The contributions provide an overview of research in tele-communications and distributed systems. The main part con-concentrates on the evaluation of the CCITT recommendationsand ISO standards with respect to OSI and ISDN and user ser-vices. It also reviews new applications that are becoming a-vailable in modern offices, manufacturing, and the publicdomain. Different approaches are discussed as to how theseapplications can be builtmore easily with advanced program-ming rools. Deals with operating systems support for commu-nication systems.