NIPS 360 FFS

National Military Command System Information Processing System 360 Formatted File System (NIPS 360 FFS) is a file management/database management system developed by IBM. The IBM product seems to be have simply called Formated File System (FFS), NIPS 360 FFS is an adaption for the National Military Command System (NMCS).

User's Manuals

Volume 1: Introduction to File Concepts
Volume 2: File Structuring (FS)
Volume 3: File Maintenance (FM)
Volume 4: Retrieval and Sort Processor (RASP)
Volume 7: Utility Support

Volumes 5 and 6 are yet to be found. Volumes 8 and 9 need to be added to the repo.

In addition there are supplementary documents:

NIPS Processing Handbook (1976): Seems to be more hands-on documentation of how to work with NIPS including best-practices and experiences on how to implement NIPS procedures efficiently. The document is marked as a supplement to the NIPS User's Manuals.
NIPS General Description: A high-level overview that reads like a requirements specification.

General File Concepts

Periodic Fields: Fields that may appear multiple times in a record (as opposed to Fixed Field)

Components

NIPS 360 FFS is made up of several relatively independant components:

File Structuring (FS): Creates the File Format Table (FFT). See also User's Manual - Volume 2 - File Structuring FS.
File Maintenance (FM):
Retrieval and Sort Processor (RASP)
Output Processor (OP)
Terminal Processing (TP)
Utility Support (UT)

Data File

A data file is a collection of records readable by NIPS. See NIPS Data File.

Software

The NIPSTRAN software can be used to decode NIPS files into ASCII tables as well as SQL.

The PyNIPS Python library is being developed to read NIPS files.