Leaving Dacorum College in 1974, I spent the summer working in Skegness on Butlins bars, and then returned to Hemel Hempstead where I had no idea how I wanted to earn a living. After filling in various applications, a week followed where I had interviews with Eastern Electricity, British Gas, RAF, and Shell Mex and BP Marketing. I was offered three jobs and had been put off the RAF. I took the oil company route as, with shift allowance it meant significantly more money, plus working on big computers seemed very future-proof.
The company's office building used to straddle Marlowes in Hemel Hempstead. It's long since been demolished, partly through fears that tiles were falling off it onto traffic, and partly to make way for a bigger shopping offer at the southern end of Marlowes.
SM and BP Marketing soon morphed into two separate companies with the Shell people moving to Wythenshawe, and the BP people remaining in Hemel. That's the background. Today I wanted to focus on COOLI.
In my early days at BP Oil Ltd computer operations department per shift there were 6 people in the office area (offline) and by the time I'd finished some 20 years later this had been taken over by COOLI (Computerised Offline System) run by one person.
There was another 5 or 6 people running the computer tasks (online), that's 2 to load the tapes onto the decks, 1 or 2 to sit at a console and decide which jobs to run, a team leader and a deputy team leader to stand around and make sure everything ran smoothly. That's assuming no one was on annual leave, taking a tea (or beer) break or having lunch. 20 years later, at least on my shift, nearly the same workload was being done by one person assisted by the COOLI person now and then.
All this through efficiency, and gradually improved programming which meant the jobs didn't error out during processing.
Reflecting on COOLI, this was an area I particularly focussed on. One of the prime reasons jobs failed to process was that they had the wrong file versions going into the next sequential job. This was sometimes down to the console operator not knowing the correct order to run things in, or more often this was down to the order in which COOLI jobs were compiled in the first place. Over several weeks I took it on myself to check through paper records of the previous shift's work to understand why any jobs had errored out. I then made changes to COOLI so the jobs wouldn't fail next time.
I regarded it a major success when, one particular month end as the most complicated totality of jobs were normally processed, nothing errored out at all. A triumph, indeed!
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