The Futurebus process quickly bogged down, and concluding it was doomed, several of the main designers left the effort in 1987 to try again on smaller projects, leading to both QuickRing and SCI.
[1] In the case of QuickRing the main proponent was Paul Sweazey of National Semiconductor, who had hosted Futurebus's cache coherency group.
Sweazey left National Semiconductor and moved to Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group, where the new system was developed.
The US Navy announced several tenders for QuickRing products for sonar data processing (for which they had originally had Futurebus+ developed), but it is unclear whether or not it was actually used in this role.
National Semiconductor offered a variety of different implementations with up to 32 data lines,[2] as well as the same signals multiplexted using frequency-division multiplexing in a single fibre optic cable for longer links between machines.
Since QuickRing was built in a ring topology there was no need for a dedicated switch or router, potentially making the system lower cost to deploy.
This is as opposed to packet switching, in which every message contains all of the data needed to reach the destination, this is more flexible, but adds overhead.