Minesapint
There are a lot of reasons to dump NAS. Not to mention being able to program in something modern that doesn't take forever to make a useable change. The kernal that started out in the IBM 9020 all those years ago, was GREAT at doing what it needed to do on 80 K of core memory. However we have grown past that and there are indeed needs to be able to get way past what NAS was designed to do, and what it is design limited to do.
Why have all of your eggs in one basket per se? You lose one function with in NAS now, and you lose them ALL. Go to a distributed system so that if one bit goes bad in a program, all you lose is that one function, not the entire program.
You also want to be able to start tying in newer functions to the software and not have to continually rewrite the host software to accept things. Coming off of a 30 year old platform is a good thing... Now, just taking the old software and rewriting it is NOT in itself a good thing... For some of the above stated reasons.
Shoot, if you folks want NAS that does a LOT of stuff as is right now, we could sell you ours rather cheap <G>.... Soon to be getting interactive data blocks that interact from sector to sector as well as center to center. I don't just mean altitude changes either. We are going to be getting a fourth line in the data block which will give us a scratch pad ability if we need it, but will also have a way of passing speeds and headings ( not supposed to tell the pilots to do that sort of thing) we are also looking at the time share of aircraft type and other info...... Soon to have input stuff between the URET conflict probe and the radar glass...
regards