Government Technology - December 2007 - (Page 20)

20 YEARS IN REVIEW ‘WE CALLED THEM TRASH 80s’ king of the IT hill was, in those days, a little thing called GIS. In the ’80s, companies like ESRI (and for the record, it isn’t pronounced ez-ree) and CARIS established themselves as premier commercial vendors of GIS applications. Though around since the late ’60s, GIS had been largely relegated to specialized agencies. Thanks to the growing number and power of PCs, GIS tools were finally available to small government agencies and the general public. ArcGIS, ESRI’s flagship product, is perhaps the most widely used GIS application, with desktop, server, mobile and online versions available. Seattle police chief remembers the first in-car computers. In 1977, Gil Kerlikowske headed the detective division for the St. Petersburg, Fla., Police Department and was part of a team that experimented with something unique: putting computers in police squad cars. “We bought these Radio Shack TRS80s,” he said. “We called them trash 80s. Battery operated, maybe four lines on a screen, no memory or hardly any. But the concept was that each officer would have his or her own.” At first, officers were intimidated by the machines, but they quickly grew comfortable, Kerlikowske said. “One of the things that happened was they started a football betting pool. On the one hand they got disciplined for that, but on the other hand they were enlightened and clever enough to think of different uses for it.” The computers were used to replace handwritten or typewritten reports, though most officers kept paper backups because they didn’t trust the new devicces. “You’d write two or three reports, and something would happen and it all would be lost,” Kerlikowske said. Nobody thought the computers were all that innovative at the time, he added. “When you’re in the middle of the experiment, being the guinea pig, you don’t see yourself as all that cutting edge, but now when I look back I say that was a great learning lab.” Kerlikowske later received a one-year fellowship from the U.S. Department of Justice to evaluate police procedures nationally. He went on to become the police commissioner in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1994, where he found the department had no computers. By the time he left in 1998, the department had installed 150 workstations and mobile data terminals in all of the squad cars. “I got seniors in high school to teach these 25-, 30- and even 40-year veteran officers,” he said. Kerlikowske is currently the chief of police in Seattle, where he just finished equipping every officer with individual laptops. “All these years later, we’re just getting to that, although we’ve had in-car systems for quite a while.” DEC_07 j j ALTHOUGH THE WEB would really kick-start the Information Age, none of it would’ve been possible without technological marvels that began appearing in the late ’80s and early ’90s. To exist then meant growing familiar with a horde of new acronyms — LAN, DOS, IBM PS/2, GUI, OS, RAM, MB, IT, CIO, AFIS, CAD, AS/400 — and a wild assortment of terms such as integration, automation, telephony, Windows, telecom, collaboration, Macintosh, worms, viruses, servers, optical storage and data centers. And that barely scratches the surface. Every corner of government dealt with a rapidly changing technology landscape, but it could be argued that the 1990 IBM launches Lotus Notes Cisco goes public, at a split-adjusted price of about 6 cents per share. Hubble Space Telescope is launched 1 991 First GSM cellular network launched Time Inc. and Warner Communications Inc. merge High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (aka the Gore Bill) is passed, creating the National Information Infrastructure JIM McKAY, JUSTICE EDITOR 20

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - December 2007

Government Technology - December 2007 Contents Point of View Big Picture Profile The Last Mile GT Spectrum Well...How Did We Get Here? Dark Spaces A Paler Shade of Green? Decertification Dilemma Game On Two Cents Products Signal:Noise

Government Technology - December 2007

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