a secretary says the CompuServe network had cut her phone time by 80
percent. Using electronic mail, for instance, Sue Clark can send a
memo to dozens of offices at once.
2. Elimination of telephone tag. “We can type a memo at the end of our
workday and have a response [from the West Coast] by the next
morning,” says Philip Selden, an Ohio-based executive with
Owens-Illinois Inc., who is using Western Union’s EasyLink service.
3. An end to garbled messages. Errors and misunderstandings decline when
people can write electronic messages.
4. More efficient sharing of ideas. =Computer conferencing= is an
example. A group of people with similar interests can keep a running
record of their electronic conversations.
Say you’re an oil company with dozens or hundreds of offshore rigs.
How to share ideas on efficiency, safety, other related topics? Well,
via radio-telephone link in some cases, your rig people might log onto
an electronic network. There they might read and add to the remarks
left by other people in this ongoing conversation.[76]
Now let’s say somebody wanted to “speak” to only one other person on
the network. He could do it.
Likewise, he might form a subgroup—say, one of people interested in
helicopter safety.
Footnote 76:
The example of computerized conferencing comes from Participation
Systems, Inc., a Winchester, Massachusetts, firm that provided the
software for computer conferencing on The Source.
E-Mail also is a boon to travelers using portable computers. Peter Nero
says that while on the road, he often must reply quickly to proposals
for concert appearances. So he taps out letters in midflight on a
lap-sized Radio Shack computer, then zips them over hotel phone lines to
his office. In Los Angeles a machine prints them for his secretary to
mail.
There are other virtues of E-Mail—MCI can even arrange to print letters
on your letterhead. A ten-year-old drew his own Bucky Beaver logo for
letters to Grandma, and a Chicago bank follows up with laser-printed
letters to impress the millionaires its sales reps call on.
E-Mail also can add new wrinkles to old friendships, business and
private. Two and one-half decades ago, an elementary-school pal named
Geoff Fobes moved to India with his parents, and we started scrawling
letters; I even fooled myself into thinking I could learn Hindi from a
book he mailed. Not long ago I introduced Geoff—by now in North
Carolina—to MCI Mail. “Well,” he typed, “it seemed only karmically
fitting to be writing you first. Many glorious surprises when your
letter began to appear. My father was dazed and said this was a historic
moment. Seems melodramatic, but then he is an old State Department
manual typewriter man.”
Electronic mail, of course, also has its negatives. Take Nero. He might
have used direct phone hookups to his office computers many times, or
perhaps other networks; but as of spring 1984 he was far from a regular
on the MCI network. Months after I “mailed” a message to him, I hadn’t
gotten an electronic receipt confirming that he had read my “letter.”
And I’m still waiting for “God” to reply. As of early 1984, MCI had
picked up sixty-five thousand of its subscribers from the Dow Jones News
Retrieval Service and the Bibliographic Retrieval Service. And many had
not logged on even once. Some registrants—including “God”?—didn’t even
know the E-Mail service existed.
So MCI was flooding subscribers’ mailboxes—the paper kind—with brochures
telling them of IBM PCs and other goodies awaiting people if they signed
on electronically to enter drawings. “God” theoretically might have won
“a luxury vacation in Hawaii.”
“Since the programs were announced,” said the _Wall Street Journal_,
“weekly [electronic] volume has risen 20 percent.” MCI in late 1984
boasted 150,000 subscribers.
By now it may have another feature. Pay extra and a _computer_ will ring
you up and read you your message. And eventually—maybe even right
now—you’ll be able to pay bills and see your bank balance via the
network.
Still, fearing loss of privacy, some people won’t use MCI Mail and
similar services.
“Electronic mail,” said my literary agent, Berenice Hoffman, ever
vigilant about her clients’ privacy, “is for letters addressed
‘Occupant.‘”
Perhaps for this very reason, MCI Mail’s bills don’t list the recipients
of messages unless you want. In that limited sense MCI is more private
than the telephone system.
You shouldn’t use E-Mail for confidential correspondence, however, if
you can’t protect your message with electronic scrambling.
Ian (“Captain Zap”) Murphy, whom MCI Mail lists under his real name,
really bought that point home. “Any easy way to get into MCI’s operating
system?” he asked.
“Come on, Ian,” I said. “Let’s not court temptation. That would be like
giving an alcoholic a bottle of Jack Daniels.” We joked over it. He said
_those_ days were behind him. And yet I wondered whether, even now,
hackers were unraveling the security of the MCI net.
E-Mail had and has other drawbacks. High-tech intimidates some
executives; others see typing as a threat to the executive image.
Then there are technical glitches. Gil Gordon, the telecommuting
consultant, gave up MCI Mail in disgust because for some strange reason
he had trouble getting his micro to show new lines on the screen
properly when he was typing letters.
Also, even though MCI ballyhoos itself as a link between many kinds of
machines, you normally can’t underline something on your Xerox 860, say,
and have it show up right on someone’s IBM running Perfect Writer. MCI
strips the special characters for underlining, boldfacing, and several
other typographical trimmings. (Among word processors, there are no such
standard codes for such features.)
“MCI’s using us as guinea pigs,” complained Peter Ross Range, a
Washington writer whose double-spaced letters were turning single-spaced
when MCI printed them. That happened with WordStar, the popular word
processor. MCI put out a detailed explanation of how to avoid such
problems, and I passed on the basics to Peter, who said, “What’s the
point if it takes that long and I can just call a messenger from an
express service?” Peter also found that on some days MCI Mail just
wouldn’t work at times; I myself noticed that, too. And some people’s $2
MCI letters, passed on to the U.S. Postal Service for delivery as “hard
copy,” were taking several days to arrive. Still other MCI messages,
hard copy or electronic, never reached their destinations at any time.
Service to New York seemed the worst but was better to medium-sized
cities, especially in the Midwest. Those are all issues crucial to
business.
MCI Mail dates back only to late 1983, and by now maybe things are much
better. Perhaps software makers and MCI and rivals will cooperate in a
big way someday so that you routinely can get boldfacing and other
“luxuries” if you stick the right command in your electronic file.
Glitches and all, MCI still works out for budget-minded writers and
consultants. A “mailbox” is just $18 a year, and if you can dial up MCI
locally as people in most large cities can, you pay a mere $1 to send
1,000 words computer-to-computer in the U.S.—including Hawaii. Indeed,
Jim Fallows says he and some other _Atlantic Monthly_ writers routinely
use the service for trying articles out on each other.
In addition, MCI offers some neat little wrinkles for heavy-duty
corporate users. Companies with in-house systems can set up bridges
between the MCI and their existing electronic mail nets. As the MCI
bragged in its on-line newsletter, you can simultaneously “send a
company-wide memo electronically on your internal system; copy your
attorneys, who subscribe to MCI Mail; copy your vendors with
laser-printed, first-class letters,” and “deliver the boss’s copy the
same day at his conference in Dallas.” If the boss is in London, a
letter written on your computer can reach him by courier after a machine
prints it out. What’s more, for a fraction of the cost of Telexes, you
can directly reach business associates’ computers in England or a number
of other countries.
Of course, especially if you’re a business, do look at the other E-Mail
networks, too. I’ve written much here about MCI simply because it is one
of the largest networks and I’m most familiar with it.
All the E-Mail services, at any rate, offer the same advantages over
conventional letters: speed. Even skeptics see the potential. Peter Ross
Range, the man with the WordStar-MCI woes, says, “I want the day to come
soon when I won’t have to lick another stamp.”
Some of the most useful electronic mail can go from person to another in
the same building or complex—a capability made possible through local
networking, discussed in the next chapter.
13 ❑ Net Gain$
Back in 1983 a young CPA named John Madden came to work as information
systems manager for Carsonville Metal Products in rural Michigan. He
found just two computers there—an IBM mini and an Apple III.
Like most computers, they were loners. The IBM, used for accounting,
didn’t pass its figures on to the Apple to be put in reports or maybe
spreadsheets. The Apple didn’t talk back.
Today, though, Carsonville not only owns more machines; they’re more
sociable. Its twenty-one Kaypros speak to each other through a =local
area network=. That’s gobbledygook for nearby computers swapping
electronic files or programs—and sharing goodies like printers.
People, too, are communicating better. They needn’t swap floppy disks as
often or fight their way through as much paperwork. Thanks to the
computer network, Madden says, Carsonville may enjoy $1,000 a year more
in _effective_ work time from each office staffer. That’s not all. Sales
normally are around $12 million a year; Carsonville competes in the
dog-eat-dog areas of defense and auto-parts contracts; and the network
may help win millions of dollars of new business. With facts handier,
the executives can more easily submit low but realistic bids.
The secret is simple: The WEB network, which in late 1984 was listing
for several hundred dollars per computer.
The WEB’s price sounds outrageous. It isn’t. Had Carsonville used
Ethernet or another of the much-touted networks, it might have spent
well over $1,000 to wire in _each_ computer—perhaps several thousand
with all the trimmings included.
Instead, Madden went by the philosophy of this book. He shopped around
for the least costly gizmos that could do the job well.
Souping up the IBM mini wasn’t the answer. It offered 64 megabytes of
storage, the equivalent of 32,000 double-spaced typewritten pages. But
Madden worried if it could run programs fast enough with a number of
people tugging at it simultaneously. “We had five terminals, and we
dropped it to four,” he said, “because our mini slowed down horribly
even with five.” Going the mini route, Madden would also have had to
spend perhaps $30,000 on at least twenty more terminals without the
brains of a full-fledged computer. In addition, he’d have had to buy new
software and other hardware, so the final costs might have totaled up to
$100,000. Besides, Madden cherished the notion of a “democratic” system.
Machines at all locations should boast plenty of power; then people
would feel more in control, and the whole system wouldn’t fall apart if
a Big Brother computer broke down.
Madden might also have gone another route, buying a =multiuser-system=
micro—one computer and a number of dumb terminals, somewhat like the
mini arrangement.
That, too, however, wouldn’t have been “democratic.”
And with too many people piled on the supermicro, it might have run
programs at the pace of a crippled snail.
UNIX, the software system developed by Bell Laboratories, was good for
multiuser arrangements and allowed much more speed—but few computer and
software companies had UNIX offerings out yet.
Madden, anyway, wanted his machines to run proven CP/M programs like
dBASE II and WordStar; he felt they were powerful enough for the jobs he
required; he needn’t mess with the more fashionable 16-bit, IBM-style
micros. Hard disks would help, though. “I’d been a partner in a public
accounting firm,” he said, “and I’d picked up a hard disk for myself,
and it ran much faster than floppy disks, and I didn’t ever want to go
back to floppies.”
So he set his sights on Kaypro 10s—with hard disks built in—and began
mapping out his networking scheme.
With twenty-one Kaypros, each offering around 10 megabytes of useful
storage, his company’s computers could stash away over 200 megabytes, or
more than three times the space on the IBM mini.
“I don’t think people appreciate the power of micros in a network
configuration,” he said.
But which network to buy?
“We were just looking at the ability to share and update the files on
our disks from any location,” Madden said. “And we wanted the ability to
share equipment like printers. We didn’t need an elaborate electronic
mail or message system. We already had intercoms. And we also didn’t
need the ability to transmit graphics.”
From the start Madden knew he hadn’t the slightest use for a deluxe
network, such as one called Wangnet, which could transmit voice and even
TV pictures but didn’t come in a version working with the Kaypro.
Well, how about Xerox’s Ethernet? Xerox was hoping that Ethernet would
become an industry standard, and some users loved it. “Ethernet has been
very good for us,” said a computer man with the Kentucky state
government, a test user; he told _Computerworld_ of “excellent
productivity gains.”
Ethernet, though, like Wangnet, didn’t run with the Kaypro at the time
Madden was shopping, and it also had too much capacity for him.
What’s more, a version of it crashed during a demonstration when two
people were trying at the same time to read an electronic file. Madden
moved on. Reliability counted most.
Speed mattered, too, and he tested The WEB to see how fast it could move
files from one Kaypro 10 to another.
“We set up machines A, B, and C,” said Madden. “We had machine A giving
the commands for a file to be copied from machine B to machine C. At the
same time, we had C transfer a file from A to B, and we had B transfer a
file from A to C.
“People at all three machines hit the return keys at the same time”—to
give them commands—“and then we watched what would happen.
“We found that the machines copied the files without errors in maybe one
minute.” And the files were about 100K long, around fifty double-spaced
typewritten pages.
Madden also tried another test to see how much The WEB would slow down
the speed at which people could run programs. He compared:
1. How long a Kaypro took to sort dBASE II files electronically while
not hooked up to the network.
2. How long it took while connected to the network.
3. How long a second Kaypro needed to sort the dBASE files in the first
machine via the network.
“In each case,” said Madden, “there was an increase in time, but it was
still acceptable.”
So Carsonville bought The WEB and saved a pile compared to doing it with
an old or a new mini.
The Kaypro 10s cost $2,750 each, which, multiplied by 21, came to
$55,000, and The WEB in a test version was $250 per machine for the
software and a circuit board. That was just about everything but odds
and ends such as $80 for 1,000 feet of telephone-style wire. Total
expenses? Much less than $70,000. And even with The WEB’s list price of
$350 per machine, Carsonville’s costs still were _at least_ $30,000 less
than those of souping up the mini system or buying a new one.
Later, Madden discovered a glitch. The WEB let people flash short
messages across each other’s screens, a feature called “flash,” and it
crashed dBASE II.
He felt his people wouldn’t need that wrinkle, however, and they could
avoid the problem just by disabling “flash.”
Ed Bigelow, president of Adevco, Inc., which made The WEB, said that if
Carsonville had wanted “flash,” then Madden could have had the network
or dBASE II modified to snuff out the glitch.[77]
Footnote 77:
Bigelow’s company, Adevco, Inc., 2145 Market St., Camp Hill,
Pennsylvania, manufactures The WEB equipment under a license from The
WEB’s designers. That’s Centram Systems, Inc., P.O. Box 511, Camp
Hill, Pennsylvania, which also sells to manufacturers to add to their
computers. A California company, Trantor Systems, likewise makes a
network called WEB: this may or may not mean a name change for the
Centram technology. At any rate, Adevco itself may abandon the WEB
name for other reasons. “We may drop the name and market the product
with the same technology in a different version under a number of
names,” said Bigelow. “If we enhance the product enough, I may want
more Adevco identification.”
Whatever the case, the little dBASE II problem showed the importance of
prospective customers putting networks through their paces with various
programs—ideally, _before_ buying.
Here’s a summary of questions to ask in setting up a network:
Do You Need One?
Don’t be expensively trendy. You have just three other people in the
office, and the paperwork isn’t piled that high? Then you might be much
better off trading floppies.
But if you’re a busy law office, you might want to get a lot of
standard, boilerplate paragraphs from a hard disk shared via a network
or multiuser system.
Especially you might consider a network or multiuser system where more
than one person is constantly dipping into the same data base. Suppose
Production wants to know five times a day how many widget parts
Inventory has left in fifteen categories. Then a network could help. The
Sales Department, after all, may want to use the same computer to find
out how many finished products are in stock.
Of course, if there are five hundred people dipping into a data base, a
mini or mainframe would be the ticket.
Also, even Bigelow warns against bringing networks into companies in
which people won’t be willing to keep their electronic files in order.
He recalls one office in which “people had been using electronic
typewriters and they’d switched to micros recently and were careless
about where they put their disks. They even left magnetized scissors and
paper clips on them.
“People didn’t trust each other’s diskettes—or diskette habits. And on a
network you can’t be sloppy. You could destroy everything if management
hasn’t set up the system well. Even on some good networks people can
wreak havoc on each other’s files by overcrowding disks with
information. There can even be network saboteurs.
“You can’t network unless people act as a team and care about their
colleagues’ records. If a company’s isn’t like that, it might be better
off with a strong data-processing department to police everyone. Or they
might just use micros not connected to each other—so that people will
crash only their own disks.
“They might network only after they’ve successfully run employees
through a training program to promote good work habits.”
In General, Do You _Know_ What You Want To Do—With People and Equipment?
You’re really planning your office, not just shopping for a connection
between computers.
All kinds of questions pop up—for instance:
1. How extensive do you want your network’s file-sharing capabilities to
be? Translation: “How important is it for people to share their
paperwork electronically?”
2. Who’ll manage the network? Who’ll determine who can see what
electronic files? Who’ll keep track of passwords? Who’ll make sure
that a careless but talented worker can’t destroy irreplaceable
information? You don’t, by the way, want your network manager to turn
power hungry. “He shouldn’t be the network police,” jokes Bigelow. “He
should be the network janitor—in the sense of keeping everything in
place electronically. You might also think of him as a network
teacher. He can help tell people the right way to do things.” Bigelow,
in fact, warns against one person holding sway over the others by
being the only one familiar with network procedures.
3. Do you want to assign special network-related duties to other people?
One employee, for instance, may be the custodian of an expensive laser
printer and make sure that other people are using it most efficiently.
4. Who will work at what =node=? That’s jargon for a location or =work
station=.
5. Will some people share work stations? If so, you’d better decide
which tasks in your office are going to be done in what corners of the
room.
6. Which computers will store which electronic files?
7. How many printers and other gizmos will people share, and where will
they go? Presumably, you don’t want a printer five hundred feet from
the people feeding their files into it.
You also should decide how many expensive, letter-quality printers you
need and how many cheapies like dot matrixes. Make up your mind—before
your office wastes $4,000 on a second laser printer when just one
might do.
The same idea might apply to high-speed modems if your network allows
computers to share them.
8. What kinds of computers are you planning to hook up? The WEB as of
mid-1984 was running only with Kaypros. But a version for IBMs was in
the works.
One advantage of a big-name network, however, is that it _may_ more
easily get machines of different brands on speaking terms. That could
count if you’re planning to trade in your old micros soon.
There’s a caveat. Some networks may work with many machines but may not
be as powerful as those dedicated to one brand.
So Apples and IBMs might both share the same hard disk but might not be
able to read each other’s files without costly add-ons.
How Fast Do You Want the Network to Transfer Information?
It’ll depend largely on the type of network—a topic covered later in
this chapter.
Wangnet will zip information over the wires many times faster than will
The WEB; it’s a boon for those who need that capability but a frill for
those who don’t.
Mind you, a network itself isn’t necessarily the main determinant of the
speed with which files zip back and forth between machines.
The speed of your computers’ floppies in many cases will count more than
the network’s transmission rate, and that’s true to a lesser extent of
Winchester hard disks. Different networks, of course, may work faster or
slower when teamed up with the same computer. Also, some networks seem
fast when you don’t have many users. But then, with a large number,
rival networks are faster.
How Much of a Load Do You Want to Put On Your Network—and Can It Handle
It?
How many computers do you want hooked in? And how much of a strain will
they place on the network before it crashes or slows down to a
bothersome extent?
If people are running data-base programs on colleagues’ files, a network
might only work with a few users, but if they’re just occasionally
swapping electronic files, the same system may accommodate hundreds of
computers.
That’s especially true, say, if you’re a publishing house with many
writers but few editors. The writers may not communicate much between
themselves, so that the handful of editors are the only ones really
taxing the system. And since they’re not running other people’s
programs, even the editors won’t be that much of a burden.
The same principle might apply to an educational network in which one
teacher is overseeing many students.
Is the Network Reliable in Other Ways?
Are the wires and connectors strong enough mechanically, for instance?
How much does the network tolerate mistakes—how crashproof is it? And
what about the software? Suppose two people at once are calling up a
directory to find out what’s on a common disk. Will the director
accurately list _every_ file? Does the network perform well not only
with the directory program but with other utility-style software in
CP/M, MS-DOS, or whatever operating system you’re using?
How Easy Must the Network be to Use?
The WEB is easy but not for the _untrained_ novice. Using the Kaypro
version, you need to know at least the basic CP/M commands.
But once you do, you’re just about home free.
Take the PIP command, which, among other things, lets you transfer files
from one disk to another on a machine by itself. To switch a file named
TEST from drive A to drive B, you’d load a PIP program into your
computers temporary memory. Then you might type =B:=A:TEST=.