READFAST — an online information retrieval system

READFAST, an online user‐friendly system, has been developed for the Library of the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad, India. The abbreviation READFAST stands for REtrieval of Acquired Documents using a Friendly And STructured system. It is based on the package DBMS‐10, and has been implemented on DEC‐1091 under TOPS‐10 operating system. The system has been fully coded in DEC FORTRAN‐10 version‐7, (similar to FORTRAN‐77) consisting of approximately 5,000 lines. It also includes an assembly routine (written in DEC‐1091 macro language), which extracts the project and programmer number (ppn) of a person who has logged on, as a string of 13 ASCII characters.