APHIS maintained a database called List of Intercepted Plant Pest (LIPP) that tallied pests found year-by-year during agricultural quarantine inspections.
It was a very useful publication for Plant Protection & Quarantine (PPQ) Officers as you could search by scientific name of pest or plant host, cargo type, origin, port of entry, class (insect, snails, diseases, etc.), and incidence. So, it was a handy tool for targeting what pests to look for and for identifying the pest found.
Unfortunately, the publication of LIPP was discontinued. The LIPP was computerized using a mainframe and somewhere along the way, the system crashed.
In 1980, APHIS tested out the use of a “dumb” terminal with an acoustic coupler that allowed 12 ports of entry to share interception findings “real-time”. Data entry was by text in free format and best kept short because connections over phone lines were poor. There were no notifications back then. The terminal had a built-in printer so you could print off messages received. This was a handy tool because ships visited multiple ports and frequently carried the same cargoes, so interceptions found at one port led to additional finds at other ports. It was a short-lived pilot as the service was somewhat expensive.
In 1982, I headed up the first computerized sharing of pest data among 16 transmitting States. This expanded to 46 States the following year. States initially transmitted data at 120-300 baud to the USDA mainframe, then upped their game transmitting at 1200, 2400, and higher. Computers consisted of 1st generation desktops (Apple or PCs 8088s) to mainframes. This program evolved into the Cooperative Agricultural Pest Survey (CAPS) at a later date.
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