Working Up

Sometimes it just isn’t worth being on the leading edge. It was 1981 and an attempt to purchase an office computer turned into a monster.

1981 – the Apple II was fun and the TRS-80 was, well it was something you could buy at Radio Shack. These little computer things could store data on floppy disks. They had BASIC interpreters, so you could write your own programs.

You could write little databases to store inventory information.

I was a new engineer out of college who could write programs. I worked with a group of older engineers. We had field sites that were a long, long ways from our home office and had hundreds of pieces of accountable equipment. We kept all this inventory on yellow legal pads. We had to write the inventory twice because we didn’t have copy machines (they costs tens of thousands of dollars in those days).

Let’s buy one of those new computers to keep track of everything.

That sounded like a good idea. The computer would be useful, and it would be fun. We had lots of spare time at those far away field sites. I would be programming BASIC during all my spare hours.

One (not so) little problem:

this was the Federal government.

I still don’t know what the real problem was. I think people were afraid of being accused of wasting money. That seemed odd to me as we were spending about $20million a year on the overall program and the computers cost a couple thousand dollars.

Anyways, our quest for a little computer went on for months – most of a year. We would meet, discuss what we would do with the computer, discuss what brands were available, discuss how we would record the inventory, discuss how we would keep copies in the field and at the main office, discuss this, discuss that, and discuss lots of things. The discussion were endless.

We finally had a last meeting where we would decide what to do. The main decision maker – the big boss – was delayed with something else. The people in the room reached a consensus:

the benefits of the little computer were not worth the pain of pushing through the purchase.

The big boss walked into the room. People looked at him and begged, “Say ‘No.’ Just say ‘no’.”

The big boss paused, looked puzzled, and said, “No.”

Everyone smiled, stood, and exited the room. We never bought a little computer to track our inventory. The yellow legal pads and pencils lived on for a few more years.