Recent advances from Olivetti research

When the Olivetti Research Laboratory in Cambridge (ORL) was founded in 1986, its initial members had, over the previous few years, been heavily involved with the development of the Cambridge Model Distributed System: an experiment in distributed computing based on the 10 Mbps Cambridge Ring. More recently, they had also been involved in the design of the 100 Mbps Cambridge Fast Ring (CFR) which was then at a prototype stage. Networking formed the main focus of the new research laboratory. From this background in networking and distributed systems came an interest in multimedia: the Cambridge Ring had allowed a small number of experiments with audio and slow-scan video, but the bandwidths available were too limiting. The CFR, for the first time, gave sufficient bandwidth to begin research into distributed multimedia systems-research which led directly to Pandora project. More recently, the experience with slotted rings has been applied to the area of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks: implementations which run at 100 Mbps over twisted pair, coaxial or optical fibre cable already exist, and research is also in progress to investigate running ATM protocols over radio and infra-red based wireless networks