Tara mines is run by Finnish Company, Outokumpu. At present Tara Mines Ltd produces 2.6 million tonnes of ore annually. Mining is carried out with an underground trackless system. The ore is blasted out and carried to the surface in haulage vehicles. The cavities created by the blasting are "backfilled" with a mixture of rock waste and cement.

Tara is credited as being one of the most environmentally responsible mines in Europe and adheres to a strict environmental protection policy. The mine premises themselves are extensively screened by coniferous trees and is virtually invisible from the surrounding roads.

The computer systems used to control automated equipment, monitoring of water and pressure levels, were originally built by the parent company Outokumpu. But in the early nineties, Tara Mines were given local responsibility for their computer systems. The main system was a Digital PDP-11/03 system running RSTS operating system and had 3 RL02 disks, one for the operating system and application, one for the data, and one to back up the data disk.

Their problem was the time the system had to be shutdown, while the system was backed up. The system was usually down for 4-hours to carry out the data disk backup and that was 4-hours the mine had to be shutdown for as well. As far as Tara Mines was concerned, that was 4-hours per day, 28-hours per week, of lost production time.

Our role, was to replace the PDP 11/03 with a PDP 11/73, which had a built in DLT backup drive and so much disk space, we could hold a copy of the data, each day for 10-years. The operating system was updated to a newer version of RSTS, but this time also had a DCL program, so we could write DCL batch programs and a very easy user front end to control the programs. All application programs had to be re-built. All of them were written in FORTRAN and with a few exceptions, each one re-compiled and re-linked without any modifications. After 10-days of testing, the new system was switched over and backups were now carried out in 5-minutes, giving them an extra 27-hours of production time per week, which equated to approximately £1M of extra income per month.