A Legacy Of Titans

By Mike Deliman

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's Galileo spacecraft began what would become a 14-year odyssey of exploration 20 years ago this Sunday, Oct. 18. Galileo was humanity's first emissary to orbit a planet in the outer solar system – Jupiter. (Read More) 

20 years ago I was just starting to work with a remarkably small, very unix-like kernel from this *tiny* company in Emeryville (near Berkeley).  You could run it with a 68020SBC and a single 2MB memory board, a computer costing perhaps only twenty thousand dollars.  It was incredibly fast (considering the hardware) and even supported networking.  It was called VxWorks, and it just came out with a "Wind" kernel.  Back then, no-one was talking much about sending commercial off-the-shelf stuff into space.

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