In 1973 he cofounded Mitel, which pioneered electronic switching systems that allowed for operator-free PBXs and touch-tone phone sets.

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To see how much you could reduce your environmental impact by switching to electronic billing, Payitgreen.org offers this calculator.

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So big institutions are keen to cut costs, by, for example, switching to electronic trading, and avoiding any duplication of their trading operations.

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And they may also allow the development of purely optical switches, which would eliminate the need to convert a light signal into an electronic one before such switching can be accomplished.

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The pieces of scenery are activated by switching on and off so-called passthrough transistors that control the flow of electronic signals from one part of the chip to another.

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