The British and American governments do not have a monopoly in wasting money on computer systems, and the Japanese government’s Audit Board has rapped the National Diet Library and Construction Ministry for wasting around $2.6m on a computer system developed jointly by the library, the Construction Ministry, Sumitomo Densetsu, NEC Corp and Nippon Shingo Co for automating library borrowing: delivered in July 1986, the system linked 27 terminals using optical fiber communications and was designed to track the library’s books – but was found to be incapable of keeping up with a daily average of 2,000 users, and was finally thrown out altogether last August.
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