Beautiful Teams

Epilogue

Developing a large tool set like HADS can be an expensive proposition. In addition to acquiring rights to the frontend compiler technology, external consultants and Honeywell engineers were used on the project. While this was not a large number of people, it still had a cost. Some of the managers on the project seemed to resent the expenditures. At one point in the project, an Ada compiler for the AMD 29050 from an external source became available. Since there was not much of a potential market for a compiler for this target, it is likely that the target customer for this compiler was the 777 project. It may be that some at Honeywell were encouraging the compiler vendor to develop the tool set to replace HADS or as a fallback position if the HADS team should fail. One day in a hallway, Bruce, one of the managers, came up to me and said, "Since there is an off-the-shelf compiler available, they are going to kill the HADS project." Naturally this was concerning, not for the sake of my job, as there was plenty of work to be done, but because we took pride in the quality of what we had done and didn't want to see it go to waste. But Bruce was known as a guy who liked to spread a lot of rumors and who liked to make others uncomfortable, so we didn't do anything special. We just continued on with our plans. By the time the other compiler came out, the HADS team had demonstrated numerous successes. Some evaluation of the other compiler was done, but the HADS compilation system ...