Go to JMI home page JMI Software Systems presented the standard training course to Hewlett-Packard and their consultants to design the LogicDart using C EXECUTIVE. The following excerpt is from the cover article of the March, 1998, issue of Portable Design magazine, quoting Eric Vogel, R&D project manager at Hewlett-Packard:
Software Development was handled concurrently with hardware. "We evaluated commodity commercial realtime operating systems to select an appropriate one," says Vogel, "looking for the elements that would be important for both our product--and for our design processes."
Vogel also wanted to put the LogicDart's OS in ROM. "We were intrigued with an embedded version of DOS, but having an Intel processor wouldn't ensure PC compatibility. We then scrutinized C EXECUTIVE from JMI Software Systems (Spring House, PA). As an RTOS, it appealed to us because its architecture offered applications layered on top of device drivers. That fit with our strategy of isolating the software that ran the data-acquisition hardware from the user-interface software. The idea was to be able to modify hardware if need be --without influencing the user interface.
"C EXECUTIVE also bore a resemblance to Unix from a programmer's standpoint. It looked similar in terms of its device driver architecture and the way applications interacted. That could help isolate the two aspects of the system easily."
JMI also directly supported the 80L188EB. "We were delighted to find that C EXECUTIVE had libraries for its on-board peripherals," tells Vogel.
From a project management point of view, Vogel evaluated JMI's RTOS in a risk-free manner. "I put my entire software team through JMI's training course to see if the product would really fit our needs. That was a low-cost way of evaluating C EXECUTIVE in great depth. If it wasn't a fit, we wouldn't have to pay source-code royalties or license fees, or sign any source or binary code agreements."
It turned out that C EXECUTIVE matched up with HP's design practices. The team was already committed to using structured analysis and design; top-level design was done with data-flow diagrams. The next level down was done with English-like pseudocode, before any line of code was actually written.
"C EXECUTIVE's data flows and bubbles corresponded to many of our elements," says Vogel. "It became obvious when we got into training that the design practices we used-- independent of the OS--would migrate over to C EXECUTIVE's facilities in a straightforward way."
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