A day in the museum

There was a lot of very old hardware and hardly any electronics or software in sight at the location that National Instruments chose to hold its Aerospace and Defence Forum this month.

But that was not unexpected, since the event took place at the Royal Air Force museum in London which houses a vast collection of old, unusual, beautiful - as well as some rather ugly - aircraft from the last century.

Fortunately for those engineers that attended the event expecting to see some high-technology equipment, there was plenty of it on display at the National Instruments forum itself, providing an unsettling disparity to the equipment used to build many of the aircraft housed in the historic hangers of the museum.

Despite the contrast between the technology used in the old aircraft and the microprocessor-based software-driven solutions from National Instruments, the exhibits acted as a stark reminder that designers of products for the aerospace field must always be cognisant of the fact that their equipment may have a lifecycle of many decades, rather than just a few years.