Engineers at TRW Inc. and NICE Systems Inc., both of Sunnyvale, Calif., needed rugged computers capable of withstanding the outdoor rigors of a land vehicle driving over rough roads. They started looking in 1994 for a computer supplier for their planned mobile communications intelligence direction finding system the two companies were integrating for an unnamed country in Southeast Asia.
The system was to be mounted in an AM General High Mobility Multi-Wheel Vehicle, better known as the HMMWV, which was to travel over bumpy, humid jungle roads to track enemy communications in wartime, and for border control and background surveillance in peacetime.
The TRW/NICE team chose a variant of the RCS-9000 computer from Greco Systems in El Cajon, Calif. "We had never installed this configuration in a Humvee before," says Wolfgang Schaechter, marketing director at NICE. "The computer itself is asked to live in a reasonably difficult environment. There was no doubt that the customer needed a computer that was built to survive a severe beating while it was doing its job."
The RCS-9000 is a 19-inch rack mounted Mil-Std 810-D computer able to run MS DOS or Unix has an optional monitor, and a hinged fold-down keyboard. "The performance of the Greco Systems in the program has been essentially a dream," says Schaechter. - J.K.
For more information on Greco Systems or its rugged computer products, phone 619-442-0205, or fax 619-447-8982.
