Author: Johan Zuidweg
Fifteen years ago, an organization under the name of TINA (Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture) raised the telecommunications revolution. At that time, the word telecommunication was practically synonymous with PSTN telephony, and still exclusive affair of large national operators. Internet only began to be used within academia.
The vision of TINA, whose members were the big manufacturers and operators, including Telefonica, was revolutionary for its time TINA foresaw a global network made up of many networks interconnected with a layer of middleware, enabling the development and deployment of services, independently with the underlying transport.
Services, which went far beyond the phone or simple data transfer, merged the information technologies and telecommunications. TUB design model was fully object-oriented, and middleware based on CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), also innovative for its time.