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A long time ago, in a library far, far away, our consultant, well known for his guru status as knowledgeable about matters computer, suggested that computers were so easy to operate that we could get our custodian to turn it on in the morning so that everything would be running by the time the rest of the staff arrived. In terms of systems setup, it was a matter of having a team arrive for a week or so to hook everything up, teach us where the on and off buttons were located, and leave us from that moment forward to lives of data processing bliss.
About that time I talked with Jim Speight, president of Ulisys, a software company that has come and gone, about the same issues. He said they had sold a system to a small library where the librarian who was assigned to computer duty had burst into tears, sobbing that she couldn't handle all this newfangled computer stuff. So Jim's partner sat down and apparently wrote a large script file that automated some of the procedures. From then on Ulisys billed itself as offering a "turnkey solution." Walk into the computer room. Turn the key. Walk out.
I don't remember the old Geac 8000 system as being exactly "turnkey:' In fact, I remember a lot of batch files, liberator cards, and programs to compile in languages such as "Zopl" (acronym for "our programming language" with a Z in front of it to make it sound cool). There were also numerous tapes to back up, transfers to initiate between databases, and quite an arcane system of buttons to push to get the original Deep Thought to boot up.
Those old systems, then, were never turnkey. Today, in our more modem age at the dawn of the new millennium, you can pretty well forget the idea that there ever will be turnkey systems. Compared to today, our old systems were simple! Today it's not so much a matter of them being more complex, but that there is a proliferation of them. We once had one set of programs to worry about. We used to have Circ (Circulation), Marc (Marc Record Management System), Cat (Online Catalog), and Dog (we split the catalog into two...