About catchy names: I don’t think there is a problem with "Wind River Tornado". But I do wonder if the Embedded Systems companies can ever take off without a better appellation. Embedded Systems fails to differentiate properly the full-service RTOS companies from the universe of embedded systems applications. We should all try to come up with a better name that captures the following:
1. Real Time Operating System scalable with multitasking, threads, and any needed services such as communications protocols, GUI, flash memory file system.
2. Transparent to the user (embedded in the application). For example, the driver of an automobile need not be aware of the RTOS controlling the injector system that is communicating with all major subsystems in the automobile, and maybe even the company headquarters where the car was built to diagnose a problem.
3. Generally, but necessarily on a 32-bit or more microprocessor. There are a few 16-bit examples of our type of embedded system, and already 64-bit processors exist (witness the embedded Alpha chip).
4. The name must exclude simple embedded systems. For example, for many years I have had smart microwaves. But I am sure they do not support a transparent RTOS of the sophistication we now are talking about. My microwaves could never do anything fancy. I’ve never been able to call them from my car and order dinner to start. Nor did they ever communicate with the local power company to determine optimum times for cooking. None of them ever responded to my wife’s cooking habits. And to top it off, they don’t speak English, or any other language for that matter. Even worse, my vacuum cleaner doesn’t inspect the cleanliness of the rug while it is being vacuumed in order to optimize automatically the settings using Fuzzy Logic. However, I have to say my new HP deskjet printer takes anything I throw at it and somehow smartly prints it to paper.
How about something like "Interoperating Transparent Computing"? Can anyone shorten this down to something like Java or Internet or Database or Client-server or Virtual Reality or Cybernetics?
Allen, |
