[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[John Edwards]

On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 08:14:48PM +0000, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
> On 05/11/10 17:25, Christopher Hunter wrote:
>> As an aside - it is notable that NO labour government IT project has
>> EVER worked properly, to budget and on time.  The Fire Brigade IT
>> disaster followed the NHS one (the FB affair was quite effectively
>> hushed-up, but a little research will reveal the whole ghastly mess),
>> and every other government IT project has been an abject failure,
>> without exception.
> 
> Given that your desktop choices were DOS6, Win3.1 and OS2 (hooked up, if 
> you were lucky, to a 28k modem) when labour came into power last you may 
> as well say no serious UK GOVERNMENT IT project has EVER worked 
> properly.
<snip>

Very good point on the generality of government IT troubles, but you
are a few years off on the technical details.

The Labour Party came to power in the UK in 1997. Windows 95, NT 4,
Mac OS 8 and RedHat 4.2 were all around then and they all had workable
GUIs that are not too different to what most people use today (RedHat
excepted unless you built early releases of KDE).

ISDN with channel bonding was available and widely used by businesses
that needed Internet access (most didn't), with T1 or E1 bundles
offering up to 2 Mbit/s (up and down). Beyond that there was ATM or
X25 frame relay. The University JANET network had a 155 Mbit/s
backbone. The larger metropolitian government departments had good
bandwidth available, but rural and satellite offices did not. And
there lies one of the main technical problems (there are of course
lots of non-technical problems). Lots of schools were already
connected to the Internet through a BT/government program, though
kids may not have had easy access to it.

Most people didn't have computers or Internet access, but most didn't
need it. And those that did were not quite in the stone age.


-- 
#---------------------------------------------------------#
|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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