Armstrong and Kreissig present an object-oriented design of a hardware access layer they call the hardware object model (HOM). The HOM is designed to present a consistent interface across two different lines of IBM server systems. The goal of the HOM is to allow code reuse and minimize the impact of hardware changes on the existing code base.
The paper is well written and ambitious. The authors describe their success with using the HOM on IBM’s i/p Series and Z Series server systems. The object-oriented design methodology used in the paper, which might be categorized as classical, is limited to class hierarchies. The class hierarchy shown in the paper seems like a natural way of classifying hardware components. No other object-oriented modeling technique is discussed, for example, state chart diagrams from the unified modeling language (UML).
Another interesting facet of software and hardware engineering is described in this paper: that of using object-oriented terminology as a common nomenclature for engineering groups that are geographically distributed.