For most of us, electrostatic is an occasional nuisance; a bother when the clothes come out of the dryer, or a surprise when we touch the doorknob. In the electronics manufacturing industry, though, it’s a major hazard that is deadly to the semiconductor devices or disk drives being assembled.

Novx Corporation (now owned by MKS Instruments) manufactures a line of instruments designed to measure environmental factors such as electrostatic potential, humidity, particulate density, and more. They needed a software product to communicate with up to 1024 of these devices at one time, record, display, and alarm-check the data, and be scalable so new device models could be introduced without a great deal of hassle.

Culverson produced such a product, that accepts, decodes, and stores data from 1024 devices, using 32 serial ports, all operating simultaneously.