[cicero]

I'm 56, and my first job out of college was at General Dynamics Fort Worth Division, which is now part of Lockheed Martin. I did not work on the F-22, aka Advanced Tactical Fighter, but I did work on avionics software for the A-12, aka Advanced Tactical Aircraft, which got cancelled by Dick Cheney in January 1990. I had some contact with ATF engineers because at that time (I can't speak for later), ATF and ATA both used IBM's Common Module computing hardware and the Ada '83 language. We used MicroVAX workstations for our Ada compiler as well as our CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) and documentation software. I was not on the program when the software tools decisions were made. I do know that other programs at General Dynamics used Apollo and Sun workstations, which were Unix based. I can only assume that either someone thought the VAX environment was better, or DEC made them an offer they could not refuse. I was a Unix fan at the time and would have preferred Sun, but the VAX was not a bad system.

[ncmncm]

A-12 is super hard-core.

Cheney has plenty else to rot in hell for, but canceling A-12 has to count more per unit victim.

But Apollos at the time would not have been running Unix. They had Aegis, which was much better. In some ways. (It took inspiration from Multics.) Some excellent features of Aegis have still not been mainstreamed. But Dragonfly BSD finally got variable expansion in symbolic links! Sort-of.