Early Mobile System - 1992 to 1996

The ASPEN/ISS project started as a series of university grants from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)/USDOT and grew into a $15 million nationwide deployment over three years. I was the de facto principal developer and architect for the projects in red outline. In my last year we did a rollout to 40 State agencies using a total of 4,000 handhelds. We did R&D work with the first mobile systems and pen-based software. Aspen was later credited with "benefits amounting to approximately $60 million per year"








Aspen had advanced features in 1996, including Lambda functions ("dynamic event handlers" in a less pretentious era):






We were also the first Federal project to use Delphi and became a case study for adoption by several Federal agencies. We prototyped the 2-d barcode on your driver's license and prototyped uploads using CDPD, an early forerunner of today's wireless broadband. In retrospect, it was an amazing project.