a. The system now does "all things imagined to be necessary."
b. The computer has proved to be remarkably reliable, with a record of about 40,000 hours of use without a breakdown.
c. A reasonable amount of preventive maintenance is done, mostly during the one week of four that the reactor is shut down.
d. One person serves as operator and programmer (for simple jobs). He also transports magnetic tapes to the computing center for off-line data processing and performs smaller tasks. The average user does not need to do any programming.
e. Fortunately, the people who have written most of the programs have remained in attendance and have updated the programs frequently. Machine-language programming has not proved to be a bad chore because the system is a fixed-hardware setup.
f. Modes of data collection can easily be changed.
g. The overall performance is excellent. The only problem is an occasional wiping out of a program due to the fact that there is no hardware memory-protection feature in the computer. These accidents are estimated to cost at most a loss of a few percent of the running time.
4. Costs
The costs in manpower and dollars of the MSCS are given in Table 7.