We've got plenty of military toyz we could level at Redmond...
To be fair, designing a system that could be dead in the water if one component
bluescreened probably wasn't a wise idea either, and one totally separate from
the actual choice of operating system. Even Solaris and AIX crash if
sufficiently provoked. But it's no surprise that the same designers who
created it with a single point of failure then turned around and implemented
the critical component with likely-to-fail thechnology.
"Windows NT 4.0 - the choice of unclued systems designers everywhere" 
Scott Weeks wrote:
This:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/USS_Yorktown.jpg
was rendered unusable by a sh!++y OS? !!!
<wipes tears from eyes after rolling around on the floor in convulsive laughter>
Um, no, that one was rendered unusable by Japanese bombs and torpedoes at Midway in 1942.
This:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)
was what was taken down by Windows NT.
Ah, it's a bit worse. This is the ship that ran Windows.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a1/USS_Yorktown_(CG-
48%29%3B04014806.jpg/300px-USS_Yorktown_%28CG-48%29%3B04014806.jpg
You have a picture of the World War II carrier. Now, this one, the second
ship of the class, has been retired, but that's because it had old-style
missile launchers that were not cost-effective to update.
In patient care systems, we would convince the doctors that didn't want
Linux by saying "would you like a blue screen of death to be literal?"