Ask HN: What OS do they use at NASA?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2199475

by pWneD • 15 years ago

8 6 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

gjvc• 15 years ago

Linux

hector_ka• 15 years ago

Mostly Windows, but I have seen Macs too.NASA is not only rockets.It has lots of offices and labs.

dasht• 15 years ago

NASA is very big with many largely separate parts. "All of them" is a reasonable approximation.

fleitz• 15 years ago

Lots of different OSs. Voyager probably doesn't even have an OS. The booster rockets on the shuttle use 8088's and assembler. The mars rovers use vxworks or it's predecessor. And I've heard rumors of embedded linux and QNX for some projects.

Basically you're going to find an OS reasonably suited to the job. Also, you're going to find OLD stuff as NASA wants something where the bugs are known / already worked out. This is why a few years ago they upgraded Hubble to a 486. And why on the rovers it executes code in debug mode and has hardware to interface with the JTAG ports. Everything that works off planet needs to be as bug free as possible and if something goes wrong you need a way to patch it remotely with latencies in the minutes to hours.

kakali• 15 years ago

Many. Ames uses Windows, RHEL, and OSX. The choice is up to the user and division they are in.

mkinnan• 15 years ago

My father works at the KSC location and his computer runs Windows :)

Ask HN: What OS do they use at NASA?

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