EASING THE MIGRATION INTO THE FUTURE OF COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY

Some of the obstacles that can be expected to impede the migration to the new communications scenarios that are expected to become real over the next few years are described. The easing of the migration is described in terms of the outputs from two ESPRIT projects, CARLOS and CACTUS. The CARLOS (Communication Architecture for Layered Open Systems) project involves the development of a series of modular components which provide building blocks to construct OSI systems of varying sizes and sophistication. The CACTUS project (CARLOS Addition for Clustered Terminal User Agents) is an extension of the CARLOS project which will build on the base of software and experience of CARLOS to implement the CCITT X.400 recommendations in a form suited to medium-sized private organizations.