Article by Hon Member – David Bradley
Continuing from last week we left a large Local Authority with more than 10,000 employees that after nearly 100 years had survived the first major communication shift; namely to Word Processors operating on the earliest of networks using stiff coaxial cable. Painful lessons were learnt about the vital need to back-up files. The next huge shift, invisible to most end users was the adoption of multiplex communication; the twisted pair cables over which multiple data packets were transmitted in both directions. Voice over Internet (Skype and Zoom) took us to where we are now.
Developments do not occur in isolation. Whereas the original Main frame computers were super arithmetic calculators aimed at producing monthly Municipal Accounts, the Land Surveyors were the branch of technology that was aching to have the ability to carry out trigonometric calculations that were done using 7 figure Log and Trig Tables.
Astonishing increase in speed was achieved with the switch to laser tech over glass fibre cable. The Computer hardware also evolved rapidly and the first switch to colour monitors followed fairly soon after with the first laptops. Two-way radios and Bleepers were rapidly replaced by Cellular Phones
[Only two kinds of laptops – those that have been stolen and those waiting to be stolen!]
Love it or hate it, the development of Windows and the integrated suite of Office and Business Programmes pretty well sealed the fate of many specialist programmes. The bundled option does not always provide the best features but there are virtually no interfacing issues!
Local Government restructuring thrust Cape Town into two steps of amalgamation and creation of Metro Cape Town required very rapid capacity increase because Programmes handling Treasury Accounts etc could not handle the combined volumes. An exciting project was the selection of a new suite called Enterprise Wide Programmes (ERP) and here the implementation was complex and required huge retraining of multiple levels of staff.
A unique problem that required earnest world-wide attention was the change over of the Century from 1999 to 2000, Acronym Y2K. (Thousands of hours of intense work was required to test the effect of the roll-over of the date. City had a dedicated team dealing with this and the city had several hundred individual systems each of which had to be migrated. (We kept a copy of one of the systems unaltered and at midnight on the 31st December 1999 we were all gathered in Civic Centre and when every system rolled over perfectly with the exception of the unmigrated one, the champagne corks popped! Many people now say this was a hoax, but it was very real indeed!
Last item to touch on was the most astonishing development of digital mapping and the unfolding concept of layers of maps that could be overlayed and matched to provide the most profound information analysis. Drone development continues to astound in what is now possible when coupled with the most complex calculations that would take centuries to compute by the only methods available just a few short years ago!
Here’s to the future and a 21 gun salute to the collective of experts! I am so grateful to have been able to have just a shaky hand in most of the foregoing areas over 40 years.
