Guest Editors' Prologue - Scanning the Issue

Many of the papers presented in this Special Issue address difficult issues of designing communications software. While no attempt at completeness has been attempted, we do feel that the papers selected deal with timely and relevant issues which communications professionals should be familiar with. This Special Issue consists of five major sections: software methodology, CCITT programming languages, software tools, switching software architectures, and communications software for computers. Since this is the first Special Issue on Communications Software we feel that it may be useful to give a rather detailed overview of each section to introduce the readers not familiar with the area to the exciting world of Communications Software. We have attempted to summarize the highlights of each paper in this prologue.