Is the U.S. Government Still Rocking HP TouchPads?

WebOS lives on, apparently, at the U.S. General Services Administration.

Last month, Web designer Allan Lasser of MuckRock, a portal for aggregating government data, filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking for all of the models of computer that "have been" and "are currently in use" at the GSA. (The GSA buys all of the stuff for the civilian divisions of our government.)

The results came back a few days ago, and were posted to MuckRock. (I heard of this via "Taylor Swift.") By and large, the GSA's purchases are pretty much like any large enterprise: a slew of Dell Latitudes and OptiPlexes, as well as some MacBooks for people who, you know, like that sort of thing.

The list includes Dell Inspiron 1100 laptops from 2003, but it isn't clear whether those are currently in use or merely have beens. If they're still being used, some (probably extremely frustrated) bureaucrat really deserves an award for being super thrifty with the purchasing budget over the past decade or so.

There are a few amazing mysteries in the list, though.

• The GSA bought HP TouchPads, HP's failed WebOS tablet, which was only on sale for a few months in 2011.
• It bought the Android 2.2-powered Dell Streak 7. Maybe it came free with purchase of 10,000 laptops?
• It bought multiple Windows tablets dating back to 2007, but no iPads until the iPad Air.

What the heck were (are?) the feds using the TouchPads for? Who knows, but for a trip down memory lane, check out the video below.