Cecil stated in his most recent column: “Windows is so notoriously unreliable that no one would ever build a life-or-death system around it.” My question is what operating system does the International Space Station use? I’ve found articles that imply it uses Windows and Linux, but I’m not sure. Also, is Cecil right in stating that no “life-or-death” system has been built around Microsoft Windows? Banks? Hospitals? The military?
Lots of systems use and run on Windows in industry. It’s just that, for many applications, it’s overkill and overly complicated. That’s why most “computers” like ATMs and the like run on very basic Linux-esque operating systems that are purpose-driven.
As for what operating system a space station uses, I doubt there’s just one running the entire thing.
Linux? You mean unix don’t you? What code behind? Fortran?
For navigation and comunication I would suspect unix. Day to day stuff I would bet on windows XP pro.
It aint’ Vista. They have come back.
Whatever OS it is, I bet it’s outta this world!
[sub]Sorry. I’ll come in again.[/sub]
For the really important stuff, they may have just written everything from scratch themselves instead of using something off the shelf. I don’t know about the ISS, but I believe this is the case for the Space Shuttle, where every single line of the flight control software is very carefully reviewed and audited.
I doubt that most of the Space Station has much of anything like an OS. It’s more wired like your garage door or something. There might be an actual, all-purpose computer with on it, and that could be Windows or anything, but I suspect that it isn’t an integral part of the overall station.
If there is an OS for any major part of the station, it might be one of:
Or any other one of several available Real-Time Operating Systems, or a homegrown variety. And possibly there are several systems each using a different OS, just depending on who developed that component and which OS they had experience with, or happened to find the homepage of first.
There are space certified versions of linux out there. NASA also uses specialized embedded operating systems that desktop users have likely never heard of, like VxWorks, ThreadX and QNX. NASA also has some proprietary operating systems that they themselves have developed, which only run on their equipment. Usually NASA contracts to another company to make subsystems, and it is up to that subsystem vendor to put whatever OS they deem suitable into the thing. NASAs specs are pretty tough, though, and Windows isn’t reliable enough to meet them.
NASA does use windows on desktop computers, but they don’t run space equipment with windows.
I design industrial control systems for a living, and my company currently uses its own proprietary operating system. We are considering porting to linux. We evaluated moving to windows (there are embedded versions of windows out there) but we found its real time performance to be so poor as to be unusable for our purposes. Linux and VxWorks are your two biggest players in the real time control arena. Microsoft gets a lot of use in the HMI (human-machine interface) because windows is good at GUIs, so while the control panel might be windows, the part that does the real work is not.
Banks are not “life or death” and you’ll often find windows based systems in them. It’s kinda funny to see an ATM with a blue screen of death.
Hospital equipment, like NASA equipment, uses whatever the equipment vendor decided to put in there. If the machine has an HMI then it might be windows. If the equipment is truly life or death critical, it’s almost guaranteed not to be running windows.
This isn’t as true today as it used to be. Windows XP Embedded shows up in a lot of unexpected places. I believe it has a strong presence in ATMs as well as gaming (gambling) machines.
Occassionally pictures show up of Windows Blue Screen on embedded devices like ATMs. Probably by now these is a whole site dedicated to these type of pics.
ecg covered the range of OSes in space equipment, so I won’t repeat his tale. Oh and he scooped me on the ATM answer too!
This is a link to the wiki page about the Apollo Guidance Computer. Considering it was built so long ago, I was surprised that it included a tiny OS (just a job scheduler really).
It was odd to me because I used to work on modems in the early '90’s. We didn’t even use an OS then – just assembly language and interrupts.
There are some computers on the space station that use Windows 2000 and XP. They’re very picky about what they install on them.
I’ve had this question on my mind for months, and when I was watching some live NASA TV of what’s going on inside the ISS (yeah, that’s what I do with my time), I saw Microsoft Windows on a laptop, took a screenshot, and assumed that’s what they use.
Windows is used on laptops for non-mission-critical tasks. One of the problems in using computers up in space is that there’s no atmosphere absorbing cosmic rays, so if the chips are too small, a stray cosmic ray can change the output to a computation. Not a big deal for a spreadsheet, but a big deal for a guidance system.
So the computer that drives the shuttle is made of 70’s hardware which is hardened against radiation. A great story about the team that writes the software for the shuttle is here.
I imagine the ISS has similar concerns.
To paraphrase what I said in another thread;
Picard: Fire!
Worf: One moment, Captain. Our Environmental Controls screen keeps popping up over the top of the weapons screen.
Riker: Who lets Microsoft write starship software?
Well, they shouldn’t have let Wesley Crusher install ‘EnviroCon.exe’ as a startup app for the tactical workstation, should they? That was the problem. 
(Yes, Starfleet Command has submitted a help ticket about the EnviroCon popover issue, and MS has confirmed that it’ll be resolved with the next service pack. Apparently it only happens when WeaponsFire.exe has finished going through the targeting dialog box and the ‘Big Red Button’ is visible.)
there is a famous picture of the blue screen of death on the roof of the olymic statium during the Chinese opening ceremonies. One of the actors that was suspended on a cable and running horizontally around the roof is visible in the picture. Our Linux sysadmins have in on the wall to tweek the PC admin.
It’s worth noting that the Space Shuttle systems run on 1 MB of RAM. The code, written in HAL/S, is simple and compact for reliability.
The ISS systems are written in Ada and run on 80386SX/80387 processors which I don’t think would even run Windows 95.
I seem to remember hearing a store about a virus getting on the ISS computer systems which would make me think that at least part of their system runes on windows.
We have critical city services built on Windows Server systems. These are systems that support emergency first responders like e-911 and such, so they could be called life or death systems. The easiest way to address the flakiness or other shortcoming of any system or service is to have several instances of it running simultaneously in different geographic locations. This is known in the IT industry as a High Availability environment. Not only does the HA design address the potential flaws of an OS, but those of the hardware, network connections and other dependencies as well - none of which can ever be made completely immune to bug or breakdown.
It seems as though designing for redundancy is less expensive than designing for perfection.
Was somebody’s tongue in their cheek when they named or selected that designation? “If it’s HAL, it’s *got * to be good!”