British Rail had 400 Datapoint 2200 computers (labelled “Ventek”) at locations throughout the country. Datapoint interfaced 96-column card reader/punch machines to the 2200 minicomputers, instead of the 80-column punch cards the TOPS mainframe software was originally designed to use. (They had NO disk drives at the locations, so the tiny punch cards were their local interface to the remote mainframe.)
I understand Canadian National Railway also used Datapoint 2200s (150 of them!), but apparently didn’t use the 96-column punch cards?
TOPS software is, apparently, still running at BR, after 50+ years … after multiple generations of mainframes!
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There’s quite the forum thread over here on the topic.
From there:
Bristol TOPS Office in 1980. Cards are still in use at this date. The rack on the wall had the trainlist header cards as I recall.
There were 4 terminals, the two nearest the camera were the two on line machines operating at 200 Baud I think.
A commenter there makes a recommendation:
This article from one of the junior programmers on the BR version of TOPS may be of interest: http://www.les-smith.com/software/tops.htm
and from there
The application programming was done in TOPSTRAN which was a set of assembler macros that that hide the complexity of the underlying assembler code from the application programming team.
Hackaday features TOPS in this post from the Retrotechtacular tag:
With a video:
I should have noted that the card reader/punches were made by Decision Data, as “plug-compatible” options to the original IBM 96-column card units used in the IBM System 3 and other small IBM systems. Burroughs also OEM’d them for their computers.
Decision Data is no longer in business, and I’ve not been about to find much about their "9650-family MFCU card reader/punch units.
I assume the smaller physical size of the 96-column cards made them MUCH easier to handle around the offices and rail yards. (They were about 1/3 the size of the much more familiar Hollerith 80-column cards.)
There’s also some about TOPS in this thread in the forum:
Some interesting bits from this thread:
- This talk:
alternative version (with more readable slides):
-
A 1962 report on the related US TOPS project (IBM - Southern Pacific):
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/tops/TOPS_SystemDesignReport_Mar62.pdf -
A 1979 report on the British effort (122 pages, PDF):
TOPS: The Story of a British Railways Project
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