Costa Concordia Series: Ship Design, Software Architecture and the search for the lost FORTRAN

Wow, it’s the fountain of youth!  I just compiled my first FORTRAN Program in this millennia! 

Think about it, let’s say your boss comes to you and says we will need to bid on a job to improve the software systems on board Cruise ships.  One of the systems that we need to bid on is the control system.  You are still working on just how do you get to do the sea trials?  ERRRKKKK!  Control System, yo! Wait a second.

So you think about all of the blogs and all of the gin joints you have wondered through and you remember good old Socal-sam, that blog that was built off of the https://blogs.msdn.com/devschool, or was https://blogs.msdn.com/devschool built off of Socal-sam.  Who the heck cares.

Back to control law synthesis and Software Architecture.  Since we are not living in the beginning of computers being commonly available (as I was early in my career), but rather in a time where there a lot of computers configured in many ways that no one understands completely, where do you start?

The control synthesis for a Cruise Ship might be considered privately held information.  No matter how hard open source tries to make the point, at sometime designers are going to protect their work.  So you and your boss will have to make some guesses on how much work there is to do control law synthesis for the proposal.

Oh, one more thing, you will need to have a running FORTRAN compiler to follow along with the next few entries.

Open source worked well here, there are a number of free copies of FORTRAN, look around, download them and get them to work.