LOVELAND, OHIO, February 19, 2003 - Existing Mattec customers know that Mattec leads the industry in new product development and expanded applications. But did you know that every MIU that Mattec has ever built can still run on today's systems? Even "black box" MIUs manufactured back in 1983 run on today's ProHelp® EPM system, without any wiring changes. It's true!

"It's not entirely uncommon to see a customer running one or two TSMIUs on high profile machines and old black-box MIUs or 6DPs on the rest of their machines" said Brian Thiel, Mattec's Development Manager. "The technologies all work well together, even on the same cabling."

It may be hard to believe, but it's true. Sometimes new features aren't available on older MIUs, but sometimes they are. For example, older MIUs work with Mattec's Voice Alarm Option and Email Alarm Option. You can use a PCMIU to upgrade the user interface for older MIUs and nearly all functions in the PCMIU will work. Data from old MIUs looks even nicer on ProHelp® EPM's Real-Time Display than they ever looked in ProHelp® Millennium or ProHelp® 1000 or ProHelp® 3.2.

"I'm most proud of our continued support for black box MIUs and the MIU-4", says Thiel. "The black box was around from the earliest days of the company. The MIU-4 was basically a prototype - we only sold about 200 of them before they were discontinued. I have one of each, plus an MIU-10X and a TSMIU, on my desk counting parts and collecting data every day."

The following is a list of some(*) of the MIUs that Mattec has manufactured through the years, the approximate date of their first manufacture, and the status of their ability to run on ProHelp® EPM:

* - In all, Mattec has manufactured more than 50 different types of MIUs since 1983. Many of those MIUs are simply incremental improvements over previous versions of MIUs. Others represent software (or EPROM) changes, not hardware changes. In some cases, the names of those MIUs were combined above for simplicity.

** - These MIUs are still commonly manufactured and sold today.