PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Micro Digital Announces Its 35th Anniversary

Costa Mesa, California, January 6, 2010 — Micro Digital Inc, based in Costa Mesa, California, is announcing its 35th anniversary, this year. Originally founded in 1975 by Ralph Moore, the current CEO, and a few partners, Micro Digital has been providing solutions for the embedded systems industry for 35 years.

“Our first project used an Intel 8080 with about a 0.5 MHz clock rate and several 4KB EPROM’s for program storage. We developed a gas pipeline meter for ITT Barton that measured delivery of gas in BTUs rather than in cubic feet. Programming was performed using a KSR Model 33 Teletype, connected at 110 Baud to a timesharing service that provided an editor, assembler, and linker. Final code was punched out on paper tape to be used to program EPROMs. An Intel “Blue Box” was used for debugging. Every time a bug caused a crash, the Intel operating system and debugger had to be reloaded from paper tape – a 20 minute process. Despite such crude tools, we delivered a quality, bug-free product,” said Ralph Moore, CEO of Micro Digital.

For the next 14 years Micro Digital continued to offer engineering and programming services in the nascent embedded systems industry. One of our more spectacular projects was software for the blow-out preventer on the Zane-Barnes deep sea oil drilling rig (up to 5000 feet). This rig, which rented for over $100,000 a day in 1986, taught us the importance of bug-free software. One bug, at the bottom of the sea, could cause days of lost drilling time in order to pull up the drill pipe, the riser, and finally the preventer (100 tons), then put it all back down again. This experience with “heavy iron” has been a strong influence on Micro Digital software ever since – not only make it bug free, but also provide easy-to-use solutions to reduce application bugs.

In 1989, after many successful embedded software projects, Micro Digital decided to offer its own commercial embedded software. This resulted in the debut, the same year, of smx® our hard real-time, multitasking kernel. Over the next 20 years smx has been used successfully in nearly 1000 different products. Also over the next 20 years other products have been added such as file systems, networking protocols, GUI, USB, BSP, and more, resulting in the current SMX, a modular, high-performance, small footprint RTOS.

Over the past 35 years, many competitors have come and gone, but Micro Digital has continued onward and today is even stronger than before. During 2009 we actually added employees, and we plan to add more in 2010. We are continuing to add more products and more processor support. Micro Digital is one of the few independent RTOS companies still in business and we intend to continue that proud tradition. Over the past 35 years, Micro Digital has frequently re-invented itself, and we expect that process to continue. Look for major announcements in 2010.

About Micro Digital

Micro Digital, Inc. has been in the embedded systems business for over 30 years and has been producing and selling embedded software products for 19 years. The company is dedicated to providing quality products and support for embedded systems at moderate prices.

SMX is a trademark of Micro Digital, Inc.

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