Government Technology - December 2007 - (Page 21)

GIS WASN’T THE ONLY HOT TOPIC IN STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT IT. Through the late ’80s and early ’90s, governors, mayors and county supervisors started realizing they needed someone in charge of their respective technology initiatives — or lack thereof. And so was born the public-sector CIO. Or director of IT. Or CTO. Or even the rare EIO (enterprise information officer.) Some names you might recall from those days include Steve Kolodney in California, John Carrow in Philadelphia, John Thomas Flynn in Massachusetts, John Kost in Michigan — having the name John apparently meant you were a shoo-in for the job. These represent just a few of the pioneers who assumed the unenviable task of establishing the CIO as a credible and vital part of government strategy. By 1990, a pattern appeared in personal computing technology. What had been cutting edge just a few years ago was now available in a smaller package at a cheaper price. Take the laptops of the day. A top-of-the-line model included features like a 286 processor, AS THE FINAL DECADE THE TOSHIBA T3100 SERIES WAS AMONG THE FIRST “LAPTOP” FORMAT PORTABLE 286 COMPUTERS, AND WAS BUILT IN 1987. PHOTO COURTESY OF DAVE DUNFIELD Sumio Iijima, a Japanese physicist, discovers carbon nanotubes 1992 Apple Newton debuts EDS founder Ross Perot makes bid for White House Mosaic (aka Netscape Navigator) was the browser created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina in 1992. The browser would dominate the market for several years. However, Internet Explorer, using much of Mosaic’s original code, would eventually drive Netscape almost out of the market. Sun Microsystems creates Java programming language First released in 1991, Linux is regarded as the most popular open source operating system. Widely used in servers and supported by a long list of heavy hitters like IBM, Sun, Oracle — even the PlayStation 3 — Linux is now making inroads to the mobile phone market. Microsoft releases Windows NT Adobe co-founder Charles Geschke is kidnapped in the company parking lot CompuServe introduces WYSIWYG e-mail j 21 40 MB hard drive, 640x400 display, and weighed around eight to 12 pounds. Sure, they’re fun to laugh at now. But only 10 years earlier, virtually no one even had a desktop computer, let alone a laptop. It’s the same today. Your bargain basement cell phones have more capability than the laptop just described, they’re smaller and cost a fraction of the price. of the 20th century began, state and local governments were spending more on IT than ever before. One leading expenditure was systems integration. By 1990, state and local government was spending more than $1 billion annually on systems integration, especially in areas like health and human services, administration and network connectivity. This electronic merging of normally disparate entities set the stage for a whole host of transformations in terms of government service delivery to citizens. With increased systems integration came even more intense focus on data. The early ’90s saw dramatic increases in practices such as data warehousing and data mining, not to mention the expansion of data centers. The effects of Moore’s Law were becoming plainly apparent, as one generation of computers was quickly rendered obsolete by endless successors. Intel’s forthcoming Pentium processor was already sounding the death knell of the relatively new 486. 90-92 http://www.govtech.com

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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