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.