No other company wanted to bid this contract fixed price.
The Central computer system was housed at 1 Police Plaza (the building to the left that you never see in the Law And Order Shots of Police Plaza. The building was in need of Demolition and that was one of the motivating Factors to upgrade the aging computer system.
At that time, the 911 FDNY system was located (Central Command) at Police Plaza, and each of the "Boroughs" had a smaller PDP-11 which dispatched Units to that Borough. Any borough could request Units from surrounding Burroughs and surrounding districts.
The PDP-11 that ran FDNY was a home grown real time operating system, all written in Macro-11 and making extensive use of the 512 byte pages of the PDP-11. For this reason, we chose a VAX to migrate the application to. The VAX (unlike the Alpha's 8192 pages) utilized 512 byte pages which meant on this first pass we didn't need to try to figure out how to change the real time page relocation system.
All the Macro-11 needed to be automatically converted in to C. Clearly low level MACRO-11 being read by a computer and turned into C is no easy task.
You can see a selection of pictures on the scrolling windows at the top of this page.
The FDNY System went live in early 2001.
