It's one instrument on the MARS Express orbiter that needed a bit more processing power than most spaceflight computers could deliver. They sent a P90 running a stripped down 98. Not an ideal choice, but not terrible, either-- it's just one instrument.
I was a little credulous reading some of the poorer quality sources reporting this. On the other hand, I've reluctantly deployed DOS and pre-Windows-NT embedded systems to run various instruments. (I've gotten away with running Wine and box86 on little ARM SBCs sometimes, but at the cost of having even less support from the hardware and software developers). Running an ancient OS in a small environment embedded can easily be the "least evil" thing.
Source? ESA press release only mentions development environment.
>“We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS,” says Carlo Nenna, MARSIS on-board software engineer at Enginium, who is implementing the upgrade. “Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!”
Somebody should be indicted for this crime against engineering. But I doubt Windows is actually running on the device.
At least the experience has not been as bad as the US Navy ship left dead in the water, needing a tow back to port, after being handed over to MS Windows.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 35.2 ms ] threadIt's also amazing that it's still working, assuming it wasn't radiation hardened and all.
Instead, they had to resurrect a Windows 98 development environment to patch the software running on the DSPs.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/mars-probe-gets-windows-98...
I was a little credulous reading some of the poorer quality sources reporting this. On the other hand, I've reluctantly deployed DOS and pre-Windows-NT embedded systems to run various instruments. (I've gotten away with running Wine and box86 on little ARM SBCs sometimes, but at the cost of having even less support from the hardware and software developers). Running an ancient OS in a small environment embedded can easily be the "least evil" thing.
https://www.litepc.com/shop/?product=Our_Products&pid=1
They get 98 down to about 80mb.
I am sure they had their reasons, maybe driver related, but I am sure there were better alternatives back in the early 2000s.
>“We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS,” says Carlo Nenna, MARSIS on-board software engineer at Enginium, who is implementing the upgrade. “Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!”
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/Software_upg...
At least the experience has not been as bad as the US Navy ship left dead in the water, needing a tow back to port, after being handed over to MS Windows.