Let me list some of the restrictions on the design of this system.It is restricted to drum and tape as no disc yet designed will survive.Eventually we may have a solid state mass memory but not now. What is the potential load for this limited mass storage? The union of the wish list of all potential Army users filled 32 volumes...and these were mostly topic headings and sketches.This user's group itself is composed of Army officers and enlisted in combat.The user both constructs and uses the data base.I can identify at least two major components of this data base.There is a small fixed component such as the number of gallons per mile a tank gets. The problem comes for the other component.That part is the much larger time varying data base which must be extracted from the river of information which flows into and through an Army Tacticai Operations Center while it is engaged in combat.This information is being constantly gathered from patrols, intelligence activities, units in contact, etc.The user may put the information into the system at the beginning of his shift and then use it before the shift is over. This means that the time scales for input and retrieval are severely compressed over the other examples presented at this conference.Data, which is input and then retrieved, is used for real time planning, and operation on a time scale of hours or days after initial acquisition.