This paper surveys the concepts of the Parallel Object-Oriented Language POOL and a highly parallel, general purpose computer system for execution of programs in this language: the Decentralized Object-Oriented Machine, DOOM. It reports on the approach to highly parallel computers and applications followed at Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, as subproject A of Esprit project 415. The first sections present a short overview of the goals and premises of the subproject. In Section 3 the programming language POOL and its characteristics are introduced. Section 4 presents an abstract machine model for the execution of POOL programs. Section 5 describes the architecture of the DOOM-system. It is a collection of self contained computers, connected by a direct, packet-switching network. The resident operating system kernels facilitate the execution of a multitude of communicating objects, perform local management and cooperate to perform system wide resource management. In Section 6 we introduce the applications that are being designed to demonstrate the merits of the system. These symbolic applications will be shown to incorporate a high degree of parallelism. In the last section some conclusions will be drawn.