[COFF] [TUHS] Apollo Domain/OS

[Pete Wright]

On 2020-01-22 10:42, Clem Cole wrote:
> moving to COFF
>
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 1:06 PM Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org 
> <mailto:pete at nomadlogic.org>> wrote:
>
>     I also seem to remember him telling me about working on the patriot
>     missile system, although i am not certain if i am remembering
>     correctly
>     that this was something he did at apollo or at another company in the
>     boston area.
>
> The Patriot was/is Raytheon in Andover, MA not Apollo (Chelmsford - 
> two towns west).   Cannot speak for today, but when it was developed 
> the source code was in Ada.   I knew the Chief Scientist/PI for the 
> original Patriot system (who died of a massive stroke a few years back 
> -- my wife used to take care of his now 30-40 yo kids when they were 
> small and she was a tad younger).
>
> During the first Gulf War, he basically did not sleep the whole first 
> month.   As I understand it, Raytheon normally took 3-6 months per SW 
> release.  During the war, they put out an update every couple of days 
> and Willman once said they were working non-stop on the codebase, 
> dealing with issues they have never seen or have been simulated.  I 
> gather it was quite exciting ... sigh.   We got him to give a couple 
> of talks at some local IEEE functions describing the SW 
> engineering process they had used.
>
> Willman was one of the people that got me to respect Ada and the job 
> his folks had to do. To once told me, that at some point, Raytheon had 
> a contract supporting the Polaris System for the US Navy.   The Navy 
> had long ago lost the source.  They had disassembled and were patching 
> what they had. Yeech!!!!  He also once made another comment to me ( in 
> the late 1980s IIRC) that the DoD wanted Ada because they want the 
> source to be part of the specifications and wanted a language that was 
> more explicit that they could use for those specs.   I have no idea 
> how much that has proven to be true.

Thanks Clem - that's really insightful.  I remember him telling me that 
during testing they would have to shut down one of the main highways 
through Arizona and how stressful it was trying to get software and 
hardware to play nice while produce was literally rotting on the 
highway.  I'm sure he told me more stories but that image of a bunch of 
engineering sweating it out in the desert really stood out in my mind.

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA

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