Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp has now released the specifications of its Multivendor Integration Architecture, developed with five of the major computer vendors in Japan, which is intended to enable the phone company to mix and match computers from different vendors now that it is phasing out manufacturing – by third parties – of its proprietary DIPS mainframes. No details of the Multivendor Architecture specifications were available, but it specifies a common programming language, communications protocol and user interface. NTT will require conformance with the new standards in all computer procurements from October 1992. The five participants in the effort were Fujitsu Ltd, NEC Corp, Hitachi Ltd, IBM Japan Ltd and Nippon DEC.
