Poor By Design

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It would seem from today's i that the Post Office's 'Capture' software, which preceded the disastrous 'Horizon' software with similarly dire results, brings to mind some software I came across decades ago, the exact purpose of which I've long forgotten, but which ran on a little Epson - the first true laptop computer  - the HX-20, which came out in 1981. It was truly a lovely bit of kit, if limited in capability by today's standards, or even those of the day, to be honest. However, it was genuinely laptop-sized, occupying the footprint of an A4 sheet of paper, which was utterly remarkable for the year.

Data and programs could be stored on a tape drive using micro-cassettes, and it had a dinky little cash-register or calculator style dot matrix printer using narrow roll paper, from which you could output your program data or even dump the code of the program itself (written in BASIC: the Beginners' All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, one of the most used - and abused - programming languages in the history of computing) for review. The keyboard was fantastic: a proper, mechanical keyboard that was a joy to use, the printer, much feted in reviews, worked well, but the tiny LCD screen was a bit of a limitation.

The purpose of the software in question, as I say I've now forgotten, or even which organisation it was that was demonstrating it to us, but whatever it was and by whomever, it was being touted by its owners as a revolutionary tool for whatever purpose that they'd spent thousands on commissioning it for. Anyway, at some point I got curious about what was under the hood that had cost so much, and whilst no-one was looking, I dumped the program listing to the printer and pocketed the copious ribbon of paper that the little machine output, for later review.

I seem to remember we were looking into making use of one of these machines and the software, which would have had significant cost implications at the time. What I found in the code dump enabled me to decide, even at a glance, that no way were we going to go near the thing at any price. It was one enormously long string of badly-formed BASIC with no subroutines, just GOTOs. In other words, it had been cobbled together by someone with extremely limited programming experience, and certainly no software architecture design knowledge. In short, a pig's ear that could not be guaranteed to function correctly over time, or produce consistent and reliable data output.

The point of this frustratingly incomplete reminiscence of mine is that similar coding methodologies lay at the heart - on a massively larger scale, admittedly, but the principles remain the same - of The Post Office scandal. Badly written and incompletely tested software was released into the wild as finished and complete onto an unsuspecting, and unfortunately for them, captive, audience of sub-postmasters, with the results we see today. No one is saying that writing software, particularly at scale, is easy - it isn't - but there are genuinely, highly-trained professionals out there who can and do highly professional work and who produce properly produced and maintained code, used at all levels of society every day. Cut costs and employ cowboys; refuse to admit you have the problems that inevitably follow, and pursue false legal claims as a result of those problems, and you end up where The Post Office and its sorely travailed franchisees find themselves today.

Not good, and completely avoidable if everyone in this world were skilled and qualified to recognised levels: openly and provably in the case of state or quasi-corporate procurement in particular. Similar levels of provable eligibility should be applied to the procurers themselves, and budget should never be the sole deciding factor in choosing a contractor - although, in the case of 'Capture', unlike 'Horizon', the work was apparently completed 'in-house'. I would hazard a guess, knowing the way these former state-owned communications institutions work these days, e.g in this case, the former General Post Office, now sundered into the atomic parts of The Post Office, Royal Mail, BT & Openreach, it was probably farmed out to some middle-order minions with little or no talent or qualification to do the work, to save money.

Lard this sorry attitude with corporate hubris, maximising shareholder dividend, bonuses and line-management, and you have the kind of perfect storm that is writ large in our crumbling society today. Incompetence, insouciance and unaccountability seem to be the main characteristics of just about everyone involved at government and corporate level today, and we are now reaping our just bloody desserts for the complacency we've shown in allowing ourselves to be led by the noses by these charlatans to where we find ourselves today: a poor and sadly broken country. 

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