My first assignment with the C&NW was to be part of a team that developed software for a warehouse inventory system. The railroad had a number of warehouses scattered about the country that stored equipment and materials for maintaining the railroad itself. Think hardware like spikes, rail, sledge hammers, as well as many more items for doing railroad business. This was a great way to get my feet wet with COBOL and Assembly language programming. And this was the first of a series of systems based on this same software architecture.
The second such system that I worked on was a system that kept track of trailers and containers as they arrived and departed from C&NW’s Wood Street intermodal yard (later known as Global I). Every time a truck with a trailer or container entered or exited the yard via railroad or concrete, an entry was made in this system by a clerk. Customers were charged for the time the railroad owned trailers and containers were in use off the railroad premises. So the system kept track of the time.
One of the problems with this system was that there was a significant number of errors in the manual data entry process. Numbers were transposed, for instance. This would result in trailers appearing to leave the yard and never return.
I remember when we first installed the intermodal system in 1980, we had to be at the yard where it was used around the clock. Members of the development team worked in shifts. I had the midnight to 8 am shift. It was a smooth installation so we didn’t have to keep this up very long.
Both of these systems were fun to develop and got my software career off to a great start.
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2 comments:
That is very interesting. Was this the first use of computer technology in Railroading?
Not at all. There was a lot of computer system installed before I got there in 1980. A lot of mainframe and batch processing.
The systems I worked on were mainframe based with terminal displays for data entry.
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