Affiliations: [a] International Coffee Organization, 22 Berners St., London W1P 4DD, United Kingdom | [b] Blake Computer Services, 25 Bedford Row, London WC1, United Kingdom
Note: [*] Paper presented at the 8th Cranfield Conference on Mechanised Information Transfer, Cranfield Institute of Technology, Bedford, U.K., 21–24 July 1981.
Abstract: A description is presented of an application of the ASSASSIN Mk. V information management package, including online search capacity, running on an ICL 2904/50 computer (96K 24-bit words) linked to an ICL 7700 two-screen word processor. All data entry and job parameters are handled by keying onto floppy discs and exporting locally-validated batches of records from the word processor to the mainframe. A word processor video can also be used in ‘transparent’ mode for online searching of the data base. Output-products, such as SDI, batch-search results, KWOC indexes and sorted monthly abstracts-bulletins are produced by running jobs on the mainframe and importing the results onto floppy discs at the word processor end. They can then be edited if necessary and printed on a daisy-wheel printer, which gives output of sufficient quality for offset-litho reproduction. Special characters such as accents are incorporated to cater for material in various languages even if they are not represented on the key-board. Online search results can be printed by a similar process, using the print command, or by printing of screen contents using the terminal print key. The interface between the word processor and the mainframe is handled by a special applications package, which is described. Transfers pass through two sets of intermediate files on the mainframe: common document pool (CDP) and mainframe access facility (MAF) files. An account is also given for the technique employed for handling upper and lower case using 6-bit internal representation of characters, and the benefits of the high degree of local processing capacity on the word processor when running a tightly scheduled multi-task data processing operation.
