Congratulations to GMIS International for 45 terrific years!

By Rick Bareuther, Member Emeritus

April 21, 2016 will mark the 45th birthday for GMIS. On that date in 1971, the first official meeting of the Government Management Information Sciences Users Group took place. Being occupied in high school at the time, I was unable to attend. However, the GMIS History Book tells us what happened.  

The first meeting took place at the Hamilton County, Ohio Regional Computer Center in Cincinnati. Andrews O. Atkinson, Superintendent of the City of Cincinnati/Hamilton County Regional Computer Center hosted the meeting, and 40 representatives from local governments were in attendance. Andy Atkinson wrote, "over the past two years, the City of Cincinnati/Hamilton County Regional Computer Center has conducted almost 200 tours for interested government agencies from all over the United States and ten foreign countries. It has become readily apparent there is a significant gap in the dissemination of research and development work in the area of government information systems. For the past several months, I have contacted some of the agencies that have visited the Center in an attempt to ascertain if there was interest in developing a user’s group dedicated to promote sharing and coordination of technical development in the information systems area." At this first meeting, there were representatives from the states of California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, South Carolina and Wisconsin. From Canada, Montreal, Quebec and Toronto were represented. The attendees were in agreement that a cooperative effort would be beneficial to all. They envisioned the knowledge within the organization could assist other local governments new to electronic data processing in feasibility studies and vendor or consultant selection. This was the start of the Government Management Information Sciences (GMIS) User’s Group.

Andrews O. Atkinson served as the first President of GMIS in 1971-1972, and as the first Executive Director in 1972-1973 and 1973-1974. Andy was unquestionably the "father" of GMIS.

I looked to see if the Hamilton County Regional Computer Center was still in existence. It has a new name – Enterprise Technology Services – but still is in business. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get the City of Cincinnati/Hamilton County back in the GMIS fold? Founders come home?

1986 was when I first became aware of GMIS. Oddly enough, the oldest copy of the GEM Newsletter in our website archive happens to be the February, 1986 issue. Do you recognize the equipment in the masthead? Disk packs and magnetic tape reels may not be familiar. How about cathode ray tubes (CRT’s)?

I had just been hired as the Data Processing Manager for City of Sparks, Nevada. The fellow who had held the job before me emphatically states that GMIS was a great resource and source of ideas.  

It's embarrassing when equipment you worked on is sitting in the HP Computing Museum! This is a HP2645 terminal with an astounding 25 lines x 80 characters. It was connected to an HP3000 minicomputer with HP Deskmanager (in-house email and calendaring) and Visicalc (a Lotus and Excel predecessor) – hot stuff for the time, but not the greatest keyboard in the world.

  

My first introduction to GMIS was the thick continuous form green bar "survey" – an early version of "data dive" done manually. This was a lot of work and I didn’t get the results back for nine months – a printed reference of who had what hardware and software systems plus contact information.

My second introduction to GMIS involved getting assistance from fellow agencies to work with my staff troubleshooting an issue at Sparks Municipal Court. Every afternoon, the Muni Court cash registers would lose their connection to the City Hall HP3000 and crash. The senior Court judge (a crusty old fellow) did not appreciate the interruption in service and let the City Manager’s office know quite loudly about his displeasure on a frequent basis. The City Manager’s office would then let me know about their displeasure after each phone call from the judge. After trying everything we could think of, I happened to mention the problem to a friend at Washoe County MIS (also a member of GMIS). 

The county being a much larger organization was able to loan me several of their telecom staff to track down the problem. With the counties advanced monitoring equipment, we determined that at the time of the crashes, the city installed wire between city hall and the court was experiencing a storm of null characters traveling towards both buildings. This peculiar activity occurred at times of high summer heat, throwing suspicion on an adjacent Power Company substation that did not appear to be grounded sufficiently. Our theory was that as the neighborhood fired up air conditioners that current would bleed from the substation into our communication wire. Of course, the Power Company insisted that everything was perfectly fine. We replaced the city-owned cable with a phone company leased line and the problem went away.  A year later, the city’s traffic engineer arranged for a fiber optic line between City Hall and the Court and the Judge was quite happy (at least on this issue) until he retired. After this affair, I was thoroughly convinced of the value of the GMIS family and remain so now.

 

Once more, happy birthday to GMIS and here’s to many more years of growth and success!