One of the things technology boffins often get accused of is an inability to understand new things in a historical context - always wildly hailing the latest development as the best thing since sliced bread.
I like to think of this as "NME syndrome", in reference to the august music magazine and its penchant for making cover stars of unknown bands and promising that they are going to be the next Beatles (or Radiohead, Oasis, Blur etc)- before promptly knocking them down as over-promoted twits just a few months later.
So I thought we'd start a regular new feature on these pages that help us put a little bit of context on the world of technology - a look back at what was happening this week back in the midsts of time.
We're starting off with a classic example that shows how the calendar may change, but everything else stays pretty much the same. It's a story reported in the Guardian on November 2, 1987 - when we discovered that (shock horror) the government had been spending more and more on IT.
Here's an excerpt from the original story, "Costs soar for computer staff in Civil Service", by David Hencke and Aileen Ballantyne:
The Government has increased five-fold the money spent on employing outside contractors and consultants in the past three years to speed up its huge computerisation programme, according to internal figures obtained by the Guardian.
Spending has risen from pounds 20 million in 1984 to more than pounds 100 million this year to meet a serious shortage of trained staff. The private companies can therefore pay more than pounds 33,000 a year to staff who work alongside civil servants doing the same job for about pounds 11,000 a year.
Sound familiar?
The only thing that seems to have changed is the size of the bill. Back in 1987 eyes rolled at £100m being spent on a government-wide computerisation programme; today we're talking upwards of £12bn just for the NHS.
