In May 1979, the US Department of Defense selected a programming language that was officially named Ada. The competition lasted four years and involved fifteen initial proposals, but only two finalists reached the end of the selection process.
The two competing projects were codenamed Green and Red. The Green specification, developed by Jean Ichbiah's team, was declared the winner. The Red proposal came from the Boston-based company Intermetrics and was ultimately rejected by the committee.
Despite losing the contract, the Red language already possessed a functional compiler at the time of the competition. The author of the article reconstructed both languages based on the original specifications to test their capabilities.
Using the Red language, the author developed a custom operating system and a management layer inspired by Kubernetes. The OS architecture was modeled after Tandem NonStop systems, which have been used in banking and stock exchanges since 1976.
