Maintained control program for "real-time" Special Test Equipment (STE)

• The STE program controlled the debugging device attached to embedded radar application processors. The device could set breakpoints/watchpoints, snoop memory accesses, modify memory, load programs etc.
• The STE program also came to be the primary controller for various other devices and simulated devices as the overall radar systems and their test environments became more complex after the inception of the STE program in the mid 1970s.
• The STE program ran on a HP1000 RTE system and was already several tens of medium sized Fortran modules maintained by a team of about five programmers by the time I joined the maintenance team. My tasks were:
• Allowing command lines to be read from (possibly nested) command files instead of just the command input device (kind of like implementing a "source" command in a shell, but not in Unix).
• Enhancing capabilities of various commands according to user requests.
• Implementing commands to control yet another simulated device. This involved:
• Implementing a new command with various options, and manually modifying the command parser tables (YACC didn't make Fortran code, and they never heard of Unix anyway).
• Implementing a low level "driver" to access the I/O card that was connected to the simulated device.
• Implementing the in-between code.
• Test and integration with the device simulator.
• Attending various reviews and analyzing code.
• Repairing various commands according to user requests.