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.