I should make clear from the outset that the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) monitor and control system is the work of a team of software designers of which I am not a principal member. This paper contains the thoughts and impressions of a part-time contributor, local consultant, and design philosopher to the project. Members of the group may not necessarily agree with all of my assessments, so the only justification for my giving this presentation at all is to offer a somewhat detached perspective. Any reference to this work should be to the primary documentation (Clark, Brandt, & Ford, http://www.gb.nrao.edu), and please see the acknowledgments section for the names of the designers.
Figure 1 shows the basic structure of the GBT monitor and control system. The object-oriented design referred to is this talk mainly concerns the parts of the software below the dotted line in this figure. Other software shown here does use OO design, particularly AIPS++, but this is not part of monitor and control. The operating systems to which this software has been ported are Solaris and VxWorks, and a port is planned to Windows 95/NT.
Figure 1: The basic software components of GBT monitor and control. The
parts below the dotted line are the main subjects of this presentation.
The design method used for the GBT monitor and control is the ``Object Model'' in Rumbaugh et al. (1991).