They underpin the whole of the world s manufacturing and engineering base. Planes fly, and ships sail, based on embedded systems. Pharmaceutical industries use embedded systems to create our drug supply. Our food, drink and clean water come primarily from processes which depend on embedded systems. These systems are also vital in car manufacturing, national and international defence, railway networks, telecommunications, medical equipment, broadcast media and so on.
Embedded systems are prime components of global infrastructure.
They also control temperature, lighting, air conditioning and security access in many offices. And they also support point of sale equipment, cash dispensers and traffic management in a typical High Street. During 1995, more than 200 million PCs were shipped worldwide. In the same period, the number of embedded systems shipped exceeded 3 billion. Action to fix the Millennium Bug in embedded systems is lagging behind the equivalent programmes for PCs and mainframe computers, perhaps by as much as one year.