[geeks] Oldest OS Still Developed

[Andy Wallis]

On Oct 18, 2006, at 1:15 PM, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> Whatever runs the US Air Traffic Control system would get my vote...

NAS(National Airspace System) is a hacked-up version of VM. I don't  
know when it was forked exactly, but NAS is still updated to this  
day. I get notices of NAS patch tapes. Everything else that is  
critical is mostly UNIX, QNX, and other OSs. AIX is the prominent of  
the UNIXes as I recall. Other than Harris' VCS , I don't know of  
operational critical servers running Windows or Linux.  I laughed  
when I heard RedHat harping up a Volpe display box running Linux.  
Unless an air traffic controller is using it to control aircraft, it  
isn't hardcore ATC.

> Last I heard, REPEATED attempts to replace those platforms have  
> failed, leaving us with a very mature product.
IBM Federal Systems's AAS(Advanced Automation System) failed because  
the specifications kept changing and it became a running target.  
Raytheon's STARS failed, from what I heard, because of serious  
quality issues. NAS is being slowly phased out as new systems replace  
legacy ones.

After the AAS boondoggle, the FAA decided to replace the NAS  
infrastructure piecemeal in small cost chunks. Rather than a single  
multi-billion dollar program, the modernization was to be done in  
subsystem increments.  I believe the old NAS VM is expected to go  
offline in the late 2010s. Given the FAA's request to replace  
machines in a quicker cycle, we shouldn't have future programs where  
we have boxes falling apart due to age.

-Andy "Washington ADIZ and Presidential TFRs are of the devil" Wallis