The National Computing Centre in Manchester, UK and the Corporation for Open Systems in Washington plan to have ready protocol testing software for File Transfer Access and Management, FTAM, and for Message Handling Systems, MHS, by the end of 1987. The two organisations are jointly developing a protocol tester for the two standards along with the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, Middlesex, and British Telecom, DEC, IBM UK and ICL. The product will be made available worldwide from both the Corporation and the Computing Centre, and the test suites to run over it are being developed by the Corporation. The NCC anticipates companies buying the protocol tester for use on their own premises, but it will continue, along with the US non-profit co-operative, to provide formal conformance testing. Between UKP2m and UKP3m has been spent in the UK on development of Open Systems Interconnection conformance testing equipment, over 50% of the cash being provided to the National Physical Laboratory by the UK Department of Trade & Industry.
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