EDS Defence required a bespoke communications application for emergency use provision as part of their successful ship-board defence messaging system. Gerboa Limited was contracted to produce this application from initial analysis through to customer acceptance testing. The application was created using WTL and Microsoft Visual C++ running on Windows NT controlling serial communications through standard COM ports and Digi serial port hubs at speeds from 50 to 38400 baud and supporting ASCII and BAUDOT encoding. Emphasis was placed on familiarity and ease of use for the operator enabling them to easily send messages by providing message templates with hot text, automatic character set switching in BAUDOT mode keyboard accellerator for inserting special characters. Received data are automatically logged (as are transmitted data) and either printed on demand or using an inovative LivePrint facility, printing incomming data as each page becomes full. An automated installation of Windows NT together with the application was also developed by Gerboa Limited allowing a existing or virgin PC to be installed and running as an emergency backup in less than ten minutes.
Due to the success of the automated NT installer, Gerboa Limited was also contracted to improve EDS Defence's full-product NT Server install mechanism, enabling the eight CD install to be reduced to six which are all loaded in the initial thirty minutes of the six hour install process, the remainder of which is automated (the original method required regular user monitoring and interaction).