"Grumman-581" writes:

Personally, I'm not a big fan of the one system does everything approach in
some of the glass panels... I have no problem with mechanical gauges being
replaced with electronic gauges, but I would prefer for them to be
independent, possibly communicating to some other system through some sort
of standard interface... At Rockwell, many of their new systems were
communicating via TCP/IP packets... I kind of liked this approach... It
seemed rather simple and elegant... A device would have a particular IP
address and port number associated with it... You could send information to
that device or retrieve information from it as appropriate... For a
non-compliant device, you could just design a TCP/IP interface to the device
that translated from the proprietary device information format to the TCP/IP
format...

Minimizing the software improves reliability and safety. TCP/IP
interfaces generally require software, and that's not a good thing.

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