The architecture of "The Worlds Biggest Machine DEGREES" is of course expressed in the many underlying communications standards; however it is far from explicit nor readily accessible. While on one hand, marketing people are busy looking for their so called "Killer Applications" that will maintain the economic growth of this machine, the engineers are struggling to keep up with the myriad of networks, pro tocols and standards that interconnect an ever growing number of network services across a rapidly increasing variety of platforms and protocols. Within the industry, it is commonly accepted...