Jim Levie writes:

On Sat, 10 May 2008 14:05:38 -0700 (PDT), Too_Many_Tools
I noted that too.

Actually I remember reading about the software in the Shuttle...using
very old hardware and software.

The DOS usage likely tells us when that subsystem was developed..which
is much newer than most of the Shuttle. ;)

This country has been coasting for a long time on old space technology
and it is coming back to bite us.

TMT
From the article it sounds like that disk drive was an experiment
controller and data collector. For that purpose, DOS would be a pretty
darned good choice. It is very light weight, allowing it to run on
minimal hardware, and is reasonably robust. Since the OS doesn't limit
a program's access to hardware, it is easy to write experiment control
and data acquistion programs. The problem these days would be in
finding hardware that DOS will run on, which is one reason that Linux
has become popular for this and similar purposes.

It isn't clear to me that the experiment computer ran DOS. All I can
be certain of from the article is that the disk was recorded using a
DOS file system.

There is an argument for something like DOS & for FAT filesystems for
some classes of applications and there are plenty of x86 variations
suitable to run soemthing like DOS. Even if it was old hardware, the
last thing you want to do is start upgrading stuff before you really
need to- where need is defined as something like "if we don't the device
is more likely to fail than if we do".

The Constellation stuff, being a new engineering effort is not
constrained to use the older stuff- and a conscious effort is being made
to modernize systems and protocols accordingly.

Gregm