New York Fire and Ambulance Dispatch System (911)

This project was one of the most challenging undertakings by Sector7. Acting as a subcontractor to Purvis Systems, who held the hardware maintenance contract with the City of New York, Sector7 was responsible for upgrading the aging PDP-11 computer system used by the New York Fire Department's 911 dispatch system.

The system, originally housed at 1 Police Plaza, was running a homegrown real-time operating system written in MACRO-11. The motivation to upgrade was not only the obsolescence of the hardware but also the imminent demolition of the Police Plaza building.

Each borough in New York City had its own PDP-11 system to dispatch emergency units within the area, and the central system coordinated dispatches across boroughs. The system’s failure could have had dire consequences, as it directly impacted emergency response times.

Due to the extensive use of the 512-byte pages of the PDP-11, Sector7 chose the VAX VMS system for migration, as it supported the same page size. This decision reduced the complexity of porting the page relocation system.

• Migrated 400,000 lines of MACRO-11 code to C.
• Handled missing source code, adding significant complexity to the project.
• Ensured no downtime during the migration, as failure could have endangered lives.
• Worked closely with the FDNY to ensure a smooth transition of this critical system.

The project was successfully completed, and the new system went live in early 2001, providing a stable and modern infrastructure for FDNY's 911 dispatch system.