Re: Why couldn't an operating system be written in ada

[olavip@kaarne.cs.tut.fi (Poutanen Olavi)]

The Nokia MPS 10 machine was all built around Ada. Its OS and all other
subsystems were written in Ada. The hardware architecture was prorietary,
"home designed". The instruction set and Ada run-time system were to some
extent desingned hand-by-hand putting the implementation to that side where
it was most convenient/efficient.

This effort took place in Finland at Nokia Data System roughly around the
years 1979..1987. This machine was supposed to become a  winner, to contain
the most advanced techniques and ideas. At the early 80's Ada was one of
those. I personally was involved in the MPS 10 effort primariliy as being
in charge of the RDBMS system implemented in Ada (see Proceedings of the
Ada Europe 1985, Paris) and of some Ada testing tools (Ada Europe 1987,
Stockholm and Quality Week 1993, San Francisco).

Nokia Data, today known as ICL Data (Nokia Corp sold its computer
manufacturing branch to ICL Plc/UK sometimes 1990), had been a leading
provider of bank systems (3-tier architechture) to Finnish banks. The
previous solution was based (branch office computers) on also Nokia-
proprietary Mikko-3 computers.

I remember one special argumentation in favor of Ada in that business
situtation: It was envisioned (at early 80's) that the future is in open
architectures and standard hardware solutions. Perhaps the banks won't buy
a yet another system upgrade where they should again build all their
applications from scratch. Ada and its portability was supposed to help
here, as a means to carry the applications to the new platform.

The next platform came soon: Intel 80286/386(/486) and OS/2. We bravely
tried to get an Ada environment into OS/2. But due to various reasons Ada
really didn't take off on that environment at Nokia.

Anyways, the MPS 10 machine has been in use in a couple of Finnish banks
for many years (as a branch office server having certain responsibility of
the overall system). It was not many years ago when I still saw those
machines, don't know if there are any more in production use.

Once the bugs and inefficiencies of the MPS 10 systems were ironed away and
the usage got stabilized, it was amazing with how little maintenance staff
the support could be managed.

On peak years the development staff was c. 200 people. Today they are still
either at ICL doing the Team OFFICE product or at Nokia Corp doing
telecommunications or mobile phones software.

Just my 2 Eurocents...

- Olavi
-------------------- *** Code hard, test well! *** ------------------------
Olavi Poutanen                                     E-mail: olavip@cs.tut.fi
Testwell Oy                                        Tel:    +358-31-316-5464
Kanslerinkatu 8, FIN-33720 Tampere, Finland        Fax:    +358-31-318-3311
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