Production control on the disk file

Production Control in a manufacturing concern can either be an ingratiating system or the most grotesque complex procedure in operation. In a large company, the manual application of the system in question becomes unwieldy and economically impossible. The necessity of mechanizing Production Control thus becomes increasingly obvious, and, because of its effect to the total systems concepts, this mechanization must be handled with the upmost of care... The next level of consideration becomes the mode of mechanization. The major criteria in Production Control are rapid access in seeking information regarding the location and status on any order or group of orders, immediate addition, updating, and deletion of orders in the file, and the ability to readily purge this file periodically. The establishment of the order file in punched cards would greatly relieve the economics of the system, but access to a large volume of orders over a days time would be extremely burdensome; even its application to magnetic tape would leave us with a cumbersome routine. The third storage device under consideration is the disk file which quite aptly satisfies the requirements: high volume of storage, 10 million BCD characters, or 100,000 sectors of 100 positions each; rapid access to any of these sectors, average seek time 600 milliseconds; and a file that can be readily purged, 150 minutes to dump the disk file on to the tape.