A big part of the DST Project was the writing and development of programs that would analyze the results of the DST and to allow operators to produce reports to present to the well owners. There was an immediate need to take the analysis to the oil fields where the testing was being done. We took on the project of building what we referred to as a Stand-Alone Analysis System or SAAS. One of the most immediate needs for this system was in South America where there was a scarcity of computers.
Halliburton had written FORTRAN programs running on mainframe computers which could do the analysis, Our job was to move the FORTRAN programs into the minicomputer environment so they could be used without the mainframe computers available in the USA.
This is a picture of the system we built. The core of this system was the RT-11 which was a PDP-11 built with a couple of cassette tapes into the green screen terminal. A graphics monitor and printer were off-the-shelf Hewlett-Packard devices. We added a Kuster microscope chart reader with encoders to read pressure vs time readings taken from the charts.
We built five SAAS systems and they were shipped to five South American Countries, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru. Two programmers from our project traveled to each country to do the training.