Monday, Nov. 20, 1950
The Country Boy
"The most astounding case of shortsightedness that we have encountered," Texas' Senator Lyndon Johnson called it. Johnson, who heads a watchdog Senate subcommittee in this war similar to one that Senator Harry Truman headed in World War II, was talking about the case of the parallax computers.
One day the War Assets Administration announced that it was stuck with a batch of war surplus aircraft computers and would sell them to the highest bidder. A Texas farmer, who is a former naval officer and likes to shop around for bargains in surplus Government goods, didn't know what the computers were, but assumed they would be like a "cheap slide rule," something he might use on his farm or sell to his neighbors. So he offered to take all 168 of the computers. His bid: slightly less than 5-c- each.
Soon he got word that his bid1 was accepted. Would he please come to San Antonio to pick up his computers? Send them by parcel post, he replied. That, said the Government testily, would be ^ quite impossible--a parallax computer in its crate happens to be a $7,200, 270-lb. electric fire control instrument as big as a bathtub and much too much for a postman. Together, the 168 computers in crates were cluttering up a full acre of Government land.
In that case, replied the surprised farmer, he didn't want the fool things at all. Nothing doing, retorted the Government with the firmness of a man who has landed his sucker and isn't going to throw him back. A contract is a contract.
Gloomily, the farmer shelled out $4,000 to have his $6.89 purchase shipped to his farm. Then he notified the Air Force that if it ever wanted a batch of swell parallax computers, he was their man. Within a few months, the farm was acrawl with Air Force procurement officers; chortling happily over their find, they agreed to pay $63,000 for the computers, which would cost $1,000,000 if ordered new from the manufacturer. Pocketing his $58,993.11 profit, the farmer couldn't help gloating in memory of the way the Government surplus outfit "was delighted to unload what they thought was a heap of junk on an unsuspecting country boy."
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