Yes, the DB awards - presented to those showing a particular flair or genius within their special contribution into the lives of all those who use computers.

At this moment in time I put forward Puretek, and in particular their drivers for the PT-3027 PCI modem, and in special particular the XP-drivers.

Now, Puretek seems to have a special flair for drivers. The PT-3517 PCI modem, as one good example, has 3 different sub-models, 2 of which differ by having a component within the “U4” solder point or not. With 15 different drivers to choose from at one stage, I really thought that this added an extra ingredient into the richness of all those lives that possessed one of these modems. Especially if they wanted a Linux driver (there arn’t any). With the PT-3027 XP drivers, however, Puretek went the extra distance that pushes the whole experience close to the realms of genius, and thus worthy of a DB award.

First, the PT-3027 is a Motorola soft modem. The reason I started this web site was because I had the ISA version of this modem, and they are a pig. Motorola has decided to kill this modem at least twice, then resurrected it (currently walking, shades of all the Zombie movies). Next, all the PT-3027 drivers are zipped. Well, what’s unusual about that, you say? Most all drivers are compressed up into a .ZIP file. Well, yes, but the .ZIP of the zipped-up PT-3027 drivers is then zipped. So it’s a zipped ZIP and you need to unzip it twice. Now, this is getting good, but there’s more. The XP driver is actually a Windows 2000 driver with a winXP name-tag. Oh, OK, so that’s normal, but here comes the genius move: within the zipped-up ZIP is the original .zip plus the un-zipped ZIP. Eh? what? pardon? no, pay attention. All the other drivers are zipped-up ZIPs, but the XP driver is a zipped-up ZIP plus a zipped-up zipped-up ZIP all within the same .zip, and is thus twice the size that it needs to be, with a modem that is notorious for it’s difficulty in downloading large files (quits part way through) and when you finally get it it’s for the wrong operating system anyway. GENIUS!!! And that’s why I think that this particular driver for this particular operating system for this particular modem is the Dog’s Bollocks.