anies introduced PBX systems that were designed from the ground up for integrated voice and data. These promised to be the "supercontroller" of the integrated office. It was a story for customers and investors alike. Probably the most widely advertised of these was InteCom, whose start-up had been largely funded with Exxon's ven- ture capital. InteCom promised that its feature-rich digital PBX, the IBX, would integrate voice and data for a small premium over voice alone. The problem with most of these IVD systems was that their pricing story was as creative as their engineering story. The vendors promoted their systems as cost-effective, which was sufficient to solicit requests for proposals, but the actual prices turned out all too often to be more than a bit on the high side. Take, for example, a typical voice-only digital PBX circa 1980. The system price, installed with wiring and a typical mix of analog single-line and digital multibutton telephone instruments, was on the order of $1,000 per station. Vendors would then promote a typical IVD price of, say, $1,300 per station. So the casual reader might assume a price of, say, $300 per line equipped for data. But this was an average price among all lines. The vendors were really assuming that only 10% to 20% of desktops were actually equipped for data, and these desktops were connected, say, to half again as many ports going to the comput- ers. So if a 1,000-line voice-only system was $1 million, a 1,000-line IVD sys- tem would be $1.3 million, but that assumed only 200 desktops equipped for data and 100 ports going to the computers. The actual price for data ports was more like $1,000, sometimes even higher! In the early days of IVD PBXs, a cheaper alternative for sites that used the popular asynchronous ("dumb") terminals of the day such as the Digital Equip- ment Corp. (DEC) VT-100 family was to use a data-only switching system. These were known as port selectors or "data PBXs"; major vendors included Gan- dalf Data, Micom Systems, and Develcon Electronics. 