Moorestown, New Jersey-based Formation Inc seemed to disappear after it stopped building its own mid-range IBMulator mainframes, has in fact been quietly working away on things like disk subsystems for IBM Corp users, but it also has an Automated Tower Control System and will be showing it at the Air Traffic Control Association Exhibit and Conference the week after next: it is a fully digital, low-cost, open architecture system targeted at FAA level II/III, military and international air traffic control towers and provides the tower air traffic controller team with an integrated system for monitoring and controlling all airport systems – lighting, tower and approach and distributes local flight plan data within the air traffic control tower cab; it uses commercial-off-the-shelf hardware and software, VMEbus architecture, standard Token Ring local network, X Window displays and recording-ready communications; the company has developed its own PowerPC-based single board computer to satisfy all processing needs.
