[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

On 07/11/10 16:19, Sanatan Rai wrote:
> On 7 November 2010 15:19, Richard Jones<rich at annexia.org>  wrote:
>    
>> On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 05:20:19PM +0000, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
>>      
>>> Yes, some of the brave souls I was at Uni with had working linux
>>> desktops by the mid 90s. I remember my mate Dave fighting with his
>>> Ollivetti 486 DX25 for nearly a week to get X working, let's not pretend
>>> that was a viable solution for widescale deployment to end users back
>>> then! ;)
>
>     So it was certainly possible to go spend the entire 90s decade without using
> windows. No one considered it as anything more than a toy platform for some home
> users. All the CS teaching expected people to use unix boxes to write
> programmes.
>    

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 (unless you want to count Amiga's, STs and Acorn Archimedes?).

Anyway, the scope to balls up IT projects on a monumental scale was far 
smaller back then. It wasn't until it became mainstream for offices to 
have computers hooked up to the internet that dangerous notions such as 
linking tens (nay hundreds) of thousands of them together and building 
uberdatabases to service them might have seemed like a sane way to 
reduce costs to a politician. Before that point an initiative on that 
scale would have involved buying each office a computer and some 
connectivity, it simply wouldn't have seemed practical. A few years 
later though when every office had a Windows PC and a modem... well you 
saw what happened!

Even if history was different and an affordable unix desktop was 
available back then I reckon it still would have been a dogs dinner as I 
don't think the problem was really with Windows. The problem as I see it 
was that politicians had no idea how complex these simple sounding 
systems could be when scaled up to national levels, and the people 
taking their money also didn't know or more likely did but simply didn't 
care as long as they got paid. Like the builders of old politicians 
didn't realize that the dynamics change as you scale designs up and they 
sadly commissioned dozens of systems that were unbuildable back then.

Of course now much of the R&D that needed to be done in order to figure 
out how to build such huge systems has been done by the Googles and 
Amazons of the world so the next time some politico decides they want a 
national scale IT system it should be a lot more practical. That's not 
to say it will be practical or that it will actually happen on time or 
within budget, there's still plenty of ways to mess big projects up, 
especially in a sector where you REALLY have to balls up to get the boot.

I'm not sure the government has any place spending taxpayers money 
initiating and managing massive IT projects at all actually, the high 
tech companies of the world are doing a damn sight better job of making 
software with the money people give them voluntarily. Instead imagine if 
the UK had spent even a quarter of what it did on failed IT projects in 
the last decade on employing open source developers to work on a broad 
range of potentially useful projects, by definition we would have got 
more software out of it!

Roger.


PS: My tutors thought it was a good idea to teach us ML instead of C, 
thanks guys that was soooo useful!

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