TSC — Transportation Systems Consulting (1992–1995)
TSC was one of my first serious programming jobs. The company was founded by George D.S. Andrews, a British aviation enthusiast who built a software suite for the airline industry called AMIS-2000.
What AMIS-2000 Did
AMIS-2000 was an integrated suite of Unix terminal-based software to manage aircraft maintenance — tracking costly downtime and producing compliance documentation for the FAA and UK CAA. The software ran on virtually every Unix variant of the era: Solaris, HP/UX, Apple UX, SCO Unix, UnixWare, Sequent/Dynix, and IBM AIX.
Modules included:
- Aircraft Maintenance Status and Performance
- Planning and Control
- Rotables / Repairables / Tools Management
- Strategic Documents Management
- Material Controls and Inventory Management
- Work Orders and Cost Control
- Purchasing and Repairs Management
- Personnel / Training / Tech Docs Management
- Financial Management
- Aircraft Operations and Management
The UI was terminal-based (curses library, 80x24 character grid on the terminal). "Workstations" were WYSE WY-60 serial terminals attached directly to a Sequent minicomputer — no PCs, no laptops. Everyone was logged into the same time-shared system simultaneously. When someone kicked off a compile, everyone felt it.
Software was distributed on quarter-inch QIC tape cartridges in tar format, and physically mailed around the world. Pre-Internet.
Source Code Control
No git, no Subversion. We used SCCS — version history per file, no concept of branches, no renames, no atomic commits. Replication across systems was done with rcp or rsync. Truly stone knives and bear skins.
Pre-Internet Communication
Internal chat was via the Unix talk program. External email used a shared uunet account over uucp. Email addresses used the now-extinct bang-path format — mine was ...uunet!roscoe!tim.
Why This Matters
Working in this environment built a deep instinct for portability, resource efficiency, and writing code that runs on anything. The constraints of shared iron, 80x24 UIs, and pre-internet networking shaped how I think about systems to this day.