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continued throughout the design, coding, and testing phases, were
designed to ensure a minimum level of functionality in the new
system, as well as appropriate improvements from Infolease. As
part of this development process, NFISG needed to learn many
aspects of Norwest Financial Leasing's business. Additionally, in
the early development phases, NFISG studied the Infolease system to
determine what data records needed to be maintained.
The primary17 technical concern at this point was the TPF
system. The existing system was designed to handle "short
records"--referring to the size of the transactions--between the
mainframe computer and the minicomputers. To obtain the efficiency
needed, NFISG sought to create a system that could handle
transactions with longer and varying sizes. As a result, NFISG
examined the development of a message system that could pass
information efficiently.18 Further, NFISG considered the
accessibility of the data through direct-access indexing to
minimize disk space and increase response time. Additionally,
17 Other issues included human interfacing--the user's
ability to navigate through the system according to the screens
set up on the system. Additionally, NFISG addressed off-line
reporting capabilities of the system.
18 To increase efficiency in the TPF system, NFISG
programmed the system using an "assembler-based" language, which
is a lower level (i.e., each assembler instruction can be
directly interpreted to machine language) and less descriptive
language than most other programming languages.
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