B-2 Stealth Bomber Gets Upgrade, Joins the '90s

WmHBlair writes "Flightglobal has a report about the upgrades being made to the B-2A Stealth Bomber, which include Pentium class processors, JOVIAL code rewritten in C, and fibre channel hard drives. The Register, as usual, makes light of this event with a tongue-in-cheek news item noting that the upgrade drags Stealth Bomber IT systems into the '90s."

Comments

I hate to break it to anybody

[Anonymous Coward]

but microprocessors that are designed to handle a nuclear EMP aren't blazing fast. But they are definitely not 90s technology.

I think the B-2 bomber will be fine unless its pilots require the extra computing power to play "punch the monkey" or the South Park Lemmiwinks game.

Better functionally quaint than gee-whiz and oops

[ScentCone]

As was recently discussed about the current Mars lander mission, it's really just fine if something built to do a very specific job doesn't have support for this week's gamer-friendly video board, a hacked Wii controller, bluetooth, and a dozen USB ports. Hardened, reliable hardware and bug-free seems better than, say, some of the misadventures that some IT-intensive commercial aircraft have suffered over the last few years. It's OK to be one notch less cool when you're flying around with large weapons.

maybe they should have stayed in the '60s

[speedtux]

I'm not sure that replacing JOVIAL code with C code is actually progress. If JOVIAL is anything like ALGOL 60, it's arguably a better programming language than C.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[tzhuge]

In this case...

avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people don't die.

Re:There's a Reason for That

[B3ryllium]

... or the wrong people die.