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Some Typical Customer Applications MAILING LIST DATA Processing tapes on personal computers for mailing list
purposes is our customers' most popular application.
Sources of tapes include mailing list firms, the US Postal Service (CRIS
and ZIP+4 tapes), local, county and state governments (e.g. vehicle registration
data), federal government (e.g. FAA pilot and aircraft owner data). ELECTION CAMPAIGNS Voter registration tapes are available from state and county
governments. Politicians make
frequent use of this data in their election campaigns. REAL ESTATE DATABASE CREATION
A popular application. Real
estate data is widely available from county and state governments.
While some details of these applications are proprietary, it is
interesting to note that the tapes contain information as to the location of the
property, owner's name and address, price paid, date of sale, zoning, current
taxes, lot measurements etc. TELEPHONE CALL DATA AMA (call detail) tapes from small phone companies and long
distance resellers are processed into subscriber bills and statistical reports. PROCESSING HUD TAPES Not all of the details of this application were made clear to
us. Apparently the HUD department
of the US government makes available tapes of people who are entitled to
mortgage insurance premium refunds. The
task is to match up that database with name and address databases in an effort
to locate those to whom refunds are due. CENSUS DATA ANALYSIS US Census data is transferred from tape to disk, then
processed overnight by proprietary statistical analysis routines, and the
results are sold to clients in the insurance business. KEY TO TAPE
Keypunch service bureaus provide "cottage industry" employees
with PC clones. Each morning, data
to be keypunched is delivered to the home workers, at the end of the day
diskettes with the keypunched data are collected.
The files on the diskettes are transferred to tape at the main office. CAD/CAM PHOTO PLOTTING
Computer aided design programs, now common on high speed PC's, produce
drawing files on disk. The disk
files are transferred to tape for photo plotting on systems made by Gerber,
Computervision and others. MINICOMPUTER DATA CONVERSION
In this application, Data General minicomputers are being replaced by
PC's. Electrovalue's FX program
reads the tapes, strips off the extraneous (Data General RDOS) bytes at the
end of each tape block and writes the remaining data to disk.
STOCK MARKET AND COMMODITY DATA ANALYSIS "Tick tapes" are
analyzed by stock market and commodity traders in hopes of predicting trading
trends. SUBMITTING DATA TO THE IRS
The IRS is pleased to receive data on magnetic tape, for example W2 and
1099 forms. IRS rules require
submission on magnetic media if the number of forms exceeds certain limits.
FIGHTING WITH CITY HALL
Several times a year, the New York City government makes citywide real
estate tax assessment data available on tape.
Some of our customers with a healthy appetite for these tapes are lawyers
who specialize in making sure their clients' commercial real estate taxes are as
low as possible. INEXPENSIVE FAA DATA The Federal Aviation Administration has hired a private
contractor to distribute copies of over a dozen interesting databases at minimal
cost. Send these guys a tape and a
few dollars and receive 49 megabytes of aircraft registrations by return UPS.
Or 77 megabytes of pilot license information.
Use our software to extract the fields of interest and join the group of
customers who are making money with this data. LANDSAT/SEASAT DATA Satellites transmit copious amounts of geophysical data when
over land and sea. Tapes containing
this data are available to the general public. OIL AND MINERAL EXPLORATION
Geophysical data is logged to tape by micros in the field, then processed
at the home office. ASTRONOMY DATA ANALYSIS
Tapes available from NASA are processed for fun by amateur astronomers. MEDICAL BILLING AND PHARMACY PRESCRIPTION DATA Medical insurance claim
information is processed on a PC, the results are submitted to the government on
tape, a big check comes back. EDITING & TYPESETTING
Travel directories need to be updated frequently.
The latest information, edited on PC's, is sent to commercial typesetting
firms on tape. DEVELOPING MAINFRAME PROGRAMS ON PC's
Since a number of mainframe languages have been ported to the PC,
customers specializing in mainframe software have been using PC's to develop and
maintain their mainframe programs. Source
programs and data are exchanged between mainframes and PC's via tape. CREDIT CARD PRODUCTION
Tapes with cardholder names and numbers are read by a PC which controls a
credit card manufacturing machine. DOWNSIZING
Technology has advanced while the economy has declined.
This situation has added fuel to the popularity of downsizing mainframe
applications to the PC arena. Accompanying
this transition has been the frequent need to continue reading and writing
9-track and 3480/90/90e tapes on the PC. PARTS LIST MANAGEMENT
These customers use a unique Electrovalue software feature (KEYLIST
MATCHING), which was added at a customer's request. Aircraft, motorcycle and
automotive parts businesses get massive semiannual parts list tapes from the
factory and automatically import only those records where the part number can be
found in a locally maintained disk file of parts which they stock locally. A FUND RAISING group uses the inverse of the above
KEYLIST MATCHING feature, the ability to reject records from tape when
the potential donor's name can be found in a locally maintained disk file
containing the names of people from whom they do not wish to solicit funds. They
process the data with "THE RAISER'S EDGE" software. DP SERVICE BUREAUS use a larger proportion of
Electrovalue's software features than the usual customer. Just some of the
features they find useful are the ability to simultaneously select records and
fields, rearrange the order of fields, strip off trailing blanks, add any
literal text as field delimiters and transfer the results directly to floppies
without splitting records from one floppy to another. Our myriad features allow
them to fill the floppies with just the data their customers need, in a format
friendly to the particular intended use. The
data manipulation scenario used by each customer is maintained in reusable disk
files called CONTROL FILES. Running a similar job on a future date simply
requires the service bureau personnel to invoke the appropriate CONTROL FILE
during the tape-to-diskette transfer. BILL COLLECTION A lawyer who earns his living
by demanding that debts be paid gets tapes from creditors and duns the deadbeats
with computer generated mailings. MAGNETIC TAPE ANALYSIS AND QUALITY CONTROL A large commercial printer
uses our software on the PC to quickly and economically check the quality,
format and contents of mainframe tapes before they are sent along as input to
massive printing jobs. ELECTRONIC AND CD ROM PUBLISHING Several
customers import all kinds of data to the PC and pre-process it in order to
publish articles, directories and CD ROMs.
In some cases they write tapes which are read by large (e.g. Xerox)
printers and photo-typesetters. NIELSEN and ARBITRON data tapes with radio listener and TV viewer data are processed statistically on the PC so the client can advise potential advertisers on the estimated effectiveness of their program choices. |