Happy Day.
Bill Karwin was talking about this at the Inprise Conference in Surfer's
Paradise in 98. He confirmed that the US Army was indeed using Interbase in
tanks and that the reboot time was the main factor in the decision. He said
that the database was being used for logging of the tank's activity and not
for targeting or battle theatre data. He didn't say anything about an EMP
but he did say that the sheer impact of the recoil was enough to screw up a
lot of the gear in the tank. I suppose that if you hit your PC
extraordinarily hard it could crash, but I'm not about to strap mine to the
base of a cannon to test this theory. Apparently they have a big red RESET
lever that they throw after the shot is fired. I guess that what happens
between a shot being fired and the completion of Interbase bootup just
doesn't get logged.
I have a VERY vague recollection that Bill said that the tank PC was running
Linux. I have an even more vague memory (this is getting very tenuous) of
Bill saying that the "Interbase for Linux" development was largely driven by
the army connection.
Cheers.
BJ...
-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Mahony <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Multiple recipients of list database <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tuesday, 11 April 2000 14:12
Subject: Re: [DUG-DB]: What cheap databases are any good?
Back to you Nic. How about tracking this one down. I remember Richard Vowles
telling us this one first, so he may know where the story came from. My
recollection is that the shock of the gun firing caused the computers to
reboot (no mention of EMP), and that the computer was used for targetting,
and thermal image recognition, etc, hence the DB. Still, who knows. The
original story had MS SQL Server as the Army's original choice, and
Interbase being brought in to replace it because SQL Server (in those days)
took several minutes to reboot.
Simon.
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Website: http://www.delphi.org.nz
