Real-Time Systems Development

Acknowledgements and thanks

There are many individuals, colleagues, students and graduates from our

BSc Computing for Real-time Systems degree, who have contributed to this

text, directly or indirectly. In particular I would like to thank a colleague

Bob Lang who generously provided detailed, technical reviews of all the

chapters, based partly on his own commercial experience working with real-

time systems. Also, Craig Duffy tolerating the repeated requests to read

drafts and responded with a sustained counterstream of cross-development

news from his Linux porting activities. In addition, I have enjoyed useful

discussions on many real-time topics with Richard Barry, Adam Budd, Andy

Clymer, Mark Cridge, Tony Gibbs, Will Skinner, and Rob Voisey. They may

recognize their influence in some parts of the book.

The duckshoot game, among many other ideas, was lucidly explained to

me many years ago by Jonathan Bromley, and it has survived to provide an

intriguing programming exercise. I must also warmly thank my colleagues

Jeff Graham, Nigel Gunton, Ian Johnson, Peter Martin, Laurence O’Brien

and Chris Wallace for engaging so generously in technical discussions and

accepting the regular outbreaks of author’s obsession.

There are too many students to mention individually, but throughout

the past 20 years, they have trusted us with their careers by enrolling onto

our BSc Computing for Real-time Systems degree. Fundamentally, it is their

good humour and continuing curiosity which provided the spur for this text.

The best reward for any teacher is to see students progress and develop their

technical confidence, leading to successful graduation and rewarding careers.

I must also once again give praise to Brian Kernighan for his wonderfully

small pic language, which I used to construct all the line diagrams throughout

the book. The original text was edited with emacs and the formatting was

all carried out using groff from Richard Stallman’s GNU suite. It was here

that I discovered the fun of using pic to code diagrams. I would also like

to thank Richard Stallman for the guidance he generously offered concerning

the General Public License which is discussed in Section 9.13.

The book would not have been possible without the energy and per-

sistence of the editors, initially David Hatter, and latterly Alfred Waller

xi

xii Acknowledgements and thanks

at Elsevier. Many thanks to them both for their patient encouragement

throughout, and also to Deborah Puleston for her flawless and patient editing.

Finally credit and thanks to the my wife Val, who several times struggled

through the draft text, in a heroic effort to eliminate my worst grammatical

errors. Apologies to our cat Cassie who has not yet forgiven my purchase of

a flat panel screen, removing her favourite warm perch on top of the CRT.

I witnessed her discouraging encounter with modern technology as she

teetered on the top edge of the new LCD panel, and then slowly, silently

toppled backwards onto my keyboard.

Dr Rob Williams

UWE

Bristol

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