PRINCIPAL DESIGN ENGINEER FOR AN IBM 3494 EMBEDDED DEVICE DRIVER FOR AN ESCON CHANNEL EXTENSION PRODUCT

Theodore Marinich designed and developed an embedded device driver for an IBM ESCON Channel Extension product, connecting the IBM 3494 Robotic Tape Vaulting System to remote mainframe computers.  The embedded 3494 device driver was designed to work in conjunction with an existing IBM 3480/3490 device driver.

The overall project required complete software engineering including the development of a functional specification, a complete detailed design document and ultimate coding.  Peer reviews were a requirement during all phases of the project.

The PC platform was the platform of choice, operating under the IBM OS/2 operating system. The 3494 driver was written in C to execute on the IBM proprietary Artic card.  The INTEL i960 was the target processor which resides on the IBM Artic card. The integrated development environment chosen for this project was INTEL's CTOOLS. A proprietary task executive was used as the OS.

High channel throughput was achieved using DS3 telecommunication links and by using "spoofed" CCW chains with proprietary compression algorithms.  Maximum ESCON channel speeds of 18Mbytes were achieved on these DS3 links.

Theodore Marinich also performed the preliminary design and investigation for implementing an IBM ESCON channel extension device driver allowing IBM JES3 NJE channel to channel communications between two IBM remotely located mainframes.