A Brief History of the Pick Environment in Australia - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 152

applications development lead time to be about 4 years. The inability of centralized DP
departments to provide satisfactory service levels (sic) led to local “Departmental”
solutions leveraging off the emergence of the new mini-computers. Many of these so-
lutions were sourced from enterprising companies who could see the need for bureaus,
a service that companies or Departments could buy to solve pressing IT problems.
3.4 Microcomputers and Applications
Visicalc 7 empowered the accounting fraternity with the ability to create complex
budgets and perform “what if” scenarios. This released accountants from the control
of their DP groups and mainframe-based computer financial models and gave them
the independence to plan, model and forecast without the constant DP engagement.
The word processor and “Windows” desktops heralded workstation ubiquity and
the death of the beloved typing pool and the start of end-user computing. The “elec-
tronic office” was coined and a “paperless office” was promised.
3.5 The Internet
The second thing after PCs and VisiCalc was international data communications, Usenet
and email. In hindsight this event created the birth of the global village. By subscribing
to your local ISP of the time you could plug into the wisdom of thousands of savants
and exchange electronic mail with them and others instantly. Back in the 1980's some
quite serious problems could be tackled by joining the appropriate user group and taking
a few tentative steps in asking for help. Like today's Wikipedia and Web2.0 the news-
groups were dominated by the loudest and most shrill voices and those with the most
apparent authority. It is not surprising then that many vendors spent considerable budget
ensuring that their message was being received loud and clear.
3.6 Point and Click Paradigm
In the middle 1990's the web browser was invented to take advantage of something
called hypertext and HTML became the way to browse online information. A pleas-
antly crafted windows environment with mouse-based point and click browsing be-
came the dominant paradigm for interacting with the now ubiquitous desktop PC and
MAC. New forms of data entry exploded with radio buttons, pull down menus, check
boxes, and of course hyperlinks, all driven by the mouse as the locating tool.
Products such as Visual Basic, “Powerbuilder” and “Oracle Forms” enabled this
windows paradigm to be extended into database interaction and transaction processing
environments. So it thus became the dominant user interface paradigm - windows,
point and click, buttons, boxes and pull-downs, an entire event driven environment.
HTML extended it to include hyperlinks.
3.7 Australian SMEs
Because of simple scale factors, Australia had a lot of small to medium enterprises
(SMEs) for whom mainframe solutions were inappropriate and who might have
7 And later and more ubiquitous was LOTUS-123.