Re: Another "you're using Ada, and you didn't even know"

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <8259n1$mr6$1@wanadoo.fr>, "Jean-Pierre Rosen" <rosen.adalog@wanadoo.fr> writes:
> In the US, the cable operator MediaOne had all its systems provided by the
> French company Canal+ Technologie.
> And yes, all the software is in Ada.
> 
> (Michael, for your list...)

Presumably this only applies to their television operations,
and the Internet operations use traditional C-based Unix
systems.

But I would be careful about anything that describes MediaOne
as doing things uniformly across the US, since Internet customers
get widely differing technology under the same product naming
depending on where they are in the US.  Some people have a
two-way Internet cable connection like mine, while others
have inbound cable with outbound characters going by a dialup
connection.  What one gets depends on when one's neighborhood
got "cable" and what the definition of "cable" was at the time,
and how much the cable company wanted to pay for installation
of outside plant (and what they were required to install by local
government) back before the days of cable modems.

The "cable company" at the time, of course, was not MediaOne,
but one of the many companies that got bought out by MediaOne.
Certainly the outside plant was not the only regard in which
those companies had made different purchase decisions prior to
their acquisition by MediaOne.

If MediaOne junked all the existing head-end hardware and then
replaced it with something that is Ada-based, that is great,
but let's make sure the Ada "wins" list has the correct
description of where MediaOne uses "Ada-Inside".

Larry Kilgallen