"C J Campbell" wrote in message ...
All operating systems have a long history of crashing and being less than
stable.

That's too broad a statement. There have been very stable embedded
OS's meant for applications like this, with no history of crashing,
and that are certified for use in life-critical situations. I believe
those are what others are saying they'd rather rely on.

It would be interesting to know why you think Win NT would be
unstable on something like the MX-20. The device is dedicated to running one
program. It has no peripherals. It never runs for more than a few hours.
Basically, all the issues supposedly making Win NT unstable simply do not
exist on a closed box like this.

For something fairly simple like the MX-20, if the application is
proven stable, then I agree. One assumes that latency effects are
mitigated by using a faster CPU for example And locking pages in
memory, etc.

However, Microsoft themselves point out that Windows is not a hard
realtime OS, and should not be used in more demanding applications
such as fly-by-wire.

Best, Kev