The aims of the DCS Programme included the reduction of duplicated effort and the production of software and hardware which was of general benefit to the majority of DCS investigators. Often the production of such items was more of a development task than a pure research exercise. In such cases, the DCS Panel asked RAL to draw up a suitable contract with a university or industrial company to develop the specific product. These agreements were called EMR (Extra Mural Research) contracts.
The main EMR Contracts were:
The contract with Ian Wand of York university produced a hardware/software solution to connecting a Unix system to either the Post Office's PSS Network or SERCnet using X25 protocols.
Dr D W Bustard of the Queen's University of Belfast produced a portable compiler-interpreter system to allow Pascalplus to be easily implemented on a variety of computers.
The pre-release version was delivered in 1980 and later it was installed on both LSI11 and PDP11 computers (running both RT-11 and RSX-11), Vax systems running VMs, X80s running CP/M and the Motorola 68000.
Software Sciences were contracted to produce a set of tools that worked with the compiler delivered by Belfast.
Additional Contracts were placed both internal to RAL and to Logica to produce Cambridge Ring Local Area Network equipment for the programme to use. Six Cambridge Rings were developed by RAL and a further ten 6-node rings purchased from Logica based on the RAL design.
