Software vendors rarely acknowledge their debt to research, indeed often are unaware of it, and rarely even appreciate the importance of such acknowledgement. The long lead times, and tortuous adoption paths, for software engineering research contributions also cloud perception of the actual source of popularly adopted software engineering technologies.

No abstract available.

The paper presents an up-to-date overview as well as new results on mobile satellite communications. Specifically, the following subjects are addressed: worldwide activities; satellite orbits; multiple access techniques; Novstar global positioning system; economic and regulatory issues; future trends. Some of these technical and nontechnical subjects appeal disjoint, but they are unique and significant among the many facets, which effect the development and operation of mobile satellite communication systems.>

No abstract available.

The main factor preventing delivery of high quality software systems is the difficulty of finding and eliminating latent software defects. Software errors - very much like "design faults" in pure hardware lbased systems - often reveal themselves in very unpleasant and unexpected ways. Systematic software testing is the best defense against such software quality problems. The intricacies and complexity of non-trivial software products i n practice dictate some form of automated software testing. A software product in the 10 KLOC to 50 KLOC range may have billions of internal states, tens of thousands of variables, and thousands of different "functional behaviors" or "features." Analyzing such a system manually - while an interesting application of modern Computer Science - isn’t much fun, and doesn’t often produce much defect detection benefit.

An extensive computer software package was developed for use at RARC '83, the 1983 Regional Administrative Radio Conference, to plan the broadcasting-satellite service at 12 GHz in Region 2 (the western hemisphere). A panel of experts from eight Region 2 administrations was responsible for the software development. The software used at the conference was the product of cooperative combined efforts in Canada, the United States, Brazil, and the International Frequency Registration Board (IFRB) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). This software package, or portions of it, was used in Geneva during the conference by three independent computer systems: the official one at the ITU, one used by the Canadian delegation, and one used by the United States delegation. Towards the end of the conference, these three systems, and the efforts of planners of several delegations, were combined in just the right mixture to produce the high-capacity flexible plan that was agreed to by the Region 2 administration. This paper describes in some detail the developed software package and its use at the conference.

The possibility of automatic construction of a complete set of program tests is considered. A test set system is said to be complete if every feasible program branch (segment) is executed by it. The complete test set construction algorithm for commercially oriented data processing programs is outlined, and the results of its functioning on real programs are analyzed.

Software testing techniques are seen as the only currently viable alternative to problems of deficient software Quality. Testing methods focus on demonstrating the correct (proper) operation of a software system, using methods that also assure a thorough search for program "errors" has been accomplished. The possible alternative organizational schemes, and some insights into the psychology of testing are presented. In addition, some rough guidelines for quantifying the size, difficulty, budget levels, and expected results of systematic software testing are presented.

A novel high-performance processor architecture for processing a large number of independent instruction streams is proposed and its operating behavior studied. The proposed processor operates on instruction words in a two-address format (thereby eliminating the "operating registers"), and is organized in a fashion which permits as high degree of internal buffering and pipelining. The processor has the following properties: 1) The hardware cost grows only slightly more than linearly with the overall implementation cost; 2) The overall performance is primarily dependent on the processor wordtime and is only secondarily dependent on the supporting memory cycle time; 3) All instruction stream interfaces with memory occur at special queuing (buffer) units which are used to "unscramble" the instruction streams and continually provide work for subsequent processing elements.

This book treats the difficult topic of "operating systems" in a somewhat novel manner–one which is not necessarily suggested by its title. The "pragmatic approach" amounts to basing the descriptions virtually entirely in the context of two very widely used operating systems: IBM's OS/MVT and IBM's TSS/360. As an expositional framework, these two systems certainly provide a surfeit of material–there are literally stacks of it in a large number of machine rooms throughout the country. Katzan culls and organizes this material in a manner which surely demonstrates that it's been culled and organized, but less surely demonstrates any significant extraction of the essences of OS's. The material is not, however, without its good points even though, in most instances, they are hard to discern from the jargon jungle which seems to be de regle when speaking of operating systems.