BRAMIS
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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.
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!!)
That would be about the time the Station motto changed from 'Loyalty Binds Me' to 'Exercise Exercise Exercise'?? (just as a shiny 2P arrived!!)
I don't own this space under my name. I should have leased it while I still could
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Join Date: Nov 2000
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BAEMMA and what happed after!
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
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
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Wander00
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. 
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.
What millennium bug was that then? A myth............
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.
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"
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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.
Amazed the computer development people had not thought of that,
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.
.
Last edited by Fox3WheresMyBanana; 8th Apr 2013 at 12:57.
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F3WMB ...
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
The ZX84 back then was a huge step forward
I started programming at school in 1977 with 4k of memory ...
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
The ZX84 back then was a huge step forward
A bunch of blank Marked Sense Cards and a few dozen HB pencils
By 1982 at Uni I was back to using a paper tape reader and writing a 5K program directly in machine code......
Last edited by Fox3WheresMyBanana; 8th Apr 2013 at 13:43.
I don't own this space under my name. I should have leased it while I still could
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,
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.
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!
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!
I don't own this space under my name. I should have leased it while I still could
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.
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Wander00 et al
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
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
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I don't own this space under my name. I should have leased it while I still could
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.
On SOMA I believe it was future proofed up to something like 20,000, but that was probably Frank Cook having a joke.
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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!