I do not know how familiar you are with the RTCA/DO-178b, but it is a traceable, documented system for software development that assures reliability and instills trust in software developed to perform tasks for commercial airlines. For 'Level A' software you need to not only test every case of every decision point in you software, you also have to break down the compiled code and compare it to the machine code and ensure that it is traceable and there is no 'dead' code or anything that might lead to a undesired path, etc... Also, the tools used to test and create software must be certified. This brings me to my conundrum. Seems a lot of embedded software was written for a certain processor, the 8051, and as a result a lot of Off the Shelf software exists for that chip. Rockwell had chosen to use the Archimedes C-51 Development Kit V1.12B to comile thier code. The specifics of this kit are:
Archimedes Compiler V5.1 Archimedes Linker/Locater V3.52 Archimedes Assembler V5.02
Some time ago Rockwell created the Software Control Library and then archived it into that library for future use. Then a system that had been compiled using that hardware/software combination came back needing an update. When they pulled the software out of archive they found that a single file had been corrupted, making the software useless. And the corrupted file is part of the Compiler v5.1. This company, KEIL, bought out Archimedes and upgraded the software a while back, but no longer has ANY copies of the older versions. If we cannot find a replacement for that then we have to purchase a newer version of the compiler and go through a large amount of testing to validate it and then write the update, probably less than 10 lines of code changes, recompile it, and go through a large amount of testing all over again before the update can be certified to be put back on the plane. A great deal of work could be avoided if we could get a copy of the FILES.1 for the compiler v 5.1. Does anyone have an old copy floating around or know of someone who might have access to that file?