UK Home Secretary Kenneth Baker officially launched the latest-generation Police National Computer database system in Hendon, London yesterday: the UKP20m PCN2 police information system (CI No 1,144), designed to help the Bobby on the beat in searching for stolen cars or missing persons, is based on a 7.500/H120-P mainframe from Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, and was developed using Software AG’s Adabas and Natural database software; the Siemens mainframe, a Fujitsu Ltd-built machine microcoded to run Siemens’ BS2000 operating system, has replaced a dual-configuration Unisys Corp (Burroughs) A15 mainframe which isn’t capable of running Adabas; the new software enables vehicle registration searches when only part of the registration number is known; also, a name search will bring up not just vehicle information, but all recorded information on a person – whether he has also been reported missing, has suicidal tendencies or is HIV-positive; on the hardware front, the 62 MIPS Siemens mainframe, with 192Mb main memory, has twice the processing power and four times the memory of the Unisys machine; the information goes out to local police offices via a private British Telecommunications Plc X25 network; 36,000 police operators have to be retrained on the new system, which may yet be made accessible to the civil service for helping evaluate job applications.
