"Online Tops keeps the freight train rolling (page 1) Commenting on the 50th anniversary, Jonathan Aylen, a Tops specialist at the University of Manchester, said: "Tops covered the whole of the UK, every freight wagon and loco, every train movement and every cargo all monitored by a central computer system at Marylebone in London. The control headquarters was described as 'space age' for its day.""
"Describing how the system operated, the Computer Weekly article noted: "The basis for Tops in the field is the punch card, one card for one wagon. As traffic is moved from one TRA to another, new cards showing the changed status are produced. The receiving officer at an Area Freight Centre (AFC) checks the cards against wagons and feeds this information into the system to update the database.""
Total Operations Processing System (Tops) went live on 27 October 1975 and centrally controlled all rail freight operations across Britain in real time. Three IBM System/370 mainframes at Marylebone processed status and movements, supported by Ventek minicomputers with built-in punchcard machines at every area freight terminal. British Rail's own telephone network connected field equipment to the central computer. The network split the country into 152 Tops Responsibility Areas (TRAs), each with a Ventek 9200 minicomputer. The system used one punch card per wagon to record location and status and Area Freight Centre staff fed updates to the central database. Marylebone stored data on thirty-two IBM 3330 Control Data Drives totaling 3.2 Mbytes.
Read at ComputerWeekly.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]