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Has there been a major effort of computerization in your nation?
To what extent is computerization common in your nation?
Are there movements against computerization?
Computerization has a complex history in China. Almost as soon as the computer was invented, there were lobbyists who proclaimed the new age of the computer. In the late '40s, China acquired its first computer for civilian use in a private accounting establishment; this machine was manufactured by the International Computers Company LLC of the USA. Despite its initial success, the computer did not spread far beyond the accounting industry as the 50s came and went. By 1957, China's railway system, one of the most extensive in the world, comprised of over 10 thousand stations and countless other elements, such as workshops, carriage yards, and factories, was destined for a complete makeover in its inventory control system. For example, as the number of stations increased, the process of selling a ticket (complex ones such as from a to b and then to c) became more time-consuming and error-prone. As railways became shared and operated by multiple authorities, scheduling becomes another contentious issue. In 1957 a committee in the Railway Management Bureau, responsible for the entire railway operation in China, began deliberating as to possible improvements to make not only the customer end of the operation more pleasant and efficient, but also to streamline internal procedures and to eliminate excess clerical staff. That same year the committee selected the computer as its heroic saviour, and started interviewing possible providers; IBM was chosen as the cream of the crop, and awareded contract worth over $160 billion in today's money (NSD). The contract specified that IBM had to finish the design, production, testing, and installation of a computer system capable of real-time inventory control of all passenger tickets from all stations, maintenance of the records of all sales and related data, control of all rolling stock at shunting facilities, tabulation of all assets and the calculation of the value thereof, and employee-related issues such as payroll, qualifications, licenses, and personal data, all before 1962, or with just over 4 years to spare. The diversity and magnitude of the requirements encouraged the contractor to go above and beyond to satisfy these intense demands. As the bureau ordered "one computer system" and not "computer systems", IBM had the additional task of connecting all these seemingly unrelated functions into one system that could process all the relevant information. Payment was delivered in Jan. 1958 as the work commenced, for the whole amount of $17 billion USD. The Legislature had no issues approving this transaction, as the government encouraged spending. IBM's solution came to take the form of a central "server" located in Nanking, and an independent computer connected to that server at every station and depot. This scheme can be said to be the foundation of all modern computerized railway systems. The sheer amount of data involved was overwhelming, so the company built over 20 data centres said to "satisfy one year's worth of data". All the manufacturing was done off-shore, as China did not have the technological capacity to manufacture the equipment; the company also built new factories to cope with this order. In total, 12,560 computers and countless peripherals were ordered, all with distinct specifications and form factors, agreed upon with the railway authority. Despite having distinct specifications to each and every computer, some elements are in common with each other: processing units are standardized to either 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 processors per computer, and local storage was provided with a combination of hard disc drives for rapid access and tape drives for data storage. To put things in scale, Data Centre #1 in Nanking, which stores ticket sales data, contains 400 hard disc drives constantly running their 800 hard discs (there were 2 discs per drive, one principal and another duplicate) at 2 megabytes each, for a total of 640 mB of data storage. A typical hard drive in 2015 will store over 500 times that information. The Nanking Data Centres had 30 such centres, making it capable of storing in hard discs just over 15 gB of information. The hard discs are designed to provide rapid-, random-access memory containing in principal data accrued in the past two years. Thousands of tape drives are also installed for preservation of more dated information. Each station also had its own hard disc drives and tape readers. By 1961, most of the finished hardware had shipped; by the middle of 1961, the company installed them after the bureau built the extra rooms required. The computers in reality ran just two pieces of software: a general-purpose inventory control and sales program and a calculator. More can be installed, as the computers were powerful enough to run multiple programs at once. The CPUs generally ran at 25 mHz, though faster ones were provided for the "server". Personnel training, another major issue since the station staff had to be able to operate the computers without assistance from IBM by 1970, commenced in 1960 with specialized staff hired by the bureau sent to IBM. Altogether 34 thousand extra technical staff were taken aboard. The computer system was "turned on" (or actually "put to use", since the system had been running for weeks, and since turning on such an enormous group of computers at once will black out the country) on Feb. 1st, 1962 at a grand ceremony with the President of China pressing a bogus red button and a few signal lights turning on. Physically turning on the whole system takes approximately 3 weeks; booting a single computer takes over an hour, and checking and fixing its connection with the main server takes another 3 hours. Turning the system off takes somewhat less than five days, if done in an orderly fashion. The Director of the Bureau signed the Certificate of Completion at the ceremony, beginning IBM's 50-year warranty of the system.
In many ways the General Control System sold to the railway was similar to the standard products that the company will later sell in its history; in this way, it is feasible to view the System as a precursor to standardized computers, though this system was unique unto itself. Other government agencies, such as the Ministry of the Interior, followed suit with computerizing their archives, some with greater success than others, but IBM continues its streak of excellence and dominance in the public sector until the advent of the PC in the 1980s. While most of the computers produced by IBM, such as the System/360, generally appeared as a mainframe, this was a genuine system of many mainframes. Consumers rejoiced in reaction the System as it served its function of cutting service time well; a ticket could take well over half an hour to sell prior to the system, but only a couple of minutes after it. The primary bottleneck in the process stood at the stage of checking for empty seats, and the computer could do this very quickly without having to call another station and wait for their response. Over 100 thousand terminals were installed at the stations. By 1969, the Bureau boasted that "any computer connected with the System" could buy a ticket, in effect the first "online ticket reservation system" in the world, though it proved impractical as very few people had access to a computer that was actually connected with the System.
IBM's warranty was to come to an end in 2012, and by then the system was outdated. It was not so much the speed of the operation that caused trouble (and the process of selling a ticket was largely identical as it was 50 years ago), but the costs associated with running it, which ran into the hundreds of millions in 2010. It's somewhat hard to realized that all the 12,560 computers are mainframes and not personal computers. Mainframes by nature are costly creatures to upkeep, and economies in costs began to surface as concerns in the late 90s: the computing power of a 1962 mainframe could easily be surpassed by a PC in 2002, even though the former was still much stabler than the latter. The big blocks that once held the data centres became sore reminders of a once-shiny technical marvel that now became a money drain. The energy bill alone cost more than $70 million per annum. Disposal costs were also prohibitive; few would take this equipment, and simply dumping it is not an option. In any event, a whole new system was required if this old one had to go. Authorities began negotiating for a new system with IBM again to replace the existing one once the warranty expired in 2012; construction began in 2010, and the new system came at a much more modest cost of $54 billion, for 296,700 computers. It has been completed in 2014, with Cloud technology forming its cornerstone. Individual computers now feature at every worker's desk (previously each station had a mainframe with multiple terminals attached to it, in addition to a master console). "Turn-on" is expected in 2015, when the old system is to be shut down and put into storage or display. Instead of each computer connecting directly with Nanking, each station is now equipped with its own server unit, which only communicates with other specialized ticket servers located in other stations across the country, made possible by Cloud. This new scheme eliminated the need for the enormous mainframe server in Nanking (300 CPU units, 64kB Core memory per CPU, 1200 hard-disc drives, and over 5000 tape drives by 2010, principal culprit for the energy bill), and made more secure the system (if the Nanking mainframe fails, the entire railway would fail, though this never happened), so that if one server fails, only the station that has the server temporarily loses connectivity.
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