CAPM320 | Vital Football

CAPM320

Does it relate somehow to a Conventional Automated People Mover? If so, is 320 the number of passengers on any given train (number of coaches on the APM)?
 
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It's not something I've seen mentioned in the Railway Magazine.

You won't have, it's deeply obscure and I'm just having a bit of fun with it.

It relates to the early electronic ticketing systems introduced in the mid to late 80s. I'm sure some train buffs will remember the "Portis" machine?
 
Yes, indeed. So, those machines dowloaded their data to British Rail's mainframe data centre on Queen's Drive in Nottingham. Where I worked.

To continue the story - I know you're all absolutely rivetted by this - Capri was the suite of programmes that managed the downloaded Aptis and Portis data.

Episode 3 tomorrow. Do not adjust your sets!
 
To continue the story - I know you're all absolutely rivetted by this - Capri was the suite of programmes that managed the downloaded Aptis and Portis data.

Episode 3 tomorrow. Do not adjust your sets!

This is all most fascinating.

Is there any mechanism on this site that can send an alert to my phone to let me know immediately when episode 3 appears ?
 
So... CAPM320 was one of the mainframe programmes that was part of the Capri suite.

It was a beast. One day, my manager wandered up and dumped a bi-fold printout on my desk that was about 15 inches thick. Thousands upon thousands of lines of code. She said something like: "We want you to re-write and amend this to cut out dead sub-routines, improve efficiency and re-organise the structure to make it fully understandable to the team".

I said: "Ok, where's the documentation?"

"There isn't any."

And there it sat, my very own Moby-Dick of a programme.

I worked on it for months, trying to disentangle something that was essentially spaghetti-code written over years by several different programmers, with no comments or documentation.

I think I eventually reduced the 15" printout to about 12". But, essentially, it defeated me and swam off back into the mainframe aether largely oblivious to my efforts. At least it still worked.

It's the only computer programme I can remember the name of, even 30 years later.