The Distributed Computing Systems Specially Promoted Programme was pushing research in distributed computing in the UK and were one of the projects pressing for the SERC initiative in single user workstations. This board was aimed at showing how the environment for computing in the 1980s would change significantly from the previous decades. Clients and Servers using local and wide area networks was to be the future.
The aim here was to show how the user could access resources anywhere on the network.
This shows some of the other initiatives in SERC. Both Software Technology, Man Machine Interaction and Artificial Intelligence were special programmes in SERC. Electron Beam Lithography was another special programme with central facilities at RAL and elsewhere providing access for UK academics to fabrication facilities.
These four areas became the basis for the government funded Alvey Programme between academia and industry.
