23 Jan
2020
23 Jan
'20
12:42 a.m.
moving to COFF
On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 1:06 PM Pete Wright <pete(a)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.