42-year-old federal ban on commercial home knitting—an issue of interest
to companies considering telecommuting. Unions were fighting for the
ban; the Reagan administration, for courts to overturn it.[71] Perhaps
the Reaganites would want _no_ restrictions on corporate use of
telecommuters, which is unfortunate considering the opportunities for
electronic sweatshops, of which the sleazy will certainly want to avail
themselves. Ideally, either (1) I’m wrong about the Reaganites or (2)
future administrations will take a more enlightened attitude.
Footnote 71:
In November 1984 the Labor Department released a rule that allowed
people to knit sweaters and hats at home for sale to manufacturers.
Telecommuting also has energy implications—good ones. With widespread
telecommuting, oil price increases would no longer be so scary if
another energy crisis threatened the United States.
Jack Nilles once calculated that the typical computer terminal uses less
than 125 watts, and a phone line takes up no more than a watt. Then he
matched those figures against a private automobile’s typical energy use
during commutes, and he found that telecommuting would have a
twenty-nine-to-one energy advantage. Compared to mass transit systems
loaded to capacity—a rarity in most American cities—it would still enjoy
two-to-one superiority. With ten million telecommuters, the country
might save three-quarters of a billion gallons of gasoline a year.[72]
Footnote 72:
Nilles’s three-quarters of a billion estimate is reported in
_InfoWorld_, April 23, 1984.
“At least in the United States,” notes Richard Harkness, “commuting
accounts for 35 percent of all auto and truck fuel consumption.” Much,
maybe even most, of the thirty-five percent would be trips to jobs
convertible to telecommuting.[73]
Footnote 73:
Harkness’s remarks are from his speech to the Seminar on
Communications, Brasilia, Brazil, June 1982.
Ticking off statistics, Harkness illustrates the profligacy of American
energy consumption. “The average U.S. worker commutes about twenty miles
each day. Eighty-four percent of those commutes are by automobile, 65
percent with only the driver. Two hundred and twenty million Americans
consume 18 million barrels of oil per day, roughly 30 percent of the
world’s supply.” He also notes the cost of America maintaining forty
thousand miles of superhighways and 4 million miles of streets and
roads. “It has been estimated,” says Harkness, “that 248,500 U.S.
bridges need major repairs at a cost of $47 billion.”
And beyond the energy and financial prices, what about the psychological
ones? Even part-time telecommuters can greatly reduce the stress on
their nerves and schedules, perhaps lowering medical costs for society.
“An employee who drives an hour to work would save sixteen hours in
commuting time each month, or the equivalent of two eight-hour workdays,
by working at home two days a week,” says Frank W. Schiff, a Washington
economist.[74]
Footnote 74:
Frank Schiff, _Washington Post_, Outlook Section, September 2, 1979,
p. C1.
Even battle-scarred urbanites with short commutes might relish the
chance to work at home two days out of five. Skyscrapers and their
occupants keep hogging downtowns, aggravating congestion and tension;
and a taxi trip of just a dozen blocks in New York City can take a half
an hour at lunchtime.
In Houston, meanwhile, some gun-toting commuters are literally murdering
each other, saying in effect: “Your right of way or your life!” Jon
Verboon, a _Houston Chronicle_ reporter who has worked the police beat,
told me, “It’s not uncommon for shots to be exchanged between motorists
who are hacked off at each other”—sometimes over right of ways. An
accident needn’t have occurred.
Motorists killed more conventionally on the way to work, of course, are
a hefty percentage of the fifty thousand yearly highway fatalities. But
how could a telecommuter die? Electrocution? Cutting his wrists on a
broken video tube? Forgetting about the rather unlikely radiation
risks—which flat screens would reduce if these dangers existed—computers
needn’t be lethal like cars.
By converting to telecommuting, then, companies in the end might save
employees’ lives as well as energy and money.
Firms making the transition would do well to consider what will be in
the data base into which the telecommuters would tap. The range of
requirements is as wide as the range of business activities. A good data
base for telecommuters, however, isn’t that different from the ones that
some managers are already using by way of terminals on site. Here are
the traits:
1. Ease and speed of use. You needn’t be a computer expert or wrestle
with inconveniences like dialing fifteen-digit numbers to reach the
main computer. The system explains itself on screen if you want it to,
though experienced users can switch off the menus when they’re ready.
You ideally don’t have to wade through an instruction manual. The
system tells you when you’re tapping out wrong commands. Also, it’s
fast. You can start using it in a hurry, and you don’t have to wait
more than a few seconds at the most for it to respond to your
commands. And you constantly feel in control. You can easily search
through the data base for the information _you_ want.
2. Friendliness. A good system isn’t just easy to use; it’s also boy
scout polite, sprinkling its prompts with “Thanks yous” and avoiding
intimidating terms like “illegal information request.” Commit a
careless mistake on some data bases and they’ll throw back lawyerish
words suggesting you’re on the verge of a jury indictment.
3. Reliability. The system doesn’t lose information.
4. Confidentiality. Clerks aren’t privy to the same information as the
company president.
Indeed, basically, the same traits would be ideal for some other kinds
of software, especially the kind governing the operation of =networks=.
That’s the term for the hardware and software that lets machines talk to
each other. A network can be a =local network=, linking machines within
the same office, or it can be national or even global. Someday, if they
haven’t already, Bell and other companies may develop software
especially meant for corporate networks of telecommuters.
While widespread telecommuting isn’t yet a reality, Peter and Trudy
Johnson-Lenz have come as close as anyone to realizing its full
benefits. They live in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and as they’re fond of
pointing out, “We don’t commute. We telecommute.” They communicate
routinely with business associates around the country and find
electronic mail a boon to late risers on the West Coast with contacts
and friends back East. By the time I reached them, they felt liked caged
animals inside a media zoo. The papers had leaped at the opportunity to
write about a certified electronic cottage. Peter and Trudy had even
ended up in a BBC documentary on computers and the future—a vivid
contrast to besuited, tied scientists shown in antiseptic laboratories.
“We’re the hippie couple,” joked Trudy. “Peter’s the one with the
beard.”
But they’re hardly refugees from the old Haight-Ashbury; Peter is a
former statistical analyst, and Trudy helped run a rural education
program after a few years as a high school teacher.
Today they’re hooked into the Electronic Information Exchange System
(EIES), a national computer network set up by Murray Turoff, one of the
world’s leading experts on networking. Through EIES they’ve done
research on telecommuting for projects funded by the National Science
Foundation. They help colleges, nonprofit organizations, and others set
up computer networks. Indeed, “on line,” they even met partners in the
business they started to refine and promote a new software system called
MIST. That stands for Microcomputer Information Support Tools. One of
MIST’s many features can help your computer stay in touch with
others—send electronic mail, for instance, or pick the brains of a micro
with a big data base.
“P + T,” as they sign their computer messages, had been on line since
1977, and it seemed right to ask them for advice on making small
business contacts through networks. Peter couldn’t talk that evening,
the victim of a temperamental printer, but Trudy offered these
suggestions, among others:
_1. Whatever network you’re on, see if there’s a directory grouping
subscribers by interest. Which match yours?_
“You can send a hello message saying, ‘This is who I am. Now tell me
something about you.’” This electronic mail could simultaneously
reach a number of selected subscribers. Then, for instance, two
stockbrokers, in New York and Washington, could exchange financial
and regulatory gossip. Other small businessmen might simply discuss
common problems. The Source and a rival network, CompuServe, each
boast well over sixty thousand subscribers; so, obviously you do
have a good chance of reaching the right people, at least if they’re
professionals or well-off. With customers typically earning $50,000
or more, The Source isn’t the way to catch up with welfare mothers.
_2. “You must take risks,” Trudy warns. “You must be able to ask_
_strangers if they can help you. There are different levels of getting
to know people for business purposes.”_
If you’re looking for a business partner for a major venture, for
instance, don’t rely just on electronic communications. Talk on the
phone before you team up; meet him. But Trudy says networks are fine
for minor transactions. “We’ve written papers with people we’ve
never met,” she says, “and we worked with Turoff for two years
before we met him face to face.”
_3. Tap out your messages knowing that people cannot see your expression
or hear inflections in your voice._
“You may even want to type ‘Chuckle,’” Trudy says, “if it’s
something where you’re being sarcastic or ironic.” Of course the
written word has advantages. “You can ask people questions and say
things without confronting them directly,” she says. What better way
to brainstorm wildly?
I’ll add other advice: try electronic bulletin boards. They work,
believe me, at least on computer-related topics. Jeremy Hewes, for
instance, reached me through The Source, which, at my request, had given
me a demonstration account, a blush, electronic equivalent of a press
junket.
“Hello,” she tapped out after seeing my note on a bulletin board for IBM
owners. “Here are a few thoughts for your book on telecommuting and
related matters.”
We followed through by phone—but The Source paved the way.
And we could just as well have been those two stockbrokers swapping
gossip electronically. It’s a distinct possibility, since half The
Source subscribers use the service in full- or part-time occupations.
Don’t, incidentally, give up making electronic business contacts just
because you can’t afford The Source or other brand-name services.
Discount, no-frills networks will be springing up without, say,
stockmarket reports. Check out prices. Experiment. Get on a service for
a trial if the connect charges aren’t formidable and see if you’re
meeting your kind of people. A network, in that sense, is just like a
bar.
Also consider local boards for which you don’t even have to pay
long-distance charges.
John Fuller phoned after I “tacked up” a notice on a board for Heath
owners around Washington, D.C. Rainer Malitzke-Goes, an employee with a
large communications satellite company and an invaluable source of
technical information, reached me through another local board. Our
computers, however, can also talk directly, without a board or network,
so I’ll check some technical details in this chapter by zipping it to
him electronically.
Besides helping you make business contacts, your computer can ferret out
facts in a hurry.
Want to see if anyone else has started a dog kennel specializing in
Afghans? Well, a magazine article or abstract, stashed away in a
computer two thousand miles away, may tell you. Just dial up the right
information service. For a listing of data banks by subject, consult
_Information Industry Market Place_, published by Bowker, 205 East 42nd
St., New York, N.Y. 10017.
People living in small towns without good libraries will find electronic
data bases especially useful.
A Tennessee doctor, Frederick Myers, spent two and one-half hours on the
road when he periodically went to a medical library sixty miles away.
Now his microcomputers bring him Medline. It’s one of the hundreds of
data bases available through Dialog, the giant information service in
Palo Alto, California. Myers told _Personal Computing_ that Medline let
him “do in ten minutes what it would take me hours to do at the library
going through the hardbound indexes.” His patients have benefited. While
a patient in the emergency room lay with stabbing wounds in his stomach,
Myers ferreted out relevant abstracts via Medline.
Electronic data bases don’t just save time. With them you can pick up
odds and ends of information that printed indexes might not bring out.
Suppose you want to know which celebrities have endorsed electric
toothbrushes on television and, searching manually, you don’t find
anything in the toothbrush articles. What next? Well, the data banks’
indexes might cover even one-paragraph mentions of electric
toothbrushes—little references in articles about advertising or about
the VIP toothbrush endorsers.
But beware. Electronic information services and data bases can cost up
to hundreds of dollars an hour to use. You need to know what to tell the
data bases to spew out the facts you need. And that can take time.
Luckily, some companies have developed programs that let you map out
your strategy off-line instead of giving commands while the ticker is
running. One, called In-Search, runs on IBM-style micros, and can save
you thousands of dollars over the years if you’re a heavy Dialog user.
Even at $399 In-Search would seem worth it.
I can appreciate this all too well, having squandered $35 in a few
minutes trying to tap Dialog for my “Jewels that Blip” chapter. An
experienced librarian at a public library operated a terminal for me
there. And yet at the time even she could find next to nothing on crimes
_against_ microcomputers. In-Search might have saved much—and maybe even
most—of the $35.
Under the circumstances, in fact, I would better have spent the $35 on
long-distance calls to the right authorities, which is what I did.
Information services aren’t panaceas. Most of this book comes from
old-fashioned print and interviews.
My work habits will change, however, as more people tap into data bases
and the costs decline; I’ll be very selfish and put in a good word for
Dialog and the rest, hoping eventually to share these economies of
scale!
■ ■ ■
Of Packets and Freight Trains
=Packet switching= lowers the cost of computer communications nets and
information services, making it possible for you to send 1,000 words
coast to coast for as little as $1.
The technique, developed by the military, lets many machines jabber
away at once on the same phone line.
To tap into a packet-switching net, you typically dial local numbers
or 800 ones reachable nationally. Giant networks like Telenet and MCI
Mail use many different phone lines, but that’s still a fraction of
what they’d need without packet switching.
Just imagine each of the nets’ phone lines as a rail line. Many trains
(=packets= specifying the starts and ends of extrabrief computer
transmissions) can zip over the tracks at once if you keep them from
crashing into each other. The trains carry freight (bits and bytes of
information). Electronic labels assure that the cargo reaches the
right destinations (the gizmos that forward the information over the
phone line to the receiving computers).
Naturally, the use of common trains and rail lines (a
=packet-switching network=) is more efficient than replicating the
arrangement for each cargo recipient (each computer).
This explanation, though simplified, sums up the technique according
to Vinton G. Cerf, a top packet-switching expert.
Incidentally, packet-switching techniques can also increase the
efficiency of networks connecting computers in the same office.
■ ■ ■
Even now, if you can pin down your topic by name, you can pay next to
nothing to use electronic data banks and similar services on occasion.
You needn’t even cough up a fat subscription fee. Through MCI
Mail—$18-a-year basic charge—you can use the Dow Jones News/Retrieval
Service. It’s one way to watch companies of interest. Regularly, during
the writing of this book, I would ask Dow what Kaypro was up to. I
merely typed “.KPRO” and a carriage return, and the computer spewed out
the latest Kaypro news; even at 300 baud the bulletins took less than a
minute or so to reach me. My cost? Maybe forty cents a shot. Just before
Ballantine wanted the final version of this manuscript, I learned of
stockholders suits against the Kaypro—facts that I might not have known
in time without the Dow Jones wire.
My experience illustrates the speed with which the information services
can update their indexes and articles.
The _New York Times_ index at your local library, for instance, may be
weeks out of date. Without a computerized search you’d better either
read “All the News That’s Fit to Print” every day or be willing to flip
through perhaps a month’s worth of papers.
You can even read condensed articles daily from major papers on
line—long before they thud against your door, which they may never do if
they’re in cities a continent away. CompuServe offers the _Washington
Post_, for instance, among others, plus the Associated Press, the major
American wire service. The Source flashes bulletins from United Press
International. And there are electronic editions of specialized
publications like the _U.S. News Washington Letter_.
“Buy stocks now,” the _Letter_’s first electronic edition said
presciently in 1982.
“The very next day, August 17,” gloated a news release from The Source,
“the stock market went through the roof.”
Not surprisingly, big newspaper and magazine companies are tinkering
with electronic information services. Often, rather than home computers,
the services use Teletext (using cable television lines or broadcast TV)
or Videotex (phone lines).
Of course lines may fuzz between technologies. Television-based systems
are growing cheaper; and someday your portable TV may have a built-in
computer, a socket for a keyboard, and a flat, high-resolution screen
fit for word processing and electronic mail. Call it a Vu-Write. Make it
a first-class color television. But also a computer suited for clerks
and professionals alike. Give it a memory system less quirky than floppy
disks. Develop idiot-proof software selected by simple switches.
Mass-produce a Selectric-style keyboard, detachable, or, eventually, a
good voice recognizer. Throw in artificial speech, too, once it’s
perfected, and include a built-in, high-speed modem or the equivalent.
Sell the Vu-Write for $200 at the local Sears. Or perhaps to companies
who can recruit clerical telecommuters by in effect offering free TVs.
Somewhere in Silicon Valley, a savvy company may be at work on a
Vu-Write now; and if it succeeds, maybe mass telecommuting will be with
us sooner than anyone thought.
No matter what, Vu-Write or not, energy crisis or not, think about
telecommuting and related innovations before your competitors do. One
intelligent step would be the use of electronic mail where appropriate.
Backups:
◼ XI, The Micro Connection: Some Critical Explanations, page 349.
◼ XII, MODEM7: An Almost Free and Fairly Easy Way to Talk to Other
Computers, page 354.
◼ XIII, Why Not an Electronic Peace Corps?, page 366.
12 ❑ How I Found “God,” on MCI (and a Few Other Odds and Ends About
Electronic Mail)[75]
You won’t find the Devil listed on MCI’s electronic mail network. But
you’ll find “God,” William F. Buckley, Jr., musician Peter Nero, IBM,
other Fortune 500 companies, me, and at least one hundred thousand more
subscribers, including a Western Union official who’s keeping up with
the competition.
Footnote 75:
Some of the material in this chapter originally appeared in an article
I did for _USA Today_. I’ve also made use of facts from the _Wall
Street Journal_, March 16, 1984, p. 29.
“God” is a man in Morgantown, West Virginia, and his listing popped up
when, out of curiosity, I typed “God” after MCI’s “To:” prompt.
I don’t know if “God” is a preacher or a businessman whose company has a
distinctive name or initials. I’m happy to see him registered with MCI,
however. When I went looking for “God” earlier on the net, the computer
said in its literal way, “God not found. Enter a postal address or TLX
(Telex address).”
I still can’t scare up “Satan,” at least electronically; but MCI’s reply
to my last “God” entry showed both the breadth and versatility that MCI
and other systems may acquire if E-Mail boosters are right. The devil
actually may be on MCI any day now. Several hundred thousand Americans
are hooked up to one mail net or another, and more than five million
should be tapping out messages that way by the end of the decade. In
Virginia a financial planner has used E-Mail’s speed to save a $300,000
deal threatened by a legal deadline.
With E-Mail you can:
● Send messages computer to computer within an office or around the
world. At their convenience recipients can flash messages across their
screens or print them out.
● Use a computer to zip messages to special centers near recipients. The
centers print the messages, then deliver them by courier or local
mail. That’s how you can overcome one of the original drawbacks of
electronic mail—the other person’s lacking a computer on the same
network.
● Send and receive messages via the Telex network—which, of course, is
why MCI Mail politely asked for “God’s” Telex number.
“E-Mail can be nothing more than the computer equivalent of a
telephone-answering box ... storing messages for people to read when
they have a chance,” says Steve Caswell, a consultant who edits
_Electronic Mail & Micro Systems_, a leading industry newsletter.
“At its most complex level, it’s a very intelligent ultimate
communications device.”
Electronic mail’s roots are in the telegraph, Western Union telegrams,
and Telex machines. Computerized E-Mail has sprung up in the past two
decades; it grew in the military and academic communities and spread to
government agencies and high-tech companies like Texas Instruments.
Within the past few years, thousands of home users and other businesses
have jumped in.
Competition is keen. The Western Union man is on MCI because he wants to
see how it stacks up against his company’s own E-Mail operation,
EasyLink. GTE Corporation and International Telephone and Telegraph
offer E-Mail service. So does The Source, which lets companies set up
their own E-Mail networks without investing in giant computers. Instead,
they piggyback on The Source’s computer bank in the Washington, D.C.,
area. Users can dump messages into The Source’s computers over phone
lines or log in to see what messages await them.
Anchor Financial Services, in Phoenix, Arizona, used The Source to rig
up a network it hoped would lead to well over $1 million in annual
commissions. One hundred financial planners were on line, and Don De
Young, senior marketing vice-president, expected some fifteen hundred by
1985. They’d be able to place mutual-fund orders for clients, conduct
other transactions like placing insurance and annuity orders, and pick
the brains of Anchor’s financial experts.
One planner, Joe Schopen of Norfolk, Virginia, already has used Anchor’s
E-Mail to save a $300,000 cable TV-related deal. Ten investors wanted a
tax break, available only if a Virginia agency approved their
partnership documents before the end of the year. At the last minute,
Schopen learned of additions that would be required; E-Mail gave him the
speedy delivery that he needed for the investors to sign the legal
papers in time.
“Without electronic mail,” he says, “we very likely would have lost
those sales.
“I’ve heard we’re getting a 10 percent increase in productivity because
of our faster turnaround and because our clients can electronically
learn when other people receive messages for them.”
Some other advantages of E-Mail are: