[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

On 08/11/10 10:01, John Hearns wrote:
> On 8 November 2010 01:33, general_email at technicalbloke.com
> <general_email at technicalbloke.com>  wrote:
>    
>>>>          
>> Yes I never said it wasn't, but the point I was originally making is
>> that the technology just wasn't there for the government to get carried
>> away with. It simply wasn't cheap enough to deploy widely, unix
>> workstations cost easily ten times as much as PC clones. The only boxes
>> they could practically deploy to end users like council offices and
>> hospitals in the mid 90s were PCs running early Microsoft operating
>> systems
>>      
> Well, medical imaging (CT scans, MRI scans, PET Scans) were being
> reported on by radiologists
> running Solaris workstations at the time, but as you say for general
> deployment PCs were much cheaper.
>
> I remember buying a PC from my projects budget, for use by radiographers.
> The big hoo-hah was over whether or not it would get nicked - so we
> commisioned a lockable steel cage to go round
> it, and I got a technician to bolt it on top of a filing cabinet.
> That was not a one off - that company did good sales in the health
> service market at the time.
>    

Yes I remember the NHS standard issue ugly steel cages, they were such a 
pain in the arse. Every time we decommisioned a PII vintage machine we 
had to unscrew these ruddy huge bolts leaving a great big holes in 
peoples desks and a massive patch of unfaded surface. Still, they were 
happy to have twice as much deskspace!

Last time I saw the inside of an MRI lab (about 5 years ago) they were 
still running proper workstations, SGIs IIRC. That was the only place on 
the whole hospital campus where there were non-Win2K desktops though.

Roger
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug