DOS/VS

Work History

Reference Technology, Inc. (RTI) July 1987 to PresentBoulder, Colorado

Project Manager Optical Disk Data Bases

Responsible for the design and development of CD-ROM projects forvarious customers.

Creative Systems Corporation (CSC) - March 1983 to July 1987

President - Systems Software Development Company

Founder and President of CSC specializing in system softwaredevelopment. Creative Systems specializes in microprocessorsoftware, ROM BIOS work and Operating System "Portings". Areas ofexpertise include; UCSD P-System, Digital Research's ConcurrentPC-DOS, and Microsoft's MS-DOS. Developed, on a contract basis,custom software for CDC future products, Central SupportWorkstation, Smartlink, CDC Cyber Console Emulator and RemoteSupport Workstation. Customer List includes:

Control Data Corporation - Minneapolis, MN. Contel CADO Systems, Inc. Torrance, CA. MAI Basic Four, Inc. Tustin, CA.


Otrona Corporation - Boulder, CO. Lingemann Design Corporation - Boulder, CO. Remote Equipment Corp. - Boulder, CO. Fujitsu of America San Jose, CA Fujitsu of America San Diego, CA Digital Research, Inc. Monterrey, CA

Control Data Corporation (CDC) - May 1978 to March 1983

Consultant - Headquarters division - Minneapolis, MN.

As a Consultant to the Engineering Services Division myduties included; Training, Maintenance and Support of current andfuture products. As a part of the remote support project, Idesigned and programmed the computer simulation systems for IBM303X series of computers. These systems were to be the core of ~the remote support system, and were also to be used in trainingand field support.

I decoded and developed the preliminary control programs torun remote diagnostics using IBM's "Retain" data link for theRemote Maintenance effort.

Storage Technology Corporation (STC) - September 1975 to May 1978

Senior Specialist / Advisory Engineer

During my three years at STC I held many different jobs andtitles. I started as a National Support Specialist on the 8000series disk subsystems and transferred into engineering to helpwork on the design of the 8350 disk subsystem. I served asadvisor and senior trouble shooter for all of Engineering duringdevelopment of the 8350 Disk Subsystem.

During the later development stages of the 8350 I managed ateam of specialists to develop the documentation that would beused by Field Engineering to support the sub-systems once theywere shipped to the field. I then went to Field Engineering asthe person in charge of Advanced Field Engineering on the 8350product line. In this job , I was responsible for marketingsupport and developing service techniques and diagnostics to beused by field personnel maintaining the equipment at the customersite.

International Business Machines - October 1966 to September 1975

Field Engineering Specialist/Regional Designated Specialist Large ComputersSystems Assurance Marketing Support

Field Engineering Specialist on IBM Mainframe, Disk, andTape Products. Responsible for providing assistance to Field


Engineers to resolve system design and maintenance problems onIBM 360 models 30 and 40, IBM 370 models 3115, 3125, 3135, 3145,3158 and 3031 series computer systems.

Originally trained on hardware in the System 360 series ofmainframes, and selected to be cross-trained on software in theSystem 370 series to help diagnose firmware problems with thenewly released VM Operating System.

In-depth trained on 370/145, I developed a proficiency inMicro-Programming in System 370 and 303X series computers.Responsible for providing technical leadership to one of IBM'slargest branch offices and the Greater New York Region (Region3).

As a Systems Assurance Specialist I was responsible forevaluating the needs of the customers, and determining if theproposed marketing solution was feasible from a hardware andsoftware perspective.~

U. S. Navy - October 1962 to October 1966

Fire Control Technician - FTG-2

Lead Fire Control Technician on USS Laffey (DD-724),Norfolk, VA. Responsible for maintenance and operation of allFire Control and gunnery systems, and management of Fire ControlGroup. Specialized training on Syncro/Servo controls, Hydraulicand Pneumatic controls, Electronic Target Control Systems, andFire Control Radar.Gary A. Zola

Gary A. Zola3227 Wynford DriveFairfax, VA 22031

General Background

Experienced general management executive with a record ofover 15 years of proven accomplishments in the area of dataprocessing, sales, marketing and product development.

Experience

Reference Technology, Inc. December 1986 to PresentBoulder, CO

Applications Engineer


Reports directly to Vice President of Sales Support.Responsibilities include sales presentations, sales support,application definition, and application support. Generallysupports the sales organization in defining legitimate prospects,and then analyzing customer data files and designing properlayout for optimum CD-ROM product.

Information Marketing International Oct. 1984 to Nov. 1986Oak Park, MI

Vice President of Information Systems

Reported directly to the General Manager. Responsibilitiesincluded the following departments: Data Processing, Data Entry,Sales Administration and Order Entry .... a $1.5 million budgetwith over 65 personnel.

National Training Manager

Reported directly to the V.P. of Sales and Marketing.Employed to train sales force, customer service representativeson all technical and sales presentation aspects of on-linedatabase with struggling sales. Responsibilities includedtraining on sales presentations, training on optical diskproduct, customer training and expansion of business, acquisitionof additional databases and the coordination and design ofproduct additions and enhancements. In 18 months sales rose from$70,000 to $1.6 million.

Government Sales Associates September 1982 to September 1984Denver, CO

President

Formed a consulting firm designed to help companies marketand sell their products to the government.

Information Handling Services April 1980 to September 1982Englewood, CO

Director of Information Resources

Reported directly to the President. Responsibilitiesincluded guiding and directing all data processing functionswithin the company with a staff of 50 personnel and a $3 millionbudget. Responsibilities also included guiding company intooptical manufacturing and publishing of products.


Senior Systems Analyst

Reported to the Director of Information Resources. Designedindexing systems, re-designed Military Specifications productsystem saving $500,000 in annual manufacturing costs. Designedand wrote company's first on-line database, then trained salesforce on the use and sale of the product.

Spiridellis and Associates December 1978 to April 1980New York, NY(a major data processing consulting firm)

Consultant

Data processing consulting to four major NYC firms. Respons-ibilities included system analysis, writing specifications,coding, testing, and de-bugging major systems in the banking andhealthcare industries. Work was done on large scale IBM mainframeutilizing TOTAL and IMS Databases.

Automatic Data Processing (ADP) August 1976 to December 1978New York, NY

Programmer/Analyst

A major service bureau handling the processing of 50brokerage firms both on-line and in batch mode. Was responsiblefor the design and programming of various parts of the portfolio ~reporting systems including data collection, capital gains andcapital changes.

Education

Attended Euclid Senior High School, Euclid, Ohio; Miami University, Oxford, Ohio; Defense Language Institute, Monterrey, CA; Empire Technical School of Data Processing, New York, NYMichael P. Fleischmann

Michael P. Fleischmann 1667 31st Ave. P.O. Box 5243 Greeley, CO 80631

DIACOM August 1984 to Present


President Computer Consulting firm

Developing custom software. Experience includes:

o High capacity tape backup software on the IBM PC/AT running under DRI's concurrent DOS o CD-ROM applications and data retrieval systems for the IBM o CD-ROM data conversions from VSAM and other formats to those required on the VAX mainframe and the IBM PC o IBM CGA/EGA graphics drivers and emulators o Disk diagnostic software for the Atari ST computer system o Medical accounting packages to Blue Cross/Blue Shield o Auto billing communications packages BC/BS o Modem communication package for the Apple and Atari o Word Processor for the Apple computer o Data base package for the Apple computer

US Air Force, Hill AFB August 1983 to August 1984

Lead engineer in Research and Development Lab.

US Air Force May 1982 to August 1983

Systems programmer working in a Minute Man Missile Systemsimulator utilizing a Perkin-Elmer 7-32 mini computer inassembler language.

Colorado State University October 1979 to May 1982

Microcomputer Laboratory Assistant for the Department ofElectrical Engineering (C.S.U). Duties included maintenance anddevelopment of both hardware and software for variousmicrocomputers and mainframes.

Education

Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, May 1982Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, May 1982Colorado State UniversityFinancial Projections Scenario 1

250 CD-ROM copies and 3,000 Floppy Disk copies

Financial Projections Scenario 2Scenario 2 500 CD-ROM copies and 3,000 Floppy Disk copies

Optical Publishing Inc. Software Products

Sample Call and Income Bank Report


the history of advanced media group from 1989 published may 7, 2016

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