Design Patterns for Avionics Control Systems (1994)

Interestingly, one finds 'reactive' programming in such old systems. What's old is new again!

"From a structural perspective, an ACS may be seen as an instance of a Model-View-Controller (MVC) design[7]. An ACS maintains a ``reactive'' model of the world that is controlled via updates in response to new data sources"

It's interesting that the GoF Design Patterns book was already out at this time. I didn't know it was that old. In 1994 I had only a vague idea of what OO design was. I was still mostly designing hardware and in my area of software (embedded systems), there were still lots of arguments over whether C should be used instead of the various Assembly languages!

After having to implement 16-bit long division in assembly on a processor that only had a single 8-bit accumulator I vowed to never again use a CPU that didn't support C very well. One painful experience was enough to cause me to switch.

That MVC was in use for this isn't surprising: by early 1998 I was seeing it being strongly advocated for embedded systems user interfaces.

I should also add that this is written by Doug Lea, the same guy behind a lot of java.util.concurrent.