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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up!
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To: Hawkmoon who wrote (71)5/30/1996 10:03:00 PM
From: Larry Cannell   of 10309
 
I work in a an area of our company which produces control modules (embedded systems) which are connected to some pretty complex machinery (I'd rather not mention the company name here).

First off, I'm a software guy. I know how to write, maintain, debug, etc fairly complex software systems but I am NOT a hardware expert. I
know enough about the hardware so I can hold a reasonable conversation
with a hardware guy.

The particular department I'm in does not produce the production
control modules but rather we produce the systems used to support the development of these control modules. A couple of development tools we support are used to test these control modules. To do that we create our own embedded systems. Our systems send out electrical signals to emulate the machinery which our production control modules control and then capture the response from the module. The folks who create these are incredibly sharp technical people.

I happened to be talking to one of these folks recently and asked him about Wind River's new product. Apparently, it is not really a completely new product but an upgrade to the current VxWorks system with a GUI in front of it. I'm sure there are other capabilities in the "new" product but not all that much from his perspective. You have to understand that developers who work with embedded systems are used to dealing with pretty raw development environments and that GUIS are pretty wimpy things. Perhaps this new environment will allow less talented folks to develop for embedded applications but to the old guard these GUIs are wimpy stuff.

He did say emphatically however that the embedded applications market was going to take off for the next few years with a growth rate to exceed that of general computers. He also believes that VxWorks is the only game in town.

You can read what the techies are saying by looking in the newsgroup
comp.os.vxworks. If you don't know how to access Usenet then learn how. You can get there if your Netscape browser is configured correctly (ie. it points to the correct nntp server) and you type in "news:comp.os.vxworks" for the url.

I've found that by keeping in touch with the user groups you can really tell if the company is doing a good job. But keep low and don't post anything unless you have a legitimate technical question about the product. Otherwise, the list owner or other readers of the newsgroup with see through it and tear you apart.
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