It was one book in Alighieri Dante’s 14th century classic Divine Comedy trilogy that inspired the name for Lucent Technologies Inc.’s new software program, Inferno. The technology behind Inferno will facilitate communications across most all networks, said the company, promising a lot more good than that which its namesake alludes.
“Inferno provides the dial tone for information services,” commented Dan Stanzione, president of Bell Laboratories, the research arm of Lucent, previously part of AT&T Corp.
Inferno provides Internet-like services across any network to a host of graphical interfaces, explained Dick Muldoon, Lucent director of external communications. “The software creates more opportunities to access and display information,” said Muldoon. “Information has value.”
The software requires minimal hardware and less than one megabyte of memory, said Lucent. Devices to run Inferno include multimedia computers, hand-held devices, advanced telephones and set-top boxes. One could read office e-mail from home on a personal digital assistant, access a stock feed across the television screen or see a news segment on a cable TV station.
Wireless and wireline networks, including telephony, satellite broadcast and the Internet, can be used with Inferno. Inferno’s software is loaded on devices at each end of a network.
Muldoon declined comment on price but said Inferno will be “inexpensive on a per client basis.”
