ICTworks by Inveneo

I am Alice Liu and was working in the technology sector in California when I became interested in international development. I made the transition in 2005 and entered the development sector and that is when my mom told me that her first job out of college was to work as a keypunch operator in Taiwan, to enter data for an agriculture survey for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). She worked there from March 1961 to December 1963 and moved up from keypunch operator to supervisor/trainer.

Recently I decided to try and track down information about the agriculture survey project because I wanted to nail down the timeframes and whether USAID was really involved. My mother suggested checking IBM’s web site because it might say when IBM established its office in Taiwan. Bullseye – the keywords “Taiwan history” immediately turned up this photo of an ox cart pulling an IBM punch card machine, confirming part of my mom’s story:

"The ox and IBM customer engineers were photographed in 1963 while assisting the Council for United States Aid in relocating its data processing center to a new site on Roosevelt Road in Taipei."

I shared this with my mom and she remembered the day of this move and more. Below are her recollections mostly in her own words (edited a bit for organization and clarification), followed by additional information I found on the early history of US economic aid to Taiwan and how computers were a part of Taiwan’s economic development strategy.

Recollections on IBM data processing work in early 1960’s Taiwan

When I started in March 1961 the Data Processing Division occupied a smaller two story building about two miles away from the new Roosevelt site, a brand new five-story building that we, the Council for United States Aid (CUSA or Mei Yuan Hui) Data Processing Division, occupied. Mei Yuan Hui was a Taiwan government organization set up specifically to coordinate with the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) a predecessor organization to USAID.

Due to the short distance, the loading and unloading of a big moving truck was considered wasteful. Also in those days there were no real moving companies as we know them here in the US, with big trucks, and the city streets were narrow. Therefore the inexpensive ox carts were used to move the IBM equipment one piece at a time during that move.

I remember they did the move on a weekend. We were disappointed that we did not get a day off. To call it "mobile computing" is not accurate. But it is still a very interesting historical picture.

Human and Computer Resources Used for Agriculture Survey

We were hired for the huge Taiwan island-wide agriculture survey project. It took 16 keypunch machines two shifts (soon they added a second shift from 5 PM to 11 PM), and about 18 months to complete all the data input. After moving to the new five-story building on Roosevelt Rd using those ox carts, we had more room and increased the keypunch machines to 24. We had a whole room just to store those 80 column IBM keypunch cards. We must have killed a million trees.

Recruitment of Key Punch Operators

The job became highly competitive because the pay CUSA offered was much higher then other jobs in Taiwan at that time. For example, this CUSA job paid twice as much as my sister’s registered nurse (RN) pay. The recruitment flyer required only high school graduation; instead many college graduates applied, myself included. To narrow down the candidates, CUSA required the candidates to take an all-day test of aptitude (logic problems) and English. Out of 400 applicants, only 16 were selected.

Interestingly when I came to Boston in January 1964, the keypunch jobs paid only half the salary of an RN in Boston. Alas! How different it was on the two sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Other Computing Projects for Taiwanese Development

CUSA was one of IBM's early major clients. Several other large Taiwan government organizations were IBM's clients at the same time. After the Agriculture Survey, CUSA did data input work for the Taiwan Petroleum Company and Taiwan Electric Company. Taiwan was also creating a personal income tax system at that time. The CUSA keypunch operators were involved in data input of the government's income tax testing pilot program. Grandpa served as a consultant for the Ministry of Economic Affairs (a cabinet level government organization) specifically on the creation of the personal income tax system.

One other interesting project I want to mention was preparing for the creation of the property tax system. We had to enter data about every property, be it an office building, a factory, a house, an apartment, a mansion, a hole in the wall.... We entered data such as owner's name, address, room numbers, bathroom numbers, square footage and such. You wouldn't believe the problems we had. The IBM machines were not designed to input Chinese characters.

We had a huge coding section, occupying the entire fifth floor. What they did was to code each Chinese character into a series of numbers, say character "LIU" becomes 30659, and character "WU" becomes 752043, etc. There was a system for the coders to follow but it was extremely cumbersome! Imagine, a street address may involve 12 or more Chinese characters, then the coder will turn that address into more than 100 numeric digits for us keypunch operators to enter. They were still working on this when I left.

These are just a few that I can remember. But they are all part of promoting Taiwan economic development. And all, at least my pay, were funded by US economic aid and executed by CUSA.

Early history of US economic aid to Taiwan and ICT in Taiwan’s development strategy

Alice again here. My Google searching to understand if USAID or a predecessor organization was behind this led me to an article from the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, "Cold War Politics: Taiwanese Computing in the 1950s and 1960s", which mentions the agricultural survey and provides more background on the historical context and the first mainframes to arrive in Taiwan, funded by the US government and the United Nations. Below are a couple of excerpts:

Keeping records of the US funds and surplus agricultural commodities to Taiwan was a laborious task for both the US and Taiwanese agencies, such as the Taipei office of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), which was the predecessor of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Council for United States Aid (CUSA), which worked under the Taiwanese government to manage US aid.

The arrival of Taiwan’s first two mainframe computers stemmed from development projects in Taiwan. Beginning in the late 1950s, both Taiwanese technocrats and engineering graduates from pre-WWII Chiao-Tung University in China faithfully believed that introducing Taiwan to cutting edge expertise on electronics and digital computers would strengthen the development of an industrial sector, such as an electronics industry, in Taiwan, which had a chiefly agricultural economy at that time.

My mom shared her memories with me because it is a part of our family’s history, but I thought others involved in ICT4D would be able to relate to this bit of history as well so I’m sharing this story here on this blog. I hope you enjoyed learning about this early example of ICT for development as much as I did.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) plans to open 10 new offices in Africa, bringing its total locations on the continent to 35 by 2015 as it starts operations in Senegal, Tanzania and Angola.

“Africa today is the new market for IBM,” said Mamadou Ndiaye, director general of IBM Senegal.

The company has invested $300 million in new Africa operations since 2006, he said in an interview in Dakar May 13. By 2015, the world’s biggest computer-services provider expects to operate in at least 23 countries on the continent, said Gary Carroll, IBM’s general manager of Africa Geo-Expansion.

IBM, based in Armonk, New York, also wants to tap into Africa’s growing mobile-banking market by working with telecommunications companies on the continent, as it expects spending on information technology to expand 47 percent to $12.5 billion by 2015, according to a statement.

In Senegal, IBM is vying for contracts to improve management of the nation’s energy grid, said Ndiaye. It currently runs a customs-collection monitoring system at Senegal’s borders, he said.

IBM fell 64 cents to $169.28 at 2:21 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares had climbed 16 percent this year before today.

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Are you an IT professional? Do you rock at your work? Then you might think about moving up to the big leagues - as Business Daily reports, big name companies are hiring.

The companies have embarked on a massive recruitment drive in Africa in search of new growth opportunities in the ICT sector.

Over 100 vacancies are currently open at high tech firms such as IBM, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, promising to increase focus on the African talent pool in coming months. Among the firms that are aggressively pursuing talent are IBM and Google, who are collectively seeking to fill over 60 vacancies. Other firms such as Oracle and Microsoft seek to strengthen their existing position on the continent, while relative new-comers such as Internet advertising firm InMobi are on a quest to deepen their presence regionally with management expertise.

Facebook, the most successful social media network that currently has over 27.4 million African users, is recruiting a Growth Manager for Africa who will be based in either Kenya or Nigeria. Research carried out by Business Daily indicates that the companies are mostly seeking personnel with strengths in business development, marketing and sales, as well as those with technical skills who can tweak the products that the firms offer to suit the African landscape.

Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria are attracting the most demand for talent, with two thirds of vacancies required to fill posts in Nairobi, Cape Town and in Lagos; cementing the three countries status as technological hubs on the continent.

Historically, there have been numerous initiatives targeting the creation of "computers for the poor," but the quest for such devices has been an elusive one.

Arguably, the original "low-cost PC" was IBM's PCjr, which was launched in 1983 with much fanfare, including a magazine devoted to coverage of it even before its actual release. The product led to a wave of clones, some fairly successful, including the Tandy 1000, though it did not itself succeed in the market due to design issues.

Low-cost innovation

This first low-cost computer was not intended as a "computer for the poor," but was instead an attempt to extend the range of people having access to computers—in this case, from businesses to home users - by drastically reducing device costs.

The second wave of low-cost PCs came in the early days of the World Wide Web. Products such as the Net PC were conceptualized (Russel, 1997), but never made it to widespread production, because the 1990s saw such rapid decline in PC prices that a low enough threshold for a "computer for the poor," as then imagined, could be attained by the market without any need to innovate. Back then, a $500 computer seemed like a quantum leap (Neugass, 1996), and most attention on the cost minimizing side was directed toward optimizing the thin client architecture (Gaw, Marsh et al., 1998).

This was, in some sense, understandable because of the dramatic drop in computer prices through most of that period. Yet the computer industry remained profitable due, quite simply, to the increase in the number of families in the developed world that annually became new consumers of home computers through this period (Bresnahan & Malerba, 1999). We argue that, on the business side, it was partly the normalization of demand through the developed world that expanded the interest of major companies in developing products for emerging markets.

We also contend that a complementary argument for the rise in thinking around low-cost PCs tailored for the developing world came with the liberalization of several economies around the globe, where major PC manufacturers found strong competition from local non-branded PC assemblers (Dedrick, Kraemer et al., 2001).

This new wave of devices aimed to concurrently deal with what we see as three related, but sufficiently separate issues. The first, and most emphasized, was the reduction of the device cost. The second was the creation of form factors and functionalities specific to usage in developing countries, accounting for the lack of urbanization and infrastructure.

This second factor was, at times, equated with building robust machines that withstood harsh weather, dust, and poor quality power, often gleaning inspiration from wearable computers for combat situations (Zieniewicz, Johnson et al., 2002). The third factor was that of "usage appropriateness," including issues related to literacy, cultural appropriateness, and social norms of resource sharing.

Simputer

The pioneer in this most recent wave was the Simputer project that originated in 1998. The Simputer, or "Simple Inexpensive Multilingual Computer," (Chandru, Deshpande et al., 2001) aimed to address these three sets of issues. The device was sold at a considerably lower price point of US$200 compared to the average computer cost of US$1,000 on the market at the time, even though it was originally envisioned to cost as little as US$100. The Simputer attempted to work across the range of issues in building for developing regions: it had a damage-resistant casing; a plastic cover for dusty and hot weather; large, sturdy buttons for rough use; and an entirely new visual and input interface.

The Simputer group put a significant effort into developing an intuitive UI with an OS interface designed with the needs of users new to technology and textual interfaces in mind. The Simputer featured icon-based screens and speech synthesis capability and was intended to be easily shared, with an individual ºash card for each user.

The Simputer did not do very well in the market, for reasons we discuss later, but another project, with a somewhat orthogonal strategy toward providing low-cost computers, was taking shape in Brazil around the same time. Both projects came from academia in respective countries and were built with a Linux backbone to reduce the cost of the OS. Unlike the Simputer, the Computador Popular (CP) had very little device-level innovation.

In fact, the CP was nothing more than a plain, stripped down version of a PC running Linux, but the project was more important for a different reason: it was the first project within the ICTD space to actively seek government intervention to subsidize the cost of personal computers through reduced taxes and loans. This device was to be priced at US$300.

Private Industry Innovation

By the turn of the millennium, there was a burst of projects in this same arena for a number of reasons (cited above) as reflected in the entry of big tech companies into this space (Collins, 2007). Arguably, many of these tech companies departed slightly from their core businesses and competencies to try their hand at selling new devices in new markets, often with the unusual business model of designing products meant for markets that could not buy the products themselves.

Instead, they had to be sold through institutional buyers, such as governments, philanthropies, or international agencies. Oracle had a brief brush with the "New Internet Computer" (started around 2000 and abandoned around 2003), which was priced roughly at US$199. Chip manufacturer Via Technologies designed a low-cost box-PC similar to the AMD PIC1 at a price point of approximately US$250. Intel, AMD's chief competitor, had its Community PC project and Classmate along with a collaborative project in China called the Beijing Rural PC.

HP experimented with the 441 device, with a changed Linux kernel to support four keyboards and screens from a single processor, and priced at approximately US$1,200 for the entire unit. This attempt was abandoned, along with its parent e-inclusion program, in 2005, although the technology has lived on in products such as the "Useful Desktop Multiplier." Recently, NComputing released the X300 that uses low-cost access terminals connected over Ethernet to share a single PC with up to seven users, eventually hitting a price point of US$200 for three users, excluding monitors and peripherals.

A quick survey of ICTD projects shows that over 50 projects in the past 10 years have attempted to create low-cost computers for developing regions, a large chunk of them small companies assembling PCs in the BRIC nations, featuring brands like Fulong Mini-PC, and E-DUC, Sirius, and SofComp, as well as more rugged products such as the SuperGenius Bharat PC, which, like the AMDPIC, was built to withstand rough use.

An unlikely constituent of the low-cost PC market was the NGO world, with a number of experiments like the pedal-powered Jhai PC, and social entrepreneurship ventures like Inveneo that again straddled the space between being outright market products and external funding-dependent development projects.

One Laptop Per Child

Probably the most discussed project, and arguably the one with the largest expectations, is the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. Also originally known as the $100 laptop, or more recently the XO-1, the current price of the device is about US$208, but is expected to decrease with volume.

This device, the brainchild of some of the leading scientists of the MIT Media Labs, is an inexpensive, low-power laptop designed for harsh conditions in developing countries and intended for distribution to children around the developing world. In many ways, the OLPC has come to exemplify the inexpensive computer space, but not just because of its charismatic promoter, Nicholas Negroponte, and the history of the Media Lab behind it.

Much of the media attention focused on the project, plus its high-profile approach (of negotiating sales primarily with heads of government), made it somewhat of an exemplar of a project within the ICTD space. The OLPC project was in the news for impressive technological innovation as much as for its approach of recommending individualized laptops as a means of better learning for children in the poorest parts of the world, a position that was sometimes at odds with some of the most influential commentators in this area, including Bill Gates himself (Kraemer, Dedrick, et al., 2007).

The idea behind the OLPC simultaneously raised hopes and criticisms; partner organizations frequently came and went (both Intel and Microsoft have, at different times, been supporters and opponents), and their participation frequently raised eyebrows.

This is an excerpt from the research article, "The Case of the Occasionally Cheap Computer: Low-cost Devices and Classrooms in the Developing World"

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Wayan Vota

Inveneo

Wayan Vota is a technology expert focused on appropriate information and communication technologies (ICT) for rural and underserved areas of the developing world. He is a Senior Director at Inveneo and is the editor of ICTworks

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