Syntegra (British Telecom )
Guidion House,
Harvest Crescent
Ancells Business Park
Fleet
Hampshire
July 1993 to June 1997
July 1987 to November 1991
During this period Mr. Whittle was employed on contract as an Analyst/Programmer on a large project in a team of Analyst/Programmers. The project was a system to monitor the amount of traffic on the digital telephone network in the U.K. The system was known as the Network Traffic Management System (NTMS) The NTMS collected data from all exchanges in the U.K. every 5 minutes and displayed the information on workstations and wallboard displays in a graphical and tabular format.

The system was a large real time project consisting of several modules for data reception, vetting, display, archive and onward transmission on to other data analysis systems.

Other projects related to this were Online Traffic Information Systems which took the data from the NTMS and produced reports on Hourly, Daily and Monthly network loading.

Design methods were highly structured and involved the following stages:- initial module design, design review, design follow up, coding, code review, code follow up, module testing, integration testing, system testing and finally soak testing.

During his employment period Mr. Whittle worked on all aspects of the project from data capture, data vetting, parameter calculation, display software, database analysis software, test tools, system monitoring tools, software installation, upgrade installations and fault monitoring. Click here for a description of some of them.

For part of this contract Mr. Whittle was working as a support software engineer on an NTMS that had been installed by Syntegra for the Spanish telephone company Telefónica. This involved conducting training seminars on how to monitor the performance, run the system and fix defects.

Hardware used:-

  • Concurrent 3260's & 3280's running OS/32
  • Gould mainframes running UNIX.
  • Sun workstations running Suns OPENLOOK XWindow manager
  • Sun sparc servers running UNIX.
  • Tektronix Workstations used as dumb terminals for graphic displays.

Software used :-

  • C & PASCAL for the main program modules & test tools.
  • CAL Assembler for small system interface procedures.
  • CSS & script for development tools.

Applications/toolkits :-

  • Concurrent X25 Program Interface (X25PI)
  • Concurrent Transport Service Program Interface (TSPI)
  • XView.

Packages :-

  • Reliance Database
  • Reliance Database Application Builder.
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