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From: bradley@im4u.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.columbia
Subject: Re: Old fashion computing practices @ NASA
Message-ID: <417@im4u.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 14-Aug-85 23:07:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: im4u.417
Posted: Wed Aug 14 23:07:15 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 19-Aug-85 04:45:25 EDT
References: <1079@cbdkc1.UUCP> <46@escher.UUCP> <239@pyramid.UUCP>
Reply-To: bradley@im4u.UUCP (David K. Bradley)
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 29
Keywords: shuttle Intermetrics HAL

>>         Although, the shuttle software was written by IBM
>>people under contract, so they probably used a mish-mash of
>>PL-1 and ForTran.
>
>I thought the shuttle software was done by Intermetrics...? Or did they just do
>the compilers? In general, how can one find out more about computing on the
>shuttle?
>-- 

The space shuttle was the subject of a special case study published in the
Communications of the ACM sometime within the past year or two.  I'm not
sure of the exact issue.  The article described the computers and software 
used onboard the shuttle and in the development/testing areas.

Although the software is developed and maintained by IBM, I seem to recall that
there is also a NASA team that writes "equivalent" programs which are used to
verify the ones from IBM.  The software is not in PL-1 or Fortran, but in
a language called HAL(?).  According to the article the language is not named
after the computer in 2001, but after the person who developed it.

It's been a while since I read the article so this some of this might be
off a little bit.
-- 
David K. Bradley  

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Computer Science Department, The University of Texas at Austin
bradley@ut-sally.UUCP      {ihnp4,harvard,gatech,ctvax,seismo}!ut-sally!bradley
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