Last night I went to a 70th birthday party and ended up sitting next to Frank.

Frank used to work as a computer programmer, because this was the 1970s to 90s and people had normal job titles that described real things, instead of "full stack orchestration engineer" or "solutions architect".

Anyway Frank's employer was the Victorian Attorney General's department. He wrote, updated and maintained in-house software for managing the court system, trial documentation managements and so on using low level languages.

The point of this post is that there was nothing special about this period of history that made it possible for government departments to write and maintain their own software to solve their own problems then but not now.

The complete lack of any in-house capacity to do this kind of thing is a political choice. Frank is a reminder of that.