🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <24055@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> labc-4da@e260-4d.berkeley.edu 
(Bob Heiney) writes:

>   What kind of information can I get on the design, implementation, etc. of
>   shuttle software?  Is there someone I should write?

Try JSC, maybe starting with PAO.  They'll give you the name of somebody
who knows more and you can chain your way to the real information.

>   I'm interested in this info at almost any technical level, though source
>   code (in Fortran?) would be a little much.  :-)

I think that the computers are IBM AP101s (at least they were in the early
phases and I can't believe that they'd replace these with incompatible new
computers and go through the _unbelievable_ man-rating required for new
software).  I don't know what the source code is written in, but I don't 
think it's Fortran.  We used AP101s in the second phase of our F-8 Digital 
Fly-by-Wire program, in part because Shuttle was going to use these.  
The flight control system software was written by Draper Labs, but I'm 
fairly sure they didn't use Fortran.  Anyway, the source code was written 
on a mainframe and a load module is produced (translator? compiler?), which 
is then loaded into the onboard computers.  I can find out a lot more of 
the details, but it will take a while.

Incidently, it wasn't a bad idea to use the F-8 DFBW to test the AP101s for
the Shuttle, since we found at least one generic problem.  Before we went to
the AP101s we used Apollo (the space program, not the workstation) computers
since we had to have flight-rated computers and there were _very_ few of those
in the late 60s and early 70s.

M F Shafer
NASA Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility
shafer@elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov

NASA management doesn't know what I'm doing and I don't know what
they're doing, and everybody's happy this way.