IBM Toll Collection System history 4143
I did the maintenance on some of their stuff in East Brunswick, NJ back attached to the State Police Barracks.
Don't try and get in there without approval and escort 8-).
Anyway, theres one really good story I was told at DEC... Don't know if it's true... some of the old Field Service stories turned out to be urban legends -- like the Double Stuffed Oreo's being VAX FPU errors. (At least the Nabisco web site denies that... a DEC Field Service VP or something like that said it was true... )
There were road sensors buried along the turnpike that measured traffic overhead and could get a pretty good estmimate of the number of cars, the traffic load and speed. That was fed back through a pile of LSI-11 systems to a pair of 11-40 systems with dual port disk driver (RM02's IIRC)...
past post in another thread: has this history of airline online res system from above: As ATW's first issue was being prepared for...
There's two sets of lanes on the turnpike -- one labeled cars, busses and trucks and one cars only.
Anyway, one jobs of the system was to divert traffic from the overloaded set of lanes to the other by closing the overloaded set of lanes by flipping the access signs automatically to closed and having the entrance ramps closed off to the overloaded ones.
Well, it seemed to work well in test and at one point it went into production. When the car traffic stopped moving forward the lanes would close down to avoid backing up even more traffic around an accident or problem.
I have driven on both the PA and NJ toll roads. When I was on the PA...
Worked real well, until we hit Memorial Day here in NJ when everyone decides it's time to go down to the shore (from Northern NJ or NYC -- or up to the shore from the PA area). Traffic built up as usual but it built up dramatically on both road streams. The computer followed the programming -- it was a good old PDP11 and didn't do anything random.
It shut down both roads because the traffic flow was below a certain level.
No toll taker salary needed. In NJ the exit booths are unmanned in many locations after rush hour and prime holiday time. It remains your responsibility to insert the 35 cents in...
The fix, of course, was to now have an operator override so that both lanes can't be shutdown automatically...
Bill
-- -- digital had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now! pechter-at-ureachtechnologies.com
IBM Toll Collection System history 4144
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