No...in most hospitals you'll find quite old PCs that are several editions behind what's hot in the homePC market, and they'll usually run on an old business system such as Win2000 or NT. Ours runs on NT, and I haven't seen any PC in most areas that are beyond something like Celerons and usually at 3 years ago CPU rates. Most of our wards now have laptops and they are absolutely bog standard and absolutely the cheapest they can find en masse. Possibly the difference in hospitals etc is that they're horribly concerned about confidentiality, so they will use layer upon layer of firewalls and protection. I'd imagine that a flashy private business will have access to better though. Medical centres are just lucky that the hackers aren't interested in destroying hospital computers. They have more immature things to do.However...... I will say, that in an ER, or something, you will find some hefty machines..
As for specific medical equipment such as the monitoring in ICU or the telemtetry from CCU or even the control of the CTs and MRIs, as far as I can tell they use pretty limited processors. Nothing flashy at all. The flashy stuff goes on in the scanners/ telemetry units/ monitors...the chips are used mainly to provide an interface, crunch some numbers and for remote control. An MRI scanner may be able to rip open your head if you've got skull plates from previous surgery, but that's entirely down to the magnets...nothing to do with any fancy computing. And CTs don't need that much power...all they do is interpolate a few images of Xrays and then churn out a few fancy 3d images. Any PC with graphical s/w can do it. CT - Computerised Tomography. Did you know that all that is is simple linear Xrays taken in slices a few mm apart each time? - they just build up the Xray slices to make a 3d whole. And it shows how dumb some doctors are - they send some patients for CT scan after CT scan. The recommended dose is one CT per year. You get a sh*tload of Xray dose just for one scan.
No idea about air traffic control - I'd imagine they probably still use Ataris?
