NIPS(ID:5377/nip001)

• Operations Analysis System (OPSANAL), 1963 - 1973 (5
  series, 22 data files, 161 doc. pages)
  
  America's military
  involvement in Southeast Asia demonstrates the first use of computers to provide
  large-scale quantitative analysis of military operations which aided executive
  decisions on the conduct of the war. Utilizing his experience in the corporate
  sector, Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara brought with him an expertise of
  statistical analysis and quantitative study which he applied to his management
  of the Department of Defense. Accordingly, the Operations Analysis System
  (OPSANAL) system was created during the Vietnam war by the Office of the
  Assistant Secretary of Defense for Program Analysis and Evaluation (ASDPAE) to
  provide a means of statistically analyzing the conduct of both friendly and
  enemy military operations in Southeast Asia.
  

  The Operations Analysis System (OPSANAL) created by the Department of Defense
  provides a perfect representation of the statistical analysis paradigm which
  dominated the Pentagon throughout the Vietnam era. The system was originally
  created in a software dependent structure, called the National Military Command
  System (NMCS) Information Processing System 360 Formatted File System (NIPS). In
  its native NIPS environment, the OPSANAL system formed an early relational
  database whose files interlinked, enabling analysts to input queries on a wide
  variety of parameters. See the ADDENDUM for a
  description of the NIPS format.

A description of the NIPS and de-NIPs file formats appears in National
Archives Reference Information Paper 90: "American Prisoners of War and Missing
in Action from the Vietnam War" (1995). The relevant paragraphs from Part III of
that publication (Electronic Records) follows:

III.3 Several of the data files in the Center for
Electronic Records were created by the Department of Defense (DoD) using an
early data base management system called the National Military Command System
Information Processing System 360 Formatted File System, commonly known as NIPS.
The data structure of NIPS files is hierarchical in that each data record is
composed of fixed, non-repeating data with one level of subordinating data. Each
record is of varying length and is usually organized into the following sets of
data elements: a Control Set, in which a unique record identifier is found, such
as operations report number; a Fixed Set, containing non-repetitive data; and
one or more types of Periodic Sets. Each type of Periodic Set may occur one or
more times. For instance, a military incident uniquely identified by an
operations report number may have more than one result. Therefore, a Periodic
Set named "Results" will occur more than one time in that specific record. In
addition, NIPS files can include Variable Sets that appear only when data is
present. These sets are usually "Comments" data in a free-text field of variable
length.