BRAMIS

[SOSL]

ISTR that there was a computer system designated BAEMMA which helped to manage the Tornado engines (RB199). Can anyone remember it? What did it do? How good was it?

What happened to it?

N.B. I have just edited my OP to refer to BAEMMA and delete BRAMIS, which I originally referenced. My mistake - anno domini etc etc

Rgds SOS

[Rev I. Tin]

The BRAMIS system was introduced into RAFG in the early 90's ISTR as a toting system. From the dim and distant areas of memory I can recall attending a BRAMIS managers' course in the Wildenrath COC. By the time I returned to Bruggen in 97 BRAMIS had evolved into SOMA (Station Operational Management Aid) whereby flying programs, weather could be displayed. There was also a method of accessing ASMA through SOMA. I remember attending a two week SOMA Managers' course in some dark corner of High Wycombe where my brain melted with hard sums and such crackers as 1$!P (one dollar bang Pee)
I am assuming it was superseded by STARS, Intranet etc.

[Pontius Navigator]

The BRAMIS system was introduced into RAFG in the early 90's ISTR as a toting system. From the dim and distant areas of memory I can recall attending a BRAMIS managers' course in the Wildenrath COC. By the time I returned to Bruggen in 97 BRAMIS had evolved into SOMA (Station Operational Management Aid) whereby flying programs, weather could be displayed. There was also a method of accessing ASMA through SOMA. I remember attending a two week SOMA Managers' course in some dark corner of High Wycombe where my brain melted with hard sums and such crackers as 1$!P (one dollar bang Pee)
I am assuming it was superseded by STARS, Intranet etc.

SOMA came in to hardened stations in UK around 1987 and was supposed to be replaced several times before it was eventually. RAF CCIS came in eventually around 1999-2000 (not to be confused with the 11 Gp System that was mega user unfriendly.

ASMA was linked in to SOMA by 1996 when I came back to the system.

The 'new' RAF CCIS was late coming in which meant that the SOMA Contract with Norsk Data and the inimical Frank Cook 1$!P had to be extended by some months.

I think BRAMIS was just another disconnected IT procurement where each command went its own inter-inoperable way.

[Waddo Plumber]

Coningsby got SOMA SEMA and SAMA in 1985 as part of the hardening, whereby both 29 and 228 OCU worked from the HASs, and by Taceval that summer the whole station was working out of HASs, and HPSs during exercises, on 4 shifts hot bunking.. The CoC seemed like Star Wars at the time. I seem to remember that the RB199 logs system was called BRANDT (sp). I remember the name BRAMIS, but I though it was an ops syastem.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

I remember a TACEVAL, Coningsby, early '90s, where the SOMA was gradually degraded by some DiStaff SOMA wizz to reduce our ability to operate. It had no effect, even when he removed it entirely and 'Black'ed the HAS site. What he never discovered was that I'd been echoing the SOMA messages to Ops and the Hazes on SEMA (using a pre-arranged code).:E


.

[Courtney Mil]

Fox 3, you sneeky bastard. Happy days!

[2Planks]

Tis only a crime if you get caught?

Gas Mask on the telephone anybody?

[Courtney Mil]

Yep, got you there, 2Planks. Well remembered.

[Pontius Navigator]

Tis only a crime if you get caught?

Gas Mask on the telephone anybody?

As Distaff on a Taceval at Laarbruch I caught OC Ops, on his knees under the desk making a telephone call. At the time the COC had been destroyed and its personnel rendered hors de combat.

Allegedly it was a call from his wife protesting at the naked men outside the squash courts.

It was a squad of Bundeswehr that had been ambushed as they tried to enter the base. They were then stripped to long johns and vests (not naked) and held outside the squash courts. The temp was near freezing.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

you sneeky bastard
Yup, OC 5 was so chuffed I got a free holiday in Cyprus (contraceptives supplied)*
In the days before Intelligence Officers, fighter squadrons used intelligent officers


*Private Plane

[Double Hush]

BRAMIS = Battle Readiness And Management Information System

Oh what fun I had cycling between the Laarbruch WOC and AWOC with a monstrous data disk tucked under my arm, trying to keep what was then the first system 'alive'; it frequently crashed! The computer room was full of power and switching cabinets and the disk readers, yet probably had less computing power than one of today's laptops. What a job for a holdee!

[walbut]

BAEMMA - Brandt Aero Engine Module Management Aid

I have no experience of using it personally or of its use in the RAF. However we have supplied it to the RSAF and its used for tracking RB199, Adour and PT6 engine module lives. As far as I know it works well and we have carried out several upgrades over the years. Its basically a big clever configuration controlled database accessed from a number of locations.

Walbut

[Waddo Plumber]

Ah thanks, Walbut, I remembered there was a Brandt somewhere in there. In the mid 80s, my FS in the 199 Bay at Woodhall Spa was a dab hand at it, but it looked far to complicated for me. I suspect that version ( and the hardware) would look stone age now. At the same time - 1985 - OC Eng's PA had a word processor - a dedicated machine that could do magic things! I had a 48K Spectrum. Woo hoo!

[SOSL]

10 years before that, on another station, OC Eng's PA also had a dedicated machine that could do magic things - so I believe.

Rgds SOS

[VX275]

Oh what fun I had with SEMA/SAMA/BRAMIS and DSSS when I was a mechanical designer for RAFSEE. The look of mistrust from the dwelers of the various HQ/COC/WOC/Sqns we descended on armed, only with tape measure pencil and note pad was universal. However, I quickly developed the disarming gambit of asking those who were affronted at my civvy presence in their holy of holies "What colour carpet would you like?" It was amazing how that got their compliance.
However the funniest situation was whilst measuring up for BRAMIS to go in the NATO HQ in the caves at Masstricht. I had copious notes of the proposed cable run in the corridors and was about to enter a room when our 'minder' suddenly remembered this room needed a higher security clearance. "Oh sorry you can't come in here unless you are CTS cleared." My electrical engineer colleague pipes up with "That's OK I'm CTS2." So he was allowed in whilst I hung around outside trying not to look too suspicious. When my colleague came out all he could say was "I shouldn't have gone in there."
Of course until then neither he nor I knew that CTS stood for Cosmic Top Secret, He'd thought his section's title at RAFSEE, Computer Terminal Systems was the only use of the acronym CTS.

[Wander00]

That's a shame, I thought this was going to turn into a "funny Taceval/Station Exercise stories" thread - who remembers Binbrook exercises in the early 80s?

[ricardian]

The Ops Room at Akrotiri in the mid 1960s ran on chinagraph pencils, rectangular pieces of perspex, a very large board and some extremely clever WRAF ops clerks.

[Pontius Navigator]

all he could say was "I shouldn't have gone in there."

When the trial CIS was being installed at Coningsby not only did the contractors need clearance in to the WOC they also needed clearance into the new computer room we were creating. The list of cleared contractors was displayed on the door. No name, no entry.

Now one contractor had special clearance. This too was published on the door of the room DO NOT ADMIT.

Never found out why :)

[Waddo Plumber]

Were you there when Alistair was setting Coningsby up for war PN?

[Pontius Navigator]

WP,

First time (well 3rd actually) was '85-'87 when ME was OC, next was '96-'00 with the Kiwi Kid.

Mike E had achieved a 1st in his promotion exam and passed the station on to C4 as a star unit. C4 soon found the truth. Later C4 became MEs boss at Support Command. I think that greased the pole well.

[Waddo Plumber]

Amazingly, this morning, looking for something else, I turned up a photo of ME and me with (I think) Lord Trefgarne, who had come for a photo opportunity with the F2 as was. About the same time, I was involved with an abbreviated visit by someone we'd never heard of called Edwina Currie, who baled out of the visit straight after the photo. We still had the lunch. Eggs Benedict, I seem to recall. She didn't seem interested in computer systems.

[2Planks]

PN wrote: C4 soon found the truth.

That would be about the time the Station motto changed from 'Loyalty Binds Me' to 'Exercise Exercise Exercise'?? (just as a shiny 2P arrived!!)

[Pontius Navigator]

2P, the most entertaining exercise was a crash/disaster exercise held one week day evening. There was no crash but the other part was exercised to the fullest extreme.

1. The exercise was pre-notified.

2. There was no ban on personnel going home or out.

3. Station Execs were either Distaff or principals.

When the balloon went down (like lead):

1. Anyone that was not a pre-notified player was down the pub.

2. There were no non-playing execs not at the scene.

3. When personnel eventually reacted to the callout they sat in crew rooms drinking coffee in the absence of any exec over the rank of cpl.

I was SDO in the WOC and changed my opinion of medical branch officers as the wg cdr S Dent O was be far the most effective GDOC Cdr I had seen.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

The Ops Room at Akrotiri in the mid 1960s ran on chinagraph pencils, rectangular pieces of perspex, a very large board and some extremely clever WRAF ops clerks.

Still did in 1988. Used to take half an hour or more to get a take-off time out of them up at Golf Dispersal. Mucked up planning somewhat. Then someone did a hold-it-low-and-rotate-vertical-at-the-end-of-the-runway take-off. The Police post (who were under it) immediately complained. Then complained again when the wingman did it. The Boss promptly ordered all takeoffs to be wacky, and we used Plod's punctilious, immediate complaints to log the T/O times. For 5 weeks.:E

[Waddo Plumber]

What the 1985 state-of-the-art WOC at Coningsby taught me was that big state boards on the wall that everyone could see were better than stovepiped CRT screens in front of each person.

[SRENNAPS]

SOSL,

BAEMMA was superseded, along with other engine asset tracking databases, by PRAMS 2000 in 1999. The primary reason was that BAEMMA and the original PRAMS (Pegasus Repair & Asset Management System) were not Year 2000 (Millennium Bug) compliant.

All of the engines that used Asset Tracking databases should have been migrated to LITS in the first instance. However this was not possible before the year 2000. Therefore it was decided that a stopgap Asset tracking Database would be required to manage the engines post 2000 and until LITS could be used.
This database was known as PRAMS2000 (Propulsion Repair & Asset Management System) and included the RB199, Pegasus, Adour and T56 Alison Engines. PRAMS2000 had the ability to be uniquely configured and setup tor each of the different ways the engines were managed and lifed etc.

Following the rollout in 1999 and after a few teething bugs PRAMS2000 proved to be extremely popular with engine community and there was great reluctance to move to LITS. However, after a huge amount of modification to LITS following testing and at great additional cost to the LITS project, all of the engines were migrated to LITS between 2003 and 2005. I served on the PRAMS2000 Team, at RAF Wyton 2001-2005 when the Team was disbanded :(

[Wander00]

What millennium bug was that then? A myth on which millions were squandered both within and without the Armed Forces.

[SRENNAPS]

Wander00

What millennium bug was that then? A myth............

I also share you cynicism, but honestly if we had attempted to use the software post 2000, the engines might have blown up, Jags would have taken off vertically, Tornados would have grown props and Hercs and Harriers would have been seen launching into the night sky with the biggest brightest burners you have ever seen…..never to be seen again. :eek::eek:

Seriously though it was quite simply the fact that the software used 2 digits for the date i.e. 97, 98 etc and had it rolled over to 00 it would have screwed up the lifing of the engines. Due to the programming it was impossible to introduce a 4 digit year. It was not considered or even thought of during the initial development of the software. :ok:

[Wander00]

Amazed the computer development people had not thought of that, but then we had a computer department at Innsworth reinventing all sorts of wheels, and would not even let us use Sage, which was in the 80s quite well developed accounting software, for non-public funds administration on the grounds that "someone might get into the system and alter it to commit fraud"

[Waddo Plumber]

What a non event that turned out to be - as most people with an ounce of common realised beforehand. Still it created a nice little industry for a while. I watched my toaster and video recorder all night in case they malfunctioned. Not.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Amazed the computer development people had not thought of that,They had. Calculating up to +/-128 requires 8-bit computing, calculating up to 2000 requires 16-bit computing. Takes a lot more memory, time, cost etc (at the time) I started programming at school in 1977 with 4k of memory, much of which was taken up by the operating system. If you wanted to play a game, you had to write the program first!

What was amazing was that managers refused to start looking at the problem in around 1990-ish, on cost grounds.The programmers had told them in good time.


.

[CoffmanStarter]

F3WMB ...

I started programming at school in 1977 with 4k of memory ...

Luxury ...

Me ... 1974 ... A bunch of blank Marked Sense Cards and a few dozen HB pencils ... ten days turnaround to get your output back ... a right bu99er to debug anything :ugh:

The ZX84 back then was a huge step forward :uhoh:

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

A bunch of blank Marked Sense Cards and a few dozen HB pencils

I used to dream of Cards.....

By 1982 at Uni I was back to using a paper tape reader and writing a 5K program directly in machine code......

Monty Python - Four Yorkshiremen - YouTube

[Pontius Navigator]

The Ops Room at Akrotiri in the mid 1960s ran on chinagraph pencils, rectangular pieces of perspex, a very large board and some extremely clever WRAF ops clerks.

In 1972 Bomber Ops at Akrotiri did away with the chinagraph. Instead each captains name was letrasetted and covered with Perspex. Two magnets were attached and the whole could be stuck on the metal tote boards. I think they had similar ones for aircraft etc and dinky magnetic numbers in reds and blacks.

The first day it was put in to use happened to coincide with a no-notice taceval. First person to enter the ops room let the door slam. All the magnets fell off the wall.

At least chinagraph is shock proof. Chalk would have been better as heat proof too,

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

For dispersed ops, 1989 on the F3, an excess of time on people's hands led to the conclusion that a nuke strike EMP would demagnetise a similar (smaller) ops board on the wall at Stornoway. The particularly bright dep. flight cdr auth at the time promptly took the board off the wall and laid it flat on the desk.:ok:

[PlasticCabDriver]

Oh God, SOMA. Almost my first job as a shiny holding chum straight out of IOT at Marham was to do a big update on the system. No training, "Here's the manual, crack on". I forget how long it took.

Individually dismantle every link that a particular page had within the page and to all other pages, make the change, re-mantle (?) every link backup again. Repeat for what seemed like an infinite number of pages. Repeat at least half of them because the required changes were in no particular order and many were on the same pages that I had already done.

I was very grateful to the WOC residents for the endless cups of tea!

[Pontius Navigator]

Individually dismantle every link that a particular page had within the page and to all other pages, make the change, re-mantle (?) every link backup again. Repeat for what seemed like an infinite number of pages.

Ah, that explains what happened.

In 1987 the EWO and I created a mass of int data pages. His were complete EW data lists, mine was an interactive orbat system. If we knew an aircraft had crashed we could enter the loss and the numbers throughout the totes would all decrement. Every 6 months when we got the master updates we could trawl through and update the base figures.

All very snazzy and probably too much work for too small an audience.

Next tour at Coningsby, this time as SOMA Manager, I searched for our totes - gone. We had also been guilty of not documenting the links and processes, but when SOMA first came in it was flagged as so user-friendly that it needed neither a manager nor any user instruction.

[SOSL]

The "millennium bug" didn't affect all software but it did affect quite a lot, including operational software, with particular date formats.

There was an enormous amount of work carried out to identify which systems were at risk and then to make the necessary modifications or reimplementation to avoid the problem.

There were of course lots of bandits who jumped on the millennium bug bandwagon; some from so-called blue chip companies.

Nonetheless, the "millennium bug" was a real bug. The fact that it didn't result in disaster was because an awful lot of well meaning (or well paid) people did a lot of work to fix it.

Rgds SOS

[Pontius Navigator]

SOS, my Merc garage got the bug. They sent out the first MOT renewal notices at the end of year two :)

On SOMA I believe it was future proofed up to something like 20,000, but that was probably Frank Cook having a joke.

[BobH41]

Great summary of BAEMMA, PRAMS and the LITS takeover. The LITS team were determined to eradicate BAEMMA and PRAMS but it was too hard a configuration management task for the LITS software. As I recall, BAEMMA continued a little past 1 Jan 2000, despite being theoretically non-Y2K compliant. The Brandt team at Horley had different ideas. When ICL, IBM and Digital were bidding for LITS, I was the Brandt exec supporting first ICL (until ICL dropped out) and then Digital (until IBM won) and then moved onto the IBM team at Stevenage. We were rehearsing the Digital final presentation to the RAF LITS team when I begged a two minute slot to demonstrate RAMS (our generic name for it). I showed about 100 screenshots of a test version of RAMS that had been put together to show how configurable it was, not just for engines and modules but for any aircraft type and any life usage component. At the end of my two minutes, one of the leaders said "I think we have just seen LITS". Unfortunately, it was too late for the bid team to jump onto a different horse, and they continued with the software they were proposing - and lost to IBM. I. might even have those screenshots!

[BobH41]

Blast from the past: The fourth system in the Station Computing programme was USAS, for supply accounting. I was the manager for USAS installation for a couple years, and then PM for SARO2 at Harrogate, then selling BAEMMA & RAMS, then LITS, next at Rolls-Royce. RAFSEE was a constant co-conspirator in those days. I enjoyed my time in Maastricht too. The new cable trays in the huts at Harrogate had to do zig zags under the corridor ceiling.

[Asturias56]

"the "millennium bug" was a real bug. The fact that it didn't result in disaster was because an awful lot of well meaning (or well paid) people did a lot of work to fix it."

and it DID affect some major companies - but they (very wisely) kept their mouths firmly shut and just fixed it