The use of Transputers in Project Unison

Unison is a four-year, £2 million, Alvey research project investigating the interconnection of local area networks (LANs) by an integrated services digital network (ISDN) for office applications. The project uses a pilot ISDN, which is one of the world´s first primary rate (2 Mb/s) prototypes, developed for the Alvey directorate by BT and Logica. On each site, Unison LANs are connected to the ISDN by a novel Unison exchange. These exchanges are built around Cambridge fast rings (CFRs), running at 50-100 Mb/s, which provide fast data paths between the LAN and ISDN and enable management functions such as directory services to be performed. The communications infrastructure has been developed to support multi-media office communications, including voice, data and slow-scan video for conferencing. Unison is investigating ways of enabling users to communicate across the wide area network in a manner similar to the way in which they communicate locally. The use of INMOS Transputers in this project is reviewed