From: toebes@bnr.ca (John Toebes P030)
Subject: My Dealings With W. E. B. Technology
Organization: Bell-Northern Research, BNR-RTP
Distribution: all
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1992 14:47:45 GMT

With the statements being posted about WEB, I felt it appropriate to
post a chronological summary of our experience in attempting to deal
with them.  I make no attempt to validate any of the claims or refute
any of the technology involved.

19MAY92 - Obtained Article from Computer Shopper.

20MAY92 - Downloaded Microbytes article from BIX in order to locate the
          phone number.

21MAY92 - Contacted WEB Technology.  Neither I nor my Manager (on a
          subsequent call) were able to get any significant information
          about the product.  Another manager in the division was able
          to extract the name and phone number of Earl Bradley who
          turned out to be local.  He called Earl Bradley and left a
          message to return the call.

22MAY92 - Earl Bradley returned the call and agreed to meet with us on
          May 28 to discuss the technology.

28MAY92 - Meeting with Earl Bradley.  During this meeting he indicated
          that they had some technology which could indeed perform the
          compression claims presented in the articles.  Specifically:

          *) Anything greater than 64K can be compressed to under 1K.
          *) They can compress the output of the the compressor as long
	     as the file was > 64K.
          *) The algorithm can be tuned for levels of lossyness and will
	     work even for analog data.

          He claimed that there were several beta testers for the
          product with no known cases at that time of files that could
          not be compressed.  When asked about the byte article by Russ
          Schnapp, claimed that the version of the program sent to him
          was flawed due to a miscoding of the algorithm when they
          downcoded it to assembler for the PC.  He claimed that the
          data Russ ran through the algorithm was of a particular form
          that caused 'four numbers in a matrix to be the same value'
          which the downcode algorithm could not handle.

          Claimed that they could not release any versions of the
          software until at least two patents for hardware were in
          progress due to legal reasons.  Also indicated that they were
          in intensive testing with a major silicon manufacturer in an
          attempt to license the technology to them.  Stated that this
          manufacturer had already done a number of tests on the
          technology without finding any flaws and were in the process
          of creating a test environment to ensure that nothing 'behind
          the scenes' was going on.  Indicated that this manufacturer
          was seriously interested in the technology and did not want to
          get burned on a false claim as they had in the past.

          He also related that the technology stems from an earlier
          company that was using the compression in order to send real
          estate pictures from a central site to multiple remote sites.

          He agreed to run a test compression of our sample software and
          report back the compression ratio.  He indicated that because
          of the heavy demand on the programmers involved in the
          project, they might not be able to run the test until they
          were finished with the testing by the 'silicon manufacturer'.

30MAY92 - Created a test set of data and brought the 4 diskette set to
          Earl's home.  He assured me that I would hear something at the
          end of the next week.

05JUN92 - Called to Check Status.  Was told that the testing was
          continuing and there was not enough time to run our data.  Was
          told to call back in about a week.

12JUN92 - (This date might be off, I called several times in this time
          frame and reached an answering machine at Earls lake house).
          Called to Check Status.  Was told that testing uncovered a
          flaw they had not known about and would require some
          preprocessing to handle the case where 'four numbers in a
          matrix were the same value' which they had not seen before.
          He stated that this was on the very last test case that the
          manufacturer had given to them - a file consisting only of a
          single value repeated multiple times.  He agreed to provide
          the test results on 09JUL92.

09JUL92 - Called to Check Status.  Left several messages on answering
          machine.  Attempted to contact WEB number in Georgia to find
          that it had been disconnected.

10JUL92 - Called to Check Status.  Was told that testing had uncovered a
          new problem where 'four numbers in a matrix were the same
          value' and that the programmers were off attempting to code a
          preprocessor to eliminate this rare case.  I indicated that he
          had told me this story before.  He told me that the
          programmers were still working on the problem.  I asked for a
          time when the data would be run through the algorithm and was
          told that I would get a status update on 31JUL92.

          I also pointed out that the phone number for WEB had been
          disconnected.  He claimed that it was not and it was only a
          problem with the phone company because the number was a
          'Foreign Exchange'.  He said he would check into it and make
          sure that the number worked again.

13JUL92 - Called Georgia number.  Still disconnected.

31JUL92 - Final Call to Check Status.  Called Earl in the morning and
          was told that he still had not heard from the programmers.  He
          stated that the company was letting the programmers go off on
          their own without bothering them in order to get the best
          utilization of resources.  Stated that if they could not
          resolve the problem then there would probably not be a
          product.  He agreed to contact me by the afternoon with a
          definite status.

          No return call that day.  A call to his secretary informs me
          that he has left on emergency business for the day.

03AUG92 - Final Call.  Earl claims that the programmers are unable to
          resolve the problem.  I asked if this meant that there would
          not be a product as a result and he said yes.


Note that in all of this time, I have never seen the product nor any
evidence of the compression by the product.  We have not seen any
results of the single compression test that we gave to them nor any
indication that they had attempted to run the test file through the
compression utility.

The above statements are not a reflection of my employer.
--- Working for but not representing BNR, INC. ---
John A. Toebes, VIII  toebes@bnr.ca

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...Russ
Newsgroups: comp.compression