Hey Gary,
I worked as a design engineer for EDMI from 1984 - 1997. At that time EDMI was a general purpose R&D and manufacturing outfit. We would research and design 'pretty much anything' and do manufacturing runs which were typically 50 to several hundred in a batch. Scoreboards, racetrack timing, industrial ovens, moving message boards, golf course irrigation, 1000Vdc lab power supplies ... you name it. Our moving message boards were red only, partly because we though red/green was lame. In those days we pined for and imagined the cool stuff that we could do if we could get a blue led that was (a) equal brightness to the reds and greens and (b) affordable.
The trouble with this style of business was that while we had a lot of fun and tackled some really cool projects there was never enough manufacturing to recoup the often enormous R&D costs, so we were always cash-strapped and the staff worked stupid hours to get projects over the line.
In the 90's the company moved towards its current specialty of electricity metering - initially substation-level metering and then including domestic metering, and towards the end of the 90's got bought by overseas interests and grown into a much larger entity. But I was gone by then as I decided to move out and start my own IT business.