Claimed to be the largest civil computer system in the world, British Telecom’s Customer Service System is now operational and comprises six Amdahl 5890s and two 5990s, alongside 18 3090s and one 308X from IBM: all run under MVS/XA, but will migrate to ESA next year; transaction processing is carried out by CICS, talking to Cullinet Software’s IDMS/R database using Cobol II application code; there are 27 Customer Service System districts across the UK, and the centres deal with orders, billing and fault enquiries; British Telecommunications says that a typical district has 140 million database record types, 50Gb of disk storage, and will be able to process up to 500,000 transactions per day.
