Considering the US government still hasn’t gotten back to me on giving me free run of their computer systems, I have to ask this question.
What are the OS systems different branches of the goverment use?
I know our local governemt uses a flavour of UNIX to store all their data. Some of which have NT workstations.
What OS does NASA use to put the shuttle into orbit?
I seem to recall a show about the CIA or FBI or perhaps National Security using massive Cray machines (which I’m pretty sure will NEVER run MS no matter how hard you bang on it)
Please tell me the WOPR of today isn’t running on Windows 95.
No real credible answer here just heresay. One of my co-workers used to fly satellites at Goddard in Maryland and he said all of the OSs there were homegrown (NASA and US govt written) stuff. Horribly, horribly, multiple redundant systems. Very complicated, make software tester man cry! This was all 10-15 years ago but he said even if someone DID manage to hack into the thing they wouldn’t get anywhere because of all the really odd protcols used and the divisions between functional components of systems. (remember this was really before PCs so we are taking big iron here)
Considering the US government still hasn’t gotten back to me on giving me free run of their computer systems, I have to ask this question.
What are the OS systems different branches of the goverment use?
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It is a safe bet that the different branches of the federal government all use a diverse grouping of operating systems. Most of their local area networks probably run the same operating systems as your typical business… Novell Netware, Windows NT, Windows 2000, etc.
The Army’s web site used to run on a MacOS web server.
Certainly for data warehousing some branches of government will use the venerable IBM mainframe or Unix systems [probably Solaris] running Oracle or similar database software.
One oldie-but-goodie that’s probably still around is VMS. They’re also probably in the process of dumping that OS as fast as they can, but the government’s version of fast is not yours or mine. For more info go to openvms.compaq.com
I also saw a claim at one point by a software vendor that the IRS was using their product to handle income data… they produced OS2000. Here is a link to that: http://www.xgforce.com/product.html
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I know our local governemt uses a flavour of UNIX to store all their data. Some of which have NT workstations.
What OS does NASA use to put the shuttle into orbit?
I seem to recall a show about the CIA or FBI or perhaps National Security using massive Cray machines (which I’m pretty sure will NEVER run MS no matter how hard you bang on it)
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You are correct. A modern Cray will run UnicOS, which is totally proprietary to Cray. I believe it can be made to have a Unix-like user interface but I can’t be quoted on that.
Most Cray work they do is probably cryptography. Interestingly enough, HARD-CORE cryptography is sometimes done not on a Cray, but on small, very odd computers that cryptographers build specially for attacking a given encryption scheme. These varieties of computers can break codes an order of magnitude more efficiently than a Cray can, but will frequently be useful against only ONE encryption scheme.
Echoing what Opengrave wrote, all of the government (well, military) mission-critical software projects I’ve worked on tended to either use proprietary systems (like the Navy’s UYK-22s and UYK-44s), embedded systems (VxWorks), or various forms of UNIX (Sun being very popular). Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) stuff like Windows, MacOS, and OS/2 might be used for non-critical work, like simulators and data analysis, though they’re usually just relegated as “desktop PCs” for reading email and/or a telnet client to the real hardware.
The only incident I can remember offhand where Windows was used in a military system was for an experimental “smart ship” a few years back – the Navy had a new warship entirely computer-controlled with Windows NT. During a test exercise, someone entered a zero into a field, the software tried to divide by zero, and the entire ship came to a dead stop when NT crashed as a result. It sat idle in the water for four hours and had to be towed back to port. There used to be an article at this link, but it’s expired now; you can get a tongue-in-cheek writeup at this link.
I suppose there might be branches of the federal government that uses Windows for non-critical stuff, like processing immigration applications (though after 9/11, maybe thst’s not a good idea, either). Needless to say, I suspect the Microsoft executive’s claim is 5% truth and 95% bullsh*t.
There used to be an article at 