© Copyright 2010 by Entropy Enigneering
If you’ve gotten this far, you might have noticed that there is a common theme for much of the web site about
technology and inventions. In the late 90s, a friend of mine from the Video Titler™ days called up wondering if
I’d be interested in working on a hardware project. Let’s just say that I was more than a little bit rusty as I hadn’t
done any serious electrical engineering in a number of years. I had kept up somewhat with the state of the art,
but hadn’t gotten my hands dirty. Software was just such an easy way to manufacture. Click. Ship it.
His idea was interesting. Take a video feed and strip out the closed caption information so that a computer could
read it. This little box would let anyone get a transcription of their favorite show without having to send in $5 in a
self addressed, stamped envelope. The design was fairly simple and should have worked pretty quickly. I had
some decent test equipment which made programming very straightforward. Do some code, look at the
waveforms. If they were right, the code was right.
The problem I ran into was that the waveforms were correct, but the Philips, that is Philips, chip that I was using
didn’t respond. After a lot of headbanging and a bunch of ignored tech support calls, I found the answer. Three
of the Four data books that I had for the Philips chip were wrong. With the correct data about the chip, the
device came to life and did exactly what we wanted. You can see more about this device, now known as News
to You, over at www.line21.org.
Having gone through the trial by fire for News to You and gotten my hardware engineering legs back under me, I
designed a number of other products, ranging from peripherals for our arcade games to some of the robotics
circuits small, earth based rovers. At LunaCorp we had a simulated Lunar terrain for them to run on. It was a lot
of fun, especially driving the rover from the motion platform with platform making you feel the bumps and tilts.
I teamed up with Mark Menz, the man with the plan for News to You, to both create a new company and a line of
products for the computer security industry. For this company, everything that we were going to do had never
been done before, and we took the patent route to protect our inventions. The first product that we released
under the new company Mykey Technology, Inc., was NoWrite™. It is a protection device for hard drives that
prevents a PC from making any changes to the drive, yet allows the operating system to run normally. We
received recognition from the US Patent and Trademark Office as well as the European Patent Office for this
invention. The US Patent is #6,813,682 in case you like reading patents.
NoWrite is used by law enforcement as a way to protect the drive while they are looking around for evidence.
Simply booting Windows can destroy a couple of hundred megabytes of data. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. There is
no way to tell if it would have proven someone guilty or innocent, which makes it vitally important to protect the
drives. Given the seriousness of the application, we took great care to insure that even in the case of a failure of
our device, the drive would not be harmed. Engineering failure modes isn’t done all that often in the PC world. It
is for Space.
Over the years, Mark and I, and occasionally his brother and my brother, have been granted 7 patents from the
US Patent and Trademark Office. Between the Bress and Menz clans, we have more than a dozen pending, and
have more that we haven’t finished writing up. Once you start inventing, it’s hard to stop.
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