TPRO sales director quoted at Gary North's site; TechWeb
Found at:
garynorth.com
techweb.cmp.com
John
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Embedded systems may harbor hidden glitches
By Terry Costlow and Alexander Wolfe
There's been a lot of hoopla about the possibility that a banking program or payroll application will freeze up at the turn of the century, but observers are now growing far more concerned that deeply embedded systems represent a far bigger problem. It's fairly simple to determine whether a PC's software package will work correctly, but it's much more daunting to tell whether a nuclear plant, factory system, elevator or other system with embedded firmware might be brought to its knees by the "00" in a dated time stamp.
Though often hidden, the embedded problem may have far more impact than the one in front-office computers. It's unlikely that airplanes will fall from the sky when the 1990s end, but observers say portions of factories may fold, oil drilling and piping systems may freeze up and other embedded hardware may grind to a halt.
Most semiconductor-market watchers say the PC market represents less than 1 percent of microprocessor usage, so the economic fallout of embedded flaws is potentially huge.
Sensory overload "This will be a far bigger issue on the plant floor than in a mainframe," said Bill Heermann, sales director at Tava Technologies, here. "In a mainframe, you've got software that's only looking at about five streams of data. On the plant floor, you've often got 10,000 electronic sensors, and in one fashion or another, each sensor is a data stream that has to be examined. One of those 10,000 sensors may begin feeding bad data to networked devices above them and bring down the whole network, shutting down the plant."
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