A successful example of mainframe software development on a personal computing system

Abstract

A venture to develop mainframe software for a moderate-size computer program using a personal computing system as the software development tool is described. When the need arose to design, code and test a Kalman filter covariance simulation it was decided to design and develop the simulation code as much as possible on small personal computer (PC) system. The success of the venture far exceeded original expectations. To design the entire simulation, write approximately 8000 lines of Fortran 77 code, integrate the code, and perform systems integration testing entirely on the PC took about eight months. The code was transmitted to the VAX, where it was then complete and executed without any further problems; the VAX results were in agreement with the PC results. The three software development systems each consisted of an Apple Macintosh Plus computer and a 20-megabyte hard disk; the software included the Microsoft Fortran 77 Compiler (version 2.2) for the Macintosh, and some code custom-written in Fortran 77 to aid in the development process. Commercially available database software was resident on one of the systems for the maintenance of code dictionaries. >