I get "The embedded muse" (free from ganssle.com) and as such had already read this one :-). The story reminded me of an episode some years ago. This company had - with an enormous staff - converted from a large PLC driven system to a gigantic UNIX box. By some odd fractors I got involved (kicking and screaming "I do not know UNIX") and in a day diagnosed that a problem was due to the timeslicing UNIX box being too late in responding to an event. Asking about interrupt latency under UNIX, I were told "we do not use interrupts". OK, I proved my case and were kicked out, they did not want to hear that replacing a PLC with a monstrosity was not "a beautiful thing". What happened later I do not know.

Erik