From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for June 6, 1974:

Government officials of Douglas County had taken their first steps into the computer age about two years earlier when they had hired a data processing director and had begun putting real estate taxes on the computer. In late 1974, county taxpayers had received their first computer-generated real estate tax bills, which had arrived a month late and were printed on computer cards. The county was now putting personal property taxes into the system, studying the possibility of expanding computer facilities, and adding more jobs to the computer’s workload. “We are simply outgrowing the manual methods,” Treasurer Edythe Normal said. “We have got to go to a computer.” Both Jim Tate, county data processing director, and Darwin Rogers, county assessor, pointed out that written records still had to be maintained in the assessor’s office. “The assessor has to be responsible to the people,” Rogers said. “The computer does not have to be responsible.” Rogers added that the new system was causing more work, not less, because with the assessor’s office on the second floor of the courthouse, the data processing department in the basement, and the computer at the high school, the information didn’t flow quickly from one point to another. “If we could get information right away, it might be different,” Rogers said, but added he didn’t believe the county could afford computer terminals in every office.