Welcome at the GSEOS V Homepage

Here you will find the latest information about the IDA Ground Support Equipment Operating System Version 5 (GSEOS V).

The Software Package GSEOS V was developed at the Technische Universität at Braunschweig, Institut für Datentechnik und Kommunikationsnetze (IDA, Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering).

Inheritance

IDA developed the first version of the GSEOS during the 1980’s. It was realized that use of a single checkout system would save money across the various projects. Dues to the easy integration of hardware into the PC a test system GSEOS 1.0 was originally developed for DOS based PC systems. It uses a simple character based interface for data displays.

The work on GSEOS 2.0 that aimed at improved user and command interfaces as well as recording capabilities was preempted by the advent of the Windows graphical user interface extension running on DOS. Development for DOS was stopped and that for GSEOS 3.0 running on Windows 3.0 started.

On GSEOS 3.0 the data display capabilities could be drastically improved and include graphics in addition to the old text based displays. A recorder module was added as well as support for monitoring the data. A simple decoder scripting language was implemented that meets the most common decoding needs.

Up to version 3.3 the GSEOS supported more than 30 different space instruments.

At the end of 1990’s engineers at APL started working on an own branch in the GSEOS history tree. These efforts resulted in the GSEOS versions 3.4 (16 bit, Windows 3.0), 4.0 (32 bit, Windows 95/98/NT) and 5.0. At that point the development of APL and IDA diverted.

As the system evolved over the years, problems became more and more apparent. First of all, technology has moved on to 32-bit systems (Windows NT/2000/XP), and support for 16-bit development has became scarce. Second, the use of different syntax and scripting language for the different modules made the system less consistent, and harder to document and configure. Furthermore the old system has some disadvantages such as block size limitation at 64 Kbytes, commanding (output data) throughput limited by timer interval (55 ms), and language drawbacks (e.g. no loops).

IDA started the development of the new GSEOS 5.0 (now called GSEOS V) in January 1998. To have the possibility to create fully new software architecture without any consideration for previous limitations, the implementation starts from scratch. There is no source code used from previous GSEOS versions. Currently the GSEOS V is used for numerous projects listed in the project section of this website.