A C.T.I.-led R&D Project putting to the test for the first time the claim made by the component computing movement that specialized exploratory software can be developed by far more efficient methods than those achieved by stand-alone approaches.

Even though the Project suffered from the discontinuity of the 'Open-doc' platform and had to start development of the E-slate desktop and escorting components from scratch with Java, some prototype components and software materialised, such as the 'vector' component designed by Prof. R. Noss through the Institute of Education, University of London, the database component and the query component co-designed by the lab and the C.T.I. group even though this was a 'small' Socrates ODL Project!