{"id":118,"date":"2006-01-07T00:19:33","date_gmt":"2006-01-06T13:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/01\/07\/rational-1000-a-surprising-architecture-from-a-surprising-source\/"},"modified":"2006-01-07T11:09:27","modified_gmt":"2006-01-07T00:09:27","slug":"rational-1000-a-surprising-architecture-from-a-surprising-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/01\/07\/rational-1000-a-surprising-architecture-from-a-surprising-source\/","title":{"rendered":"Rational 1000: A Surprising Architecture from a Surprising Source"},"content":{"rendered":"
This is one of a short series<\/a> of nostalgic reminiscences about the Rational 1000.<\/div>\n

It’s 1991. Way back before Rational Software<\/a> became part of IBM. Back before RUP<\/a>. Back before they acquired ClearCase<\/a>. Back before the UML Gang of Three were a gang. Back before Gra-Gra Booch<\/a> stopped writing about Ada. Back before Rose 1.0<\/a> had been released.<\/p>\n

Rational used to pimp a custom-built mini-computer. Yep, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right. Serious hardware. Sounds weird now, coming from a company that sells software tools and business methods.<\/p>\n

On top of that piece of hardware, they built their very own operating system. Yep, an entire operating system.<\/p>\n

On top of that operating system, they built an Ada compiler. (If your reaction is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ada? That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the language of death!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fair enough, but please stifle your revulsion for a moment. We have much to learn about high-quality engineering from the US Department of Defence!)<\/p>\n

On top of that compiler, they built an IDE purpose-built for writing Ada.<\/p>\n

Then they brought out a big whisk and mixed all the layers in together. The IDE was<\/em> the operating system. The operating system was<\/em> the Ada compiler. If you opened a command window to write a quick batch job, you wrote the batch job in Ada, using the IDE! Every time you pressed a button, it triggered an Ada program to carry out your command, even to the point of inserting a letter into the IDE (at least notionally \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I am sure there were hidden optimizations.)<\/p>\n

Using a Rational 1000 was like immersive learning<\/a> for Ada!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Using a Rational 1000 was like immersive learning for Ada!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-rat1000"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}