When Brian Welch CMIOSH, founder of On Safe Lines QHSE Software, began his career in OSH in the 1990s, there were very few environment, health and safety (EHS) software systems that could collect, manipulate, process and retrieve data efficiently. ‘It was still a paper-based approach, and the software systems available were expensive,’ he recalls.
They also took up time and were cumbersome to operate, as Bridget Leathley CFIOSH notes. Back in the mid-1990s, Bridget – who is now a health and safety consultant, writer and trainer at The Safer Choice – reviewed software sent to her on floppy disk for Health and Safety at Work magazine, starting with Croner’s electronic Health and Safety at Work for Windows.
Looking back, Bridget remembers the painstaking process of loading the disks and the amount of memory needed on her PC to run them. ‘When these systems started, they were all on a desktop computer and there was no ability to do anything mobile,’ she says. Continue reading the full article on IOSH (page 45) >>
