Optical Data Systems Brings the Internet and Multimedia to the Allen
Independent School District

Technology forges strong ties between teachers and students in the
classroom

Richardson, Texas--August 7, 1995--Optical Data Systems, Inc. (ODS),
(NASDAQ-NMS:ODSI) announced today that the Allen Independent School
District (AISD) has awarded ODS a large contract to provide Green
Elementary with a leading edge, fiber optic computer network. The new
network provides classrooms with switched 10-Mbps Ethernet connections,
bringing the school's students and faculty on-line with the Internet's
information superhighway and gaining access to new "cool" multimedia
learning applications.

School officials in Allen, Texas. the fastest growing suburb of Dallas,
represent a growing alliance among educational faculty members across the
nation that favor the use of high technology products to provide a better
education for their students. Unlike students of earlier generations,
today's kids are much more technically astute and are receptive to a wide
variety of high technology products including cellular phones, pagers and
computers. They are accustomed to receiving visually appealing information
from videos or television programs that feature a combination of music,
video and voice. When presented with educational information in the same
multimedia format, it is a natural transition and a much more captivating
way for them to obtain knowledge that, in earlier generations. might have
been obtained from reading text books.

"The results from installing the network and the computers in our
classrooms were amazing. In our situation, the computer network has been a
catalyst that has actually drawn our teachers and students closer
together. It has been a very satisfying experience to watch the kids and
their teachers learning about computers and software applications
together, versus the typical teacher-student relationship," stated Carol
Smith, Technical Coordinator for AISD. "As students and their teachers
work together, it will be very interesting to see innovative educational
multimedia tools develop that will further everyone's understanding of
computers and how they will fit into our future society."

In addition the multimedia software, students also have gained access to
the world wide Internet's unlimited research servers all over the world.
Instead of being confined to the school's limited set of library books and
magazines, students literally have the world at their finger tips.

The Network That Made It All Possible

The network consists of a collapsed backbone design that provides a cost
effective migration path to ATM technology. Cabling connecting the hubs
will consist of multimode fiber optic cable supporting a high speed
backbone at speeds of 100-Mbps and upgrade paths to 155-Mbps. Three of the
four hubs have twelve slots and will be configured with one Ethernet
management card, one Ethernet switch card and several 10BaseT Ethernet
user modules, each supporting 32 copper connections with on-board retiming
and work group switching. This configuration provides over 100 Ethernet
connections per hub with plenty of room for adding more Ethernet
connections on an as needed basis. The forth hub provides backbone
connections to the other hubs as well as connections to three file servers
and a Cisco router that provides an information firewall and connections
to the Internet.

The modular design of the Infinity hub allows one of the backplanes to be
replaced with an ATM backplane while remaining compatible with all ODS
user modules. The ATM backplane should be available in the latter portion
of 1995. The Infinity hub can be configured to support Ethernet, Token
Ring, FDDI and ATM backplanes, providing a wealth of networking options.

The entire network can be managed from a single workstation using an
Ethernet management card that provides full SNMP management for all
network devices attached to the hub that are SNMP compatible. The card
also supports all nine groups of RMON which are used to gather important
statistical information and monitor network performance.

Optical Data Systems, Inc. (ODS)

ODS sells a full range of intelligent switching hubs; high-speed
multi-protocol routers, bridges, switches and sophisticated network
management modules to large corporations that build very large and
advanced enterprise-wide information internetworks including LANs, MANs
and WANs. Its mainstay product, the ODS Infinity intelligent switching
hub, is the largest hub on the market that supports all four of the
industry standards-Ethernet, Token Ring, Fiber Distributed Data Interface
(FDDI) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). The Infinity hub provides
superior local and remote SNMP-based management that supports all groups
of RMON for both Ethernet and Token Ring networks. ODS can be reached at
(214) 234-6400.

Optical Data Systems Inc
1101 E. Arapaho Rd
Richardson, TX 75081
214-301-3811,  fax 214-301-3893
 
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