Prodesp - the state of Sao Paulo, computed

Prodesp was created on 24 July 1969 by State Decree 137 and began operating that October with two employees, no equipment, and a borrowed room in the Finance Secretariat building in central Sao Paulo. Its first premises of its own, in 1970, were a three-storey house in Ponte Pequena.

The first machine was an IBM 360/65 costing around nine million dollars, and the first job, in July 1970, was the state payroll - then 290,000 employees. The distance between those two facts and the two people in a borrowed room the previous year is the whole character of state computing in that era: the institution was improvised and the workload was not optional.

What followed is a tension every large estate eventually meets. While consolidating physically into a new headquarters at Taboao da Serra, the company deliberately decentralised its operation - a regional centre at Bauru, dedicated units for public security and for the teaching hospital, and its first teleprocessing services. The equipment estate more than doubled between 1987 and 1989, and the State Data Processing Network put regional computing centres in Campinas, Bauru, Presidente Prudente and Ribeirao Preto.

The reason to record that is that it happened for reasons of geography and politics rather than architecture. Sao Paulo state is larger than most countries, the interior needed service, and the country was democratising at the same time. Centralise the building and distribute the processing is a decision most enterprises reach much later and usually describe as an innovation. In 2021 Prodesp absorbed the Imprensa Oficial, an institution with 130 years of its own history.