The major problem has continued to be getting accurate abutting on both hardcopy and 35mm together. To help solve the problem, III have added extra logic to the machine so that different circuits are used for adjusting the hardcopy and 35mm image.
The Acceptance Tests were started on Friday 18 April but were discontinued when the abutting proved to be unacceptable. Further adjustments are continuing and it is likely that the tests will be continued sometime in the next few days.
The Programming Course took place in the week starting 14 April. Due to the disruption caused by attempting this course and the Acceptance Tests, it was found impossible to fit in the operator training. This will be done as soon as the Acceptance Tests are completed.
The inability to get time on the FR80 for software development has meant that the date for starting a service on 1 May is no longer feasible. The new date is Monday 12 May. This should allow us about two weeks for software development assuming that no further problems arise in the Acceptance Tests. It is unrealistic to expect that automatic accounting will be available on this date and the initial service will have to use manual accounting.
III have reduced the cost of a source listing for the FR80 Displayer from £2000 to £100 which is little more than a handling charge. It was decided that a listing of the multi-camera version of the Displayer would be purchased. However, III have now stated that purchase of this listing will mean that no further updates of the program will be available to ACL. If III keep to this policy, it is likely that the listing will be returned and not purchased.
A number of minor problems have arisen during the software tests in the last two weeks:
RWW was working on the disc routines while JMR was concentrating on the magnetic tape and teletype routines. RWW had written about 50% of the code required but had not had a chance to test any of it yet. JMR would soon be in the same position. It seemed likely that testing of the system could be completed in 1 month from when adequate time on the FR80 was available for debugging.
It was unclear how many frames were going to be charged for. Should the ID frame and blank frames for job separation be charged? It was agreed that FRAH would check with WJ as to what he required. It was also necessary for the various packages to be consistent in the placing of STARTJOB commands etc.
All the packages should be producing accounting records before and after each job by the time the service is started. While manual accounting is taking place, it will be necessary for a dummy SYSLOG program to be available which just skips over the data record. JMR will provide this.
Work on SPROGS was nearly complete. The ID frame had been added and checked for consistency with JMR's fixed data. The documentation of changes for the FR80 had been produced and was being read by DVR. It was decided that a few more people would read it before sending it to the typists.
JRG had issued a paper defining the listing produced by the spool read-out program. The original intention had been that individual packages would generate similar output. It now seemed that the information produced by SPOOL was more comprehensive than that required for a single job. It was agreed that those involved would agree on a standard listing for tapes generated by the individual packages.
Code had been written for handling accounting information. Although simple in theory, it did complicate matters significantly as the number of different possibilities for incomplete jobs had increased significantly.
Work was continuing on a utility for returning tapes to the pool. It was agreed that the utility for erasing a job from the spool would be incorporated with the Tektronix VIEW utility.
The poor performance of the tape decks on the FR80 so far has meant that the ability to generate both 7 and 9-track spool tapes is of greater importance than was first thought. It was agreed that this would be regarded as the most important addition required and that, if possible, it should be available by 12 May.
Copies of the draft manual had been circulated. It was agreed that comments on the draft should be written on the individual copies and returned to PAD by Wednesday 30 April. PAD would abstract these and, if necessary, a meeting would be arranged to discuss any problems.
All the FR80 features were now available including the ID frame and fiche titles. The main work outstanding wss lineprinter graphical output and file storage for Tektronix and Hewlett-Packard. MBK had nearly finished the definition of the character set for the Hewlett-Packard and would then implement the vector family command. This is very similar to the Tektronix version.
AHF had noticed that the table searching to find the user's actual name from his username was taking a significant proportion of the time for a short job. GWR was looking into this and it is likely that an alternative method of accessing this information would be provided and this would be used by all the packages.
The documentation is complete apart from appendices which require aperture sizes etc to be added once the Acceptance Tests have been completed.
A version appears to be working on the 360/195 and generating tapes correctly. DVR will see MFC about getting SCFOR working.
This was complete and the documentation written. This would be finalised as soon as the Acceptance Tests were complete.
