There is a premier developer of thermal printer technology, located near Ithaca College, it has created a large variety of printer components. CoinStar, makers of the CoinStar machines found in supermarkets, was transitioning to Microsoft Windows server platform and was challenged by the available printer driver technology. Windows server technology did not lend itself well to thermal printers at the time and CoinStar pushed the envelope. The company suppling CoinStar with printer guts offered to help and in doing so brought Polymorph onto the project.

Polymorph conceived of a flexible printer driver architecture incorporating the business objectives defined for CoinStar. Polymorph devised a 3-layer architecture with two drivers giving developers complete control over printing, adaptability to future printer components and real-time monitoring capability.

Control over printing - Windows thermal printer drivers up to then only printed top-down printing with no conception of graphics printing. Polymorph's architecture included access to the native printer graphics support and rotated printing.

Adaptability - 3-layers provides ample structure for additional drivers to be inserted to further specialize the print pipeline. When a different printer is interfaced, the decoupled structure isolated changes to a single driver layer.

Lastly, monitoring. Windows simply had no means to provide real-time feedback on the print jobs and print pipeline. One layer in this architecture provided round-trip reporting on data coming through the print job pipeline, materials usage, and communications channel metrics.