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The Nimrod Airborne Early Warning System
Nimrod-AEW was one of those large projects which came to a sad end. It was intended to be the UK 'eye in the sky', to warn of airborne intruders. By flying at some height away from our coasts its radar coverage was considerably greater than could be achieved from land.
I had joined Elliott Automation in 1970 to work on the first attempt to build an AEW. This was cancelled by the Heath 'axe' in August that same year. But the idea was revived a few years later, only to be cancelled another 10 years or so later, in 1985, in favour of the Boeing AWACS. Originally intended for over-sea operation only, the competition, initially, was the US Grumman E2-C 'Hawkeye' (as seen off Vietnam). But when the requirement for over-land capability was added, the AWACS became a serious competitor.
The demise of the project was, by some, blamed on the software. In 1989, having been responsible for various aspects of the design and management of the development of the data processing function of the AEW, I told the real, albeit 'anonymised', and just slightly 'sanitised', story. Only one or two minor details have been obscured, primarily to protect the people involved.
The story was told at a conference of the Centre for Software Reliability and the accompanying papers were published by Elsevier in "Sofware Enginering for Large Software Systems" (ed. Barbara Kitchenham.) It is with the kind permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers, who now own the rights, that I can make that story available here as "A large embedded system case study".
Kluwer (www.wkap.nl) told me that, as of August 1999, they had 33 copies of the book left (ISBN 1-85166-504-8).