The Network Management Forum’s Spirit team, in process of setting standards for a machine-independent distributed computing system to enable phone companies to buy a standard environment from a choice of vendors, has now moved on to the second release of their specification. Although a – preferably fault-tolerant – implementation of Unix System V is strongly implied, since most of the standards come from the Unix world, no one operating system is specified, and if Microsoft Corp can implement the standards in NT Advanced Server, fair enough. The service provider members of the Forum have estimated combined annual spending of $20,000m worldwide. In Spirit Issue 2.0, X/Open Co Ltd’s TxRPC for Distributed Transaction Processing, plus Distributed Computing Environment for client-server computing, and interoperability with legacy environments are also specified and Structured Transaction Definition Language has been chosen as a high-level transaction processing language providing application portability. Issue 2.0 also incorporates Fibre Distributed Data Interface, ISDN and Frame Relay transmission protocols, and irons out inconsistencies between the C, Cobol and SQL languages to ease portability. Spirit 1.0 was announced in October (CI No 2,289).
