Direct Show, and at the outset of NSP, this posed a conflict and a challenge for the working relationship between Intel and Microsoft (traditionally very close partners with highly aligned interests). When Intel proposed the NSP software design to Microsoft, it became clear that the two initiatives (NSP & Direct X) were in direct conflict. Microsoft refused to put their support behind a competing standard such as NSP, especially one with the potential to level the OS playing field for PCs. Despite this conflict, IAL continued to work on NSP, showing demonstrations of DSP software running smoothly on the central microprocessor. With every generation of performance and functionality improvements, Microsoft refused to support NSP in its operating systems. Microsoft and Intel, both large and influential companies who worked with the same PC Original Equipment Manufacturers found themselves at odds over the direction of the software and hardware in the PC industry. Microsoft convinced PC makers that the Intel NSP device drivers would render their systems unsupported by the Windows operating system, and in turn this led Intel to pull back from promoting the software, leaving NSP as an orphan project. Although NSP did not achieve commercial success like Direct X, the concepts, prototypes, and implementations of DSP algorithms on native Intel microprocessors was widely recognized as an impressive technological feat at the time, and indirectly supported the overall notion of moving dedicated software workloads to general purpose microprocessors like Intel's. Internet browser IAL also tangled with Microsoft by supporting Netscape and their early browser, and by producing a fast native x86 port of the Java system. Most of these projects were later shelved, and after 1997 IAL tended not to risk competing with Microsoft. The details of IAL's conflicts with Microsoft over software were revealed in Steven McGeady's testimony in the Microsoft antitrust trial. Not all of IAL's software efforts met bad ends due to Microsoft—IAL developed one of the first software digital video systems, Indeo(tm) - technology that was used in its ProShare videoconferencing product line but suffered later from neglect and was sold to another company in the late 1990s. Input/output interconnect projects However, IAL successes in the hardware world are legendary, and include PCI, USB, AGP, the Northbridge/Southbridge core logic architecture and PCI Express. Universal Serial Bus (USB) USB, in particular, was developed in the Oregon offices of IAL, where the architects of PCI and the Plug