Re: Rewriting SSA. Is This A Chance For GNU/Linux?

On 4/5/25 3:20 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sat, 5 Apr 2025 11:41:11 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
 

Project I worked on was undersea repeater for optical cables.
Probably the worst organised and specified project ever, but that's a by
the by. They said 'you are lucky we are allowed to use a silicon
processor, up to 5 years ago we had to use germanium' 'Why?' Because
that was the only technology more than 15 years old that could be
guaranteed to last the 15 years'

 When we built sequential runway lighting controllers the wire harnesses
had to be laced because the nylon ties used in industry hadn't had a
couple of decades of use.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_lacing
 Luckily all our techs were women, most of whom had knitting or macrame
skills. The heart of the system was an electro-mechanical stepper that was
also mostly obsolete in industry.
 The SSA probably has people saying 'Rust? Well maybe after it's proven
itself for 60 years like COBOL.'

   HA ! I can sorta believe it !!!
   Oh wait, they can re-do it all in Ada ! That
   ought to take 25 years and 25 billion $$$ ...
   though the programmer suicide rate may be a
   bit embarrassing ..........
   Lots of 'govt projects' are NEVER meant to
   get done - just use up as much money as
   possible for as long as possible so a few
   people can keep dipping into the cash stream.
   Oh, old tested computer lang - BASIC  :-)