Siren

In April 1972, the Soviet Union in the Central Agency of Air Communications of the Moscow aviation hub (FACA) has commissioned the first in the country, unique at the time an automated queuing system, "Siren" - process control system implementation places on air transport. Since then, many years passed, replaced by several generations of hardware and mathematical software, there are dozens of centers across the country and abroad, the system interacts with other systems abroad, identifies ways to further improve and develop the system.

Service first passengers using the system "Sirena-1", 1972

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By the beginning of work on the establishment of a "siren-1" in the Soviet Union had notechnical means for its implementation. There were no computers that can communicatein real time simultaneously with hundreds of clients in some cases thousands of milesfrom a computer. There was no means of communication to ensure transfer of necessary information from the client in a data center for the second unit with high reliability. There were no facilities for customer systems that would enable them to carry out a set of information and take it from the data center to display alphanumericinformation in a convenient form for the customer can print the necessary travel documents. There was no software, which brings together the work of all technical facilities into a single system, providing the technological reliability of the system with the required speed.

In these circumstances, heavy responsibility entrusted to the chief designer of the "Siren-1." VA Zhozhikashvili as the chief designer of the system, with the active assistance of the Ministry of Instrumentation, Automation and Control Systems (MinisterKN Rudnev), in close cooperation with the Ministry of Civil Aviation (Minister Bugaev, BP) and MCA Glavagentstvom (Head Zhebrak In . I.), managed to organize a coherentcollaboration of several organizations Minpribor and IAG, which has solved all technical and organizational problems and ensure the establishment and commissioning of the system "Sirena-1" in the Moscow aviation hub, which was successfully operated during the 1972-1982 years. Subsequent modification of the "Siren" operate in various cities of Russia and the CIS countries and in the present.

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During the creation of "Sirens" was first formulated the idea of dialogue with the so-called interactive cards, where each request is created on an external drive an entrycontaining all the variable part of the dialogue. Why in the external and why only a variable? Because the computer memory in those days was a ferrite, and the "memory cell" looked like a set of series (in all three coordinates) of ferrite rings, pierced by thincopper wires. This meant that expect to receive a large amount of memory was not necessary, and in most of the time existed in the computer memory capacity was only 64 kilobytes, that imposes severe restrictions on the algorithms of information processing.

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The machine room of the "Siren-1", 1972

In every city where it was deployed, "Sirena-2", there was a Data Processing Center (DPC), which contained only space flight, "attached" to this city (that is, data about the flights were geographically distributed). Moreover, each of the Centres, the owner of which was appropriate FACA, consisted of a set of data (RCD), based on the SM-2 andthe host network information (MIS). The latter has also been implemented on the CM-2and was connected with a variety of communication multiplexer, solving the problem of data transmission (up to 1990 were used leased lines at 1200 bit / s, but it was enoughbecause the request had a size of only 157 bytes .) There were also fitted Displayterminals of DM-500, manufactured in Vinnitsa, then they were replaced by the DM-2000, and later - Device type BTA.

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