Glass panels: what OS?

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004 08:15:41 -0700, C J Campbell wrote:


"Bruce Horn" wrote in message
news
I've been wondering...

What underlying OS do the various glass panels (Avidyne, Garmin, etc.)
use? It might actually make me think twice about buying a particular
system if I knew that (for example) it was Windows underneath.

The MX-20 runs plain vanilla Windows NT 4.0. I don't know why anyone except
software bigots would have a problem with that. There have been no known
problems with the OS in this application.

Well, chances are, it's actually embedded NT, but I'll defer if you
factually know otherwise. The concern is, NT has a long history of
crashing and being less than stable. This is true of embedded NT, but to
a much lessor degree. So, for someone to have concern about the heart of
an important navigation tool, I think falls well outside of simple OS
bigotry.

There are many, many, excellent and respected embedded OSs. It just so
happens that anything from Microsoft tends to be on the bottom of the list
of stable and respected OSs. So, while you might dismiss it, I don't
think it reason enough to ignore the concern. Having said that, if real
world use shows the device to be rock solid, then I think that speaks
volumes, clearly out weighing the voice of concern.


Cheers,

Greg Copeland