State computers

In the early days of business computing, a computer was a very expensive item, costing the equivalent in todays dollars somewhere around $100,000.

These were placed in a secure room, and those with the need to do their work on the computer were connected to it with a small box known as a work station.

This contained a driver for their monitor, and connections for  the keyboard and as things progressed, ports for a mouse were added. These computers operated at an incredible speed of 1Mz., andwere able to handle up to 255 work stations as there was so much idle processor time available between key strokes from the various work stations.

The State in its infinite wisdom, has since discarded this as impracticable, and even with computers running at speeds thousands of times faster, now equips each state worker with at least one, often two and occasionally three complete computers. These computers are usually purchased on "price agreement" at prices considerably higher than retail prices for single computers.

In the "old days", if you needed to upgrade the system in your office, you upgraded the server and everybody with access was automatically upgraded.

Today we pay inflated prices to upgrade the server, and then pay again to upgrade the individual computers located throughout the building.

This is not a funny story, as the average State employee has little or no need for any computer running faster than 100 Mz. There are a few, mostly in assorted engineering departments that need extremely fast, large physical memory units to view rotating views of design projects.

Programming is another tender subject.

The State is apparently unable or too incompetent to use available spreadsheets or databases and instead purchases custom software most likely at a dollar a line and then discovers that the product is full of mistakes and requires expensive correction and modification to work. We the citizens of Oregon feel that it is long past time for the State to realize that our pockets are not bottomless, and to do things in a proper businesslike manner.