[jackbill]

What needs to be done is a complete rearchitecture and rewrite of the entire system. A costly undertaking that RARELY happens to software once it is in a production environment. At least based on the story as told in this article.

While the software goes through this "complete rearchitecture", is the hardware supposed to stand in place - with technologies that are continually becoming obsolete?

By the way, I was the "hardware design manager" for a major electronics system for the F-22 before I retired in 1991. Although I wasn't involved directly in the software, I could see that ADA was a coming disaster.

[HamiltonJay]

Hardware doesn't need to stand still, with proper architecture hardware can change without neccessarilly creating chaos in the design. Real Time systems make this definately more of a pain, but not an impossible problem.

You have a core architecture that was designed in what the late 80s early 90s.... software design has come a long way in the past 10 - 15 years. THere is much more flexibility to non-homogenous and flexible hardware systems today than there ever was before.

I am not trying to minimize the problems, but an architected and designed system, nearly always outperforms a kludged one.. particularly a system that has 15 years worth of Kludges.