DSL was my first attempt at consulting and I spent most of that time working for Olivetti Research on low level device drivers for video display hardware and ATM ALL5 network drivers. These were developed on the first generation of DEC’s Alpha based machines and the first version of the OSF based Ultrix (DEC’s version of UNIX). It was a pretty rough ride since we needed to DMA to/from user-space and the VM system was mostly undocumented and somewhat unreliable at first. We eventually managed to get good performance for the networked video; running at full-frame and resolution (NTSC/PAL) over the network with very little buffering in 1993 was pretty impressive.