Acknowledgments

My first exposure to open source was in the summer of 1994. I had just come off of a project building an operating system kernel for a large geosynchronous communication spacecraft in the Ada language on the MIL-STD-1750A microprocessor. The Ada language was technically very nice, safe, and easily readable. The MIL-STD-1750A processor was old, even by early 1990 standards (it was a 1970s instruction set architecture designed for military avionics ), but was still very elegant in its simplicity.

I moved on to working on a research satellite to study gamma ray bursts and, on the side, supported the validation of a project called 1750GALS. This project, managed by Oliver Kellogg, consisted of a GCC compiler, assembler, linker, and simulator for the Ada language, targeted to the 1750A processor family. Since I had some background in Ada and the 1750A and the gamma ray burst project was just ramping up, I loaned some time to its validation. Some months later, I saw a post in the comp.compilers usenet group , of which a snippet is provided here: