Ramonamap is an iterative map for database and communication services within our workgroup. Resources are represented as icons on the map, which preserves their actual (or implied) physical location and capitalizes on a user's understanding of maps. The map is interactive, giving the user control over the level of detail visible, allowing more information and services to appear than could be placed on a static map. The interactivity also allows users to change the map and add icon annotations. Since the map is continuously derived from an on-line database, changes and annotations are immediately shared by all users. As the database contains a wealth of information about the group, it also serves as a source for static maps for other purposes.

The Tandem NonStop System is a fault-tolerant [1], expandable, and distributed computer system designed expressly for online transaction processing. This paper describes the key primitives of the kernel of the operating system. The first section describes the basic hardware building blocks and introduces their software analogs: processes and messages. Using these primitives, a mechanism that allows fault-tolerant resource access, the process-pair, is described. The paper concludes with some observations on this type of system structure and on actual use of the system.