Little-known story about how this little box saved the shuttle program: When Dan Goldin took over NASA, he mandated that all of Mission Control would run on Wi

Little-known story about how this little box saved the shuttle program: When Dan Goldin took over NASA, he mandated that all of Mission Control would run on Windows NT. (This was back when the NT kernel was excellent, as it always had been, but the surrounding bits had serious stability problems). The shuttle astronaut corps rebelled, literally refusing to fly if forced to bet their lives against the BSOD. The solution was to provide the astronauts with their own independent copy of the software that Mission Control previously ran on their SPARCstations, so even if MCC crashed, the shuttle wouldn't. Since the SPARCbook was already flight-qualified, the astronaut revolt was quickly and quietly resolved, with almost no one even being aware of it...