Meetings:2002-12

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MASCOT: The lessons learned and forgotten.

Presented by David Tilbrook.

TLUG meetings are held at UofT on the second Tuesday of each month at 7:30 pm.

Date: Tuesday December 10, 2002

Time: 7:30 pm

Topic: MASCOT: The lessons learned and forgotten

Speaker: David Tilbrook

Description: MASCOT is an acronym for Modular Approach to Software Construction, Operation, and Test.

The MASCOT system is primarily intended to help design, implement, test, and execute real time software as might be embedded in a radar or navigation system.

It was developed by Ken Jackson of RSRE in Malvern and Group Commander Hugo Simpson of the RAF in the early 70s, at just about the same time as Unix and Modula, with which it shares some interesting approaches.

Despite its age and the evolution of systems, MASCOT is still in use within the MoD and a variety of other organizations, primarily in the cricket playing world.

The fascinating thing about MASCOT is that it is the only system that the presentor has experienced that does a good job at bridging the gulf between that fuzzy idea and the running system in a way that was truly helpful.

The presenter worked with Jackson on extending MASCOT and creating a MASCOT support and runtime environment on UNIX (7th edition) at B-NSR in Toronto and SDL in the U.K.

The presentation will discuss the MASCOT approach w.r.t. design and the runtime environment paying particular attention to the IPC mechanism (i.e., control queues).

Although MASCOT is not in wide use, there are some important lessons to be learned from this presentation.