Hardware and Software
Now for advice on finding the most crookproof computers and programs.
Buy a micro with 16- or 32-bit word lengths and RAMs of 256K or more. Those specifications will let you use more elaborate codes to protect information. What’s more, they might be less cumbersome than codes on an 8-bit machine. Look, too, for electronic design that lets your computer establish privilege levels—reachable through passwords. That way, Sally, the new secretary, can start out getting into the computer only for word processing. Helen, the payroll clerk, can have access to confidential salary information but not a top-secret budget that doesn’t give her the raise she’s been pestering you about. Questions exist about the effectiveness of passwords and codes, at least when the thieves or snoops may be sophisticated, but that’s another story. Most experts will tell you that anything that can be coded can be cracked. The trick is to make it not worth the criminals’ time and resources. Of course, the best safeguard is still the simplest: locking up the disks and computer after you or your people are through.
New minis, by the time you’re reading this, may all be 64 bit or higher. They adapt to codes—and fancy electronic logs showing the kind of work done on them—more easily than do micros. And they might justify other costly security measures. Suppose, for instance, you want to follow the many government agencies’ examples and pen in the tiny radio waves that computers emit so that eavesdroppers can’t pick them up with sensitive receivers. A micro fortified this way might cost perhaps $10,000. “What’s the sense of doing that for what’s essentially a throwaway computer?” asks Harold Joseph Highland. The “throwaway,” be assured, is an exaggeration, but his point comes through.
Of course, don’t forget the disadvantages of minis.
Most machines at the mini level or above need professional programmers, and that’s bad news if you’re trying to stay in complete charge of your business.
Also, minis, because of their expense, normally won’t pay for themselves unless they have at least several terminals.
And the more terminals you have, the more “doors” through which crooks can “walk.”
Still, you normally shouldn’t let security alone determine if you end up with a micro or with a mini. Remember the warning earlier in this chapter that security costs shouldn’t overwhelm you. How often, for instance, is your information so sensitive that you’re worried about criminals lurking in the bushes with the elaborate equipment needed to make sense of the tiny waves your computer emits? Your data might not even justify use of codes.
I myself haven’t the slightest need for codes, user-privilege levels, anything other than locking up my disks, since I’m essentially a small businessman who is the sole operator of a micro.
Even the FBI doesn’t really worry about security on some computers. At the time I visited the agency’s academy in Virginia, several little Radio Shack models were purring away there—the same kind you’d buy off the shelf. The micros’ software had passwords, but some agents could bypass them, anyway, which wouldn’t be necessary, of course, since, in this case, the FBI wants the machines to be used.
Before saddling yourself with fancy electronic precautions, do see if a security service, a good, heavy safe, a locked room, or a burglar alarm would work instead. And what about simply carrying home some duplicates of your most important floppies? That possibility will become increasingly attractive as the disks’ storage capacity increases. This isn’t to say, however, that you should store Exxon’s major corporate secrets in a dirty unlocked drawer next to old underwear. But a small businessman might consider taking his backup disks home.
If you buy a safe for your office’s disks or tapes, think about fire protection. Check with your fire department. What makes of safes could be in the middle of the flames without the disks suffering temperatures of more than 115 degrees Fahrenheit?
Investigating locks and burglar alarms, you’ll learn that your computer may be able to protect itself. How? Some gadgets can let only card-carrying employees—your people with magnetic cards—enter a room. And they can tie into the computer to save you money. The same applies to burglar alarms. Of course, you might want nothing fancier than a strong lock bolting your computer to a heavy table. Don’t spend more than the data are worth to replace.
You might also consider a guard service. The problem is that salaries add up even for quick nighttime checks.
After a few months or a year, you may be well on your way to having shelled out the cost of an elaborate electronic security system. Guards normally would be more appropriate for users of large minis and mainframes than for desktop types.
One advantage of physical security—most any kind—is that it can protect the computer equipment itself, not just your electronic files.
You’ve undoubtedly read of theft of computer chips from Silicon Valley firms. Now be prepared for reports of widespread computer theft, eventually, as the market grows for both legally bought and fenced merchandise. With computers shrinking in size, they may well be an even hotter item for fences than stolen Selectrics. Even Apples several years ago were too intimidating to a burglar, like the one who stole the silverware of an acquaintance of mine but passed over his computer. Be assured, though, that crooks are increasingly computer literate. There’s even talk of the mob moving into computer crime, raiding government files, and, presumably, engaging in less challenging illegalities, like setting up computer-fencing rings.
With computer crooks in the future being smarter and more organized, you should think hard before depending on simply passwords or codes to protect you.
First, assume that at least some people may try to unravel your puzzles. A whole generation of prodigies right now is practicing by copying the supposedly uncopyable computer games on disks. In effect, notes Churbuck, the New Hampshire lawyer, each disk provides two puzzles. One is the original game. The other is the puzzle of figuring out how to make illicit copies. And at the University of Western Ontario, Prof. John Carroll surveyed students in two advanced computer courses and found that one-third had sought free, illegal computer time. It’s been pointed out that the very best, the very brightest, students have too many legitimate opportunities—on large systems—to worry about pillaging small computers. And that may be true. But by the late 1980s or early 1990s, some journeyman criminals may develop among the second-raters.
Second, don’t shrug off a warning from R. E. (Bob) Kukrall, author of the handbook Computer Auditing, Security and Controls: “Cracking a computer system’s defenses may be about as difficult as doing a hard Sunday crossword puzzle.” He says that thieves managed in minutes to call up computer files that were protected by a five-digit code number. They just programmed the computer itself to try each of 100,000 combinations.
“In effect the speed and capabilities of the computer were used to violate its own security,” Kukrall said in TeleSystems Journal.
■ ■ ■
How the National Enquirer Gets Some Security along with Bargain Communications
Some National Enquirer reporters send in stories via computers, but there’s little danger of rival tabloids spying on the computer collecting the articles.
The reason? There’s no receiving computer, actually—just an auto-answer modem rigged up to a dot-matrix that spews out paper copies at several hundred words a minute.
The modem and printer can’t send messages or relay stories elsewhere. But who needs that—not when some computer-smart National Star reporter might give his eye teeth to find out what the competition is up to?
To be sure, the scheme has some problems:
● The Enquirer can’t transfer the reporters’ stories to a computer there for editing, since they are on plain old paper but not in an electronic format. Editors, however, heavily rewrite the original stories. Capturing reporters’ key-strokes for the typesetter wouldn’t help as much as at an ordinary newspaper.
● Theoretically someone could still steal the hard copy (just as he or she could sneak off with a floppy disk).
● The system isn’t secure against telephone tappers who could translate the modem whines.
Still, the system is dirt-cheap. If knowledgeable, you could probably replicate it for less than $500 for the printer and modem. And you could send to it with just a $400 lap-sized portable.
Beyond that, the Enquirer’s arrangement may be safer than leaving an unprotected computer on the phone to collect unencrypted files.
■ ■ ■
Then there’s the Dalton school case in New York City in which the four culprits, age thirteen, violated silicon sanctity hundreds of miles away. The feds caught up with them before they could steal Pepsi Cola, by coaxing an order out of a warehouse. But another computer didn’t fare so well. The thirteen-year-olds destroyed more than one-fifth of the 50 million bits in the machine’s memory, inspiring a magazine writer to call them “electronic Huns.”
More recently, the 414 Gang out of Milwaukee—named after their telephone area code—broke into computers across the country. These half-dozen or so high school students, tapping on home micros, broke into more than sixty computers and among other things they:
▪ Hooked up with a VAX 11/780 at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Eighty hospitals across the U.S. were using the computer to help treat hundreds of radiotherapy patients.[[55]]
▪ Broke into an unclassified computer at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory.
▪ Penetrated a Security Pacific Bank computer in Los Angeles. That may not have been so much a challenge. The account name and password both were “SYSTEM”—a word that many computer manufacturers routinely put in new machines and that their customers often forget to take out. “TEST,” “DEMO,” and “MAINTENANCE” are other old standbys.
If teenagers can wreak Attilan havoc and snoop on a bank computer, then think of adults.
So use passwords and codes, knowing their vulnerabilities. Try, anyway, to give computer crackers a good challenge by avoiding use of obvious passwords like street names or those of wives or children. Consider a two-level password; also, maybe one with two words of pure gibberish; that’s what CompuServe does. And, obviously, purge the computer of standard passwords in the “SYSTEM” vein.
If your system permits dialing in through a modem, see if it can limit the number of tries that people can make before the modem hangs up the phone. Your dial-up computer should[should] send its name until the caller has given the right ID. Be careful of overly helpful prompts that lead callers on to the next step. “A prompt saying, ‘Hi! This is the Last National Bank Disbursement Department,’ sort of gives the game away, doesn’t it?” says a Creative Computing article laying out precautions. Also, change passwords regularly. And if an employee’s leaving? Change the access codes.
Here’s what I’d ponder if shopping for a password or encryption system:
1. How hard, exactly, would it be to puzzle out? Just how many combinations would a computer cracker have to try? Could he easily do this through his own machine—or yours? You might want to consult a cryptography expert to learn how much of a challenge this particular program would be. You’d be surprised. You may see the manufacturer’s claims instantly deflated.
2. How compatible is the program with your computer? If security is so important, choose the protective software first, then the hardware—assuming, of course, that it will run your applications programs.
3. Is the security program easy to use? If it’s too hard, it’ll be self-defeating. “Ease of use” would include how much time the security software adds to your normal tasks.
4. Are you certain the program won’t jeopardize the accuracy and completeness of your files by making you more accident-prone?
5. Should you expand your system, will the security software be able to grow along?
6. Do you want a public key encryption system? It works this way. You pass out a code that people can use in sending messages to you. Only you have the means to unscramble them, though.
7. Will your code be based on the Data Encryption Standard (DES), published by the U.S. government and repeatedly tested by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Bureau of Standards? To this day the rumors persist that NSA has built in a trap door to snoop on DES-style codes. True? I don’t know. Captain Zap says, “I don’t trust it. I don’t think NSA would have approved it if they couldn’t crack it.” NSA-approved codes are overkill in all but the most sensitive systems.
Telenet has a special interest in encryption software. It is the network into which thousands of computer users dial to reach other machines and services like The Source.
In 1984 Telenet claimed to be the first public network offering encryption software—a package for the IBM and clones that uses the public-key method and sells for somewhere under $600.
“You have a directory that has all the public keys in it,” said Claudia Houston, Telenet public affairs manager, explaining the Phasor software’s operation. “You look up the guy’s key that you want to send a message to. You punch that key and your message gets encrypted.”
For a two-page message, a Telenet man says that might take thirty seconds. Then you’re ready to send over the phone lines. Even if someone wiretaps you, theoretically, he won’t be able to puzzle out your secrets.
MCI Mail also offers encryption—through a customized version of a popular communication program—and other electronic networks will undoubtedly follow suit.
“Black boxes,” or hardware that scrambles messages, might likewise help; the topic is too complex for me to cover here in the detail it deserves. This equipment usually costs well into the thousands. One security expert, J. Michael Nye, even puts out a consumer’s guide to black boxes.[[56]] A good black box could be just a special modem with scrambling circuits built in. “If no one else produces a good, low-cost modem with encryption,” says Nye, “I might start doing it myself.”
■ ■ ■
Captain Zap’s Wisdom on Protecting Your Dial-up Computer
The Captain and friends stole—via computer connections—over $100,000 in goods and $212,000 in services, including a $13,000 Hewlett-Packard minicomputer. He received a $1,000 fine and two and one-half years’ probation, with fifteen hours a week community service.
Far from being 100-percent antiestablishment, however, Zap is a Philadelphia Republican fond of wing tips. (“They show good breeding.”) And a computer security consultant, a client, praises him as “a damn good technician.” A computer-crime expert named Jay BloomBecker isn’t so keen on the use of e×-criminals in security: “There are a lot of people just as bright who have stayed within the law.” Regardless, Zap has some good tips for security-minded computer users, especially those with dial-up machines. Among them:
▪ Don’t think of computers as gods. “Remember, there’s just another human at the other end.”
▪ Spread out your computer numbers; you might even use different telephone exchanges. Don’t have numbers adjacent to each other—like 555-1212 next to 555-1213. If you do, your computers will be easier targets for hackers with WarGames-style dialing programs that scan local exchanges for computer numbers.
That’s good advice from Zap. In the same vein, even if you have just one micro, you might consider trying to get a phone number in an exchange miles from your actual location. You might even want to use a tie line to another city. It all depends on whether you think the costs would justify the added protection; for many businesses they wouldn’t.
Also, you might keep your modem number secret from people who don’t need to know. A Hollywood director, fearful that computer-smart science-fiction fans might tap into his dial-up machine, used such a precaution. Only he and his regular callers knew the number. His super-secretive approach obviously wouldn’t have worked in a typical business, especially one with many phone lines coming in. Also, nothing’s foolproof; suppose an electronic snoop unlocks your building’s wire closet.
▪ If possible, use modems faster than 1,200 baud. Then, says Zap, “most hackers’ modems can’t keep up.” Most small computers’ modems transmit at 300 baud, about 300 letters or numbers a second.
▪ Remember that hackers can be ingenious. “Don’t be smug just because you have a dial-back modem. That’s a device that makes callers tap out a special code, and then it rings them back at their authorized location. You can get around it by tying into the central office and setting up a three-way call—without anyone hearing you. I know hackers can set up three-way calls. I’ve done it myself.”
▪ Protective devices, however, are better than nothing at all. “Despite their limitations, I’d still install a call-back arrangement or a device that asked you for a code—or maybe a combination of the two. A combination usually would be much better.”
▪ Don’t get hung up on protecting your dial-up computer with just hardware or just software—use both. “Black boxes can help keep the wrong people from breaking in. But you also need good security software to control how deeply even authorized people can get into your computer. You want some people—like customers—to have only partial access to the goodies inside your system.”
▪ Watch what you throw away. “Some hackers can log onto your dial-up computer after first poking through your trash—for printouts with passwords and similar material.” Another hacker jokingly refers to “The Dempster Dumpster Library.”
■ ■ ■
Don’t lose track of security threats around your office itself while worrying about modems and encryption. Would you believe that you can’t absolutely erase an electronic file—say, a letter or report on your disk—just by following the directions in your software? A snoop might recover the information with a special program like Disk Doctor. Luckily, however, you can zap a sensitive file by magnetically “writing” over its part of the disk. Say you want to wipe out a letter 500 words long, File A. Well, do the following:
1. See if your disk has a file at least 500 or 600 words long. If so, make a copy. If not, type out a file that long. I’ll call this new file “B.”
2. “Write” File B’s contents under A’s name. “Overwrite” in other words.
3. Erase A.
To really erase an entire disk? Well, don’t depend on your computer’s “copy” program or “format” program. Instead, just sweep a magnet over it—within a quarter inch or so.[[57]]
So much for the James Bond kind of data security. Now on to coffee spilled on floppy disks.
Whether it’s coffee or Coke, unless you’re careful, you’re possibly going to be your own biggest data-security threat. Just ask people like Betty Cappucci, a quality-control manager with the Dennison Kybe Corporation in Kopkinton, Massachusetts. “Most of the time,” she says of returned disks, “it isn’t the disk—it’s spit or fingerprints. All you have to do is look at offices with people eating their lunch near their computers.”
“We see disks coming back with cigarette ashes and coffee stains,” said Jack Fitzgerald, who at the time was a field engineer with another disk maker.
And it isn’t just the very smallest computer users who abuse their disks. “The big problem in computer facilities,” he says, “often is cleanliness. I’ve been to a large investment firm in New York City and seen apple cores on the floor, Big Mac containers near the disks. And yet they were complaining of data-loss problems.
“This was a major investment firm with all sorts of ads on news programs and football games about how carefully they protected your money,” says Fitzgerald. “No investor lost money in this case because the firm at least had backup disks. But the company itself lost thousands of dollars of processing time—money they could have spent helping their investors earn more.”
A programmer with a Florida accounting firm, however, didn’t even have a backup when his disk crashed on a large computer.
“He was actually crying on the phone,” Fitzgerald recalls. “He had lost two disks. And he was willing to pay $20,000 to get data off them. His job was on the line.
“I’ve had disk crashes myself,” Fitzgerald says, discussing his off-hours work on his micro. “I was developing a small game similar to Space Invaders. I lost power on my computer and about three hours of work. I ignored one of my basic rules, which is to back up about every 20 lines—make a copy on a second disk.” Captain Zap’s rule is, “Every fifteen minutes, save on both disks.” That’s extreme. Like all forms of security, apply this in relation to the trouble it would take to recover a loss.
Even Paul Lutus, famous in the industry for his work developing Apple software, has a scary crash story.[[58]]
He’d toiled to develop a new program, of which he took two copies to the company. An electronic glitch cost him one of the copies. The sun melted the other. It seems that Steve Jobs, an Apple cofounder, had put the disk under the windshield of his car. “I ended up very carefully prying apart the case of Jobs’s copy and switching the floppy disk inside to another case so we could recover the programs,” Lutus says. “I haven’t always been so lucky.... For me the biggest drawback to personal computing is the quality of the mass storage. I dislike floppy disks intensely.”
Here’s how you can help your floppies and data survive threats more immediate—sloppiness and stupidity:
1. Zealously enforce a no-drinking, no-eating policy around disks, at least if trouble develops.
2. Remember the Rothman Dirt Domino Theory. Dirt, dust, and grease often can sneak up on your floppies indirectly, in stages. You start with clean hands. Then, however, they fall domino style when you touch a dirty table or one with your office mate’s submarine-sandwich drippings. You return to your own desk briefly before you yourself leave for lunch. You don’t work with floppies then, and you wash your hands after eating, but during your brief stop at your desk before lunch, you’ve already left a trace of grease behind, anyway. Your disk box picks it up when you set it on the wrong spot on the desk. Then, working with the floppies, you lay one atop the box. Now the disk itself fails. Alas, most disk failures aren’t gradual like a recording that gets progressively noisier until you can’t stand to listen to it anymore—they tend to be sudden and total.
3. Realize that floppies don’t always mix well with office materials that correct errors the old-fashioned way—erasers, for instance, white-out fluid, or that unavoidably flaky correction tape.
4. Know about other natural enemies of floppies or at least of the data on them. Beware of airport metal detectors. A disk maker says this isn’t a problem; but don’t gamble, since a magnetic detector, misadjusted, might still mush your data. Beware, too, of telephones atop disks: the magnets in them are powerful.
5. Don’t even let your floppies rest against your computer’s screen, which, like a television’s, can be full of static electricity, attracting dust.
6. Remember that the more information you can pack on a floppy, the more vulnerable it may be to damage from dirt, fingerprints, magnetic fields, and other causes.
7. Clean your disk heads. Don’t use rubbing alcohol. “Try something like a Freon-based material with 91 percent pure alcohol,” Fitzgerald says. “You can get it at some computer stores.” Or, after every twenty hours of operation, use a cleaning diskette, three of which typically come in a $15 package. Each disk, says Fitzgerald, will last about thirty cleanings.
8. Have head alignment checked, to reduce disk errors. With heads out of whack, your machine may be the only one that can read your disks—not even identical machines. A crude way of assuring proper alignments, in fact, might be to see if other machines can read disks written on your micro.
9. Buy quality disks. Of course, the more you spend on disks, the more expensive your backups become—discouraging you from making them. Find a balance between cost and convenience that suits your security needs.
Timing—that’s the secret to saving your electronic diamonds or rhinestones on your floppies, whatever the quality.
In the past, working just with paper, timing meant to me nothing more than the Rothman Chronological Method. The newer the document on my desk, the closer it would be to the top of the file. It wasn’t the most efficient way. But I rarely lost material, just temporarily misplaced it. Computerizing, however, I worried.
“Floppies are treacherous,” my friend Michael Canyes said like a John Bircher discussing commies. “They always trick you when you least expect it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “The way you’re encouraging me to computerize, I’m beginning to think you actually want to sabotage me. Help me lose my manuscripts and all that.”
“Just back up your copy page or so,” Michael said.
“Isn’t that a lot of trouble?”
“Maybe twenty seconds. Then you’re protected if the power fails. Or maybe your computer. You can’t afford to have your material stored just in on[in on] your chip. It’s just temporary. You cut off the current a fraction of a second, it’ll forget everything. You’ve got to get your stuff on the disk ASAP.”
All right, I supposed my creative juices wouldn’t dry up during the half minute the disk drive was whirring.
“The ‘Save’ command on WordStar is KS,” Michael said. “Just hold down the ‘Control’ button on your computer while you’re doing that. Then you’ll hear a whir and the disk drive clicking away.” Somehow my Kaypro was coming across as an animal to be fed during training; the clicking could be the sound of a dog chomping up candied biscuits after a successful lesson.
“You’re also going to make backup disks,” Michael said. “Sort of like electronic carbon paper.”
“I don’t have time,” I said.
“You’ll find time. You can do it in just a minute or so. You can even use a scratch disk to be safe.”
“What’s a scratch disk?”
“Suppose the power failed or something went wrong with your machine while you were making your copy,” Michael said. “Then you could be up the creek without a paddle. You might lose both the original and the copy.”
“So?”
“That’s why you have a scratch disk. You copy on it first. If something goes haywire, then you’re still safe. Because, during your last work session, you made a backup.”
“Theoretically,” I said.
“And if something goes wrong while you’re recording on your permanent backup disk, then you can just work from the scratch disk. It’s just what it sounds, sort of a scratch pad.”
“Oh, I’ll use paper, thank you,” I persisted. “The best backup yet. It’ll be years before it falls apart. And who knows? Maybe by then the Library of Congress will be preserving my manuscripts.”
Michael withheld a guffaw.
“Well, I can type a mean streak on my Selectric,” I said. “I can get my stuff back into the computer in no time.”
Always the patient teacher, Michael didn’t argue.
Presumably, however, another writer nowadays would have agreed with Michael immediately. His editors had been looking forward to having the printer set type from the disk he’d submit with the paper version of his manuscript—a crowded floppy storing every single byte from his toil. Then the editors could bring the book out six or eight weeks faster, with the disk in the printer’s hands. But in this unlucky man’s case the disk never reached the printer’s hungry computer—he hadn’t, alas, made an electronic copy. A case of hubris if ever there was one.
You might avoid such traumas by following the Rothman Chronological Method II (RCM II), a lazy man’s form of data security for those with fast printers:
1. Every five minutes or so, type out the “KS” or an equivalent and dump your work of the moment into the disk—for, ideally, permanent preservation.
2. Every half an hour make a printout of your recent work. With a fast printer, that’ll still be faster than messing around with an electronic copy at this point. Remember, you still have the backup disk from your last work session. So even if the original fails, you’ll need to reenter just the newest material.
3. Every day make your backup floppy. You might forget about the scratch disk and make two copies.
What about working with hard disks? Well, Winchesters are more dependable than floppies. On the other hand, they commonly store many times more material than do the soft disks—meaning perhaps a fiftyfold increase in your agony if one fails.
“Always try to use an uninterruptible power supply with your Winchester,” warns Fitzgerald, whose former company produces hard disks as well as floppies. Some manufacturers say their hard disks don’t need this protection. But, in general, it’s a good idea; here’s why.
Normally, the head picking up the magnetic patterns is only ten or twenty thousandths of an inch from the oxide-coated disk. The disk is aluminum—and shear-prone in the event of a crash. Instead of the typical soft whirl, you’ll hear an ear-piercing squeal like a car brake out of adjustment, except that the aftermath will be more costly. Repairs may run into the hundreds of dollars, not to mention the loss of data.
Not every power failure will produce a disk crash. But why gamble with your Winchester and its data?
An uninterruptible power supply will protect them by pumping out juice long enough for you to know something is amiss and shut the disk down. It sells for several hundred dollars, commonly, and is normally worth it.
“Also,” says Fitzgerald, “be sure the drive is grounded and shielded as the manufacturer recommends. If not, power surges could cause it to lose track of its data.”
He suggests one more precaution. Since the disk and the head are so close, why not warn furniture bangers? This could change. Hard disks are shock mounted in some portables nowadays, so that the equipment isn’t quite that delicate. But I’d still try not to be too klutzy around it—and to be careful in other respects.
You can back up a Winchester in one of several ways:
1. Dumping to floppies. It’s cheap but slow. Then again, you can speed up the process by updating only the files you’ve been working on. You just “write” over them.
2. Transferring the Winchester’s contents to a special tape drive large enough to hold them. This method is fast but may cost you a good $1,500.
3. Dumping to an ordinary videocassette recorder. Although slow, it’s okay up to around 100 megabytes or so, and you can set the VCR timer to “watch television” off the Winchester at night when you’re not using it.
“Interesting,” you say, “but how about the lap-sized portable I’m considering? How do I protect the information inside that?” The best way, of course, is not to lose the memory and the rest of the portable; as a well-practiced raincoat forgetter, I’ll never be the ideal owner of a lap-sized portable.
Common sense, too, suggests that you not store a lap-size portable inside a car with the sun blazing down—bad news for heat-sensitive chips and other parts.
If your portable uses a bubble memory, your data-security problems are milder in some respects than with other kinds. The bubbles are tiny magnetized areas inside a small metal container. Magnetized “north,” a bubble might mean a bit specifying “one.” Magnetized “south,” it could mean zero. (You’ll recall that bits form a byte standing for a letter or number.) Magnetic bubble memories aren’t that much faster than disks, but they keep remembering forever—unlike the CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) RAMs used in many portables.
An RAM will develop amnesia if your power fails, and a CMOS RAM is no different. It’s just that the CMOS keeps the power requirements extralow so small batteries can dribble out the needed juice after you’ve “officially” switched your machine off. This “hibernation” may last weeks or months. (Check your instruction manual.) You’re in great shape, however, only as long as your batteries are; the Eveready commercials may talk of nine lives, but your data may have only one. Someday your care may count more than ever. Low-cost CMOS RAMs may eventually store thousands of pages on one chip; and power failure might not be the only risk.
Imagine. You can tap out a chapter of your 1,000-page great American novel some bitter winter night, lazing on the rug by your fireplace. Your lover is stroking your back and—ZAP! Since CMOS RAMs are such low-voltages devices, think what thousands of volts from static can do.
Here’s one solution to the portables’ static problems. Before computing, you might discharge yourself on a nearby vent or anything else that’s grounded. You can also spray your home and office rugs with Static Guard or its equivalent. And you also can use a static mat—cheap at your local computer store—if the zaps persist.
What about a plane thirty thousand feet up? Then you might try discharging yourself against a metal ashtray before using your portable. If it’s all plastic, with no metal parts, by the way, your risks are much less than otherwise. But they’re still there.
Whatever style portable you’re using, remember the importance of backups—however inconvenient or costly. Through a cable called a null modem, you can pipe valuable reports from your portable to a larger computer a few feet away. You may want to do this, anyhow. Your lap-sized computer simply may run out of storage room much more quickly than a bigger machine and may lack floppy disks to spread those bits and bytes around. So make sure your portable software lets you zip material back and forth between machines.
“And in the field? What backup technique, then?”
Well, you’re often stuck with slow, tape-style storage. And mini-disk drives may be expensive and take up room if they’re not already in your portable.
But why not see if your company will let you send valuable reports over the phone for temporary storage in its big computer? You can also stash them away inside a desktop computer hooked up to the portable the same way. And there’s yet another answer. Rent electronic storage space on a commercial computer network like The Source of CompuServe.
In the future, maybe computer memories—on little portables and desktops alike—won’t be so temperamental. Perhaps there will be superreliable CMOS RAMs. Or how about practical, low-cost disks that you use lasers to “read” and “write” on? Dreams, dreams!
Meanwhile, most of us struggle along with floppies and must keep thinking, Backup! Handle carefully! Clean! Maintain! and How often? In summary, keep asking yourself:
1. How much time or money does it take to enter your data or set up your computer equipment?
2. How easily could you duplicate or replace it?
3. How much time or money do you have for copying, cleaning, maintenance, whatever precaution you’re taking?
Do keep data security in perspective. Remember, even if you must be a zealot at times, it’s just part of surviving with your computer. Harold Joseph Highland, a data-security stalwart in his work—a believer in two backup disks of book manuscripts—tells of people who make out very well with far less copying. They are students at the University of Minnesota, computer-science majors, and they trudge through snow and ice carrying unbacked-up floppies in their books. Their professors are tolerant. If a disk fails and a student’s assignment is late, they understand. The students can’t afford too many floppies, and some just don’t have the time for backups. It’s the same, perhaps, at countless other colleges, and maybe that’s only right for twenty-year-olds who’ll learn soon enough about disappointments beyond the campus.
But you’re in business, perhaps, without a friendly professor ready with a sympathetic nod. Your making regular backups is just plain good sense, and if you don’t, you deserve what’s coming to you.
Isn’t that what data security should be about?
It needn’t be Orwellian at all. If anything, in fact, Winston Smith had more of a data-security problem than Big Brother. Privacy, certainly, is an important data-security element, as is what the jargonists call integrity—accuracy and completeness of files. Think of Winston Smith and his appreciation of history and Big Brother’s propensity for tampering with the contents of back issues of the London Times! Even if “1984” has already become a year, the number, to true believers in data security, remains a warning.
This will be especially true as more and more machines swap secrets over the wires between home and office.
11
Wired to Work
John Fuller’s daughter is grown now, and he’s taken over her room, cluttering it with computer and boating magazines and his Heathkit micro. At first glance it looks like the computer room of any of thousands of hobbyists. You may, in fact, catch whiffs of smoke from Fuller’s soldering gun.
It’s an unlikely setting for a working office of the U.S. Navy.
And yet that’s exactly what it was when Lieutenant Commander Fuller responded to my notice on an electronic bulletin board asking if anyone at home was hooked up to his boss via computers.
“I’ve been getting away with it for six months,” Fuller drawled proudly.
On the verge of retirement from the navy, he was determined to telecommute in civilian life, too, perhaps as a management consultant, his military job. “It seems foolish for me to get in a car to go to an office,” he said, “if I can go to that office by phone. I’m much happier not having to get into traffic for forty-five minutes each morning. I can have coffee and read the Washington Post, and I’m not tense. I work fewer hours. But I don’t have five or six guys to talk to about ball scores, either. The government’s getting a better deal from me working at home.”
In fact, Electronic Services Unlimited (ESU), a research firm in New York City, found typical productivity increases between 15 and 20 percent.
So it isn’t surprising that at least 250 firms, including some big names like American Express and McDonald’s, were allowing work at home as of 1984. Many more companies might be. They might have kept quiet, however, fearing either (1) union resistance or (2) pressure from employees who wanted to telecommute before management was ready for them to do so.
“I look outside my Manhattan window and think some cities are going to be transformed—streets will be empty,” InfoWorld quoted an ESU official.
That might have been stretching it. In 1984 only several thousand people were full-time telecommuters on a payroll. But Jack M. Nilles, coiner of the word “telecommuting,” said the number may have reached twenty thousand if you included other people.[[59]] Lone individuals, stockbrokers, even a software house organized “on-line,” were trying it. And Nilles, a future studies researcher at the University of Southern California, was predicting perhaps as many as ten million wired workers by 1990. He said most of the ten million would telecommute only part time. Still, that would be a huge number, perhaps one-fifth of the information workers in the United States.
You might beat the crowd in the most obvious way—by becoming a do-it-yourself telecommuter, perhaps without even leaving your present job. “Wired to Work” will explain. You’ll also learn how your company might benefit from large-scale telecommuting. Even small firms can come out ahead. A growing translation service in Washington, D.C., squeezed into the basement of the owner’s home, lends tiny Radio Shack computers to workers.
Telecommuting may very well help your firm reduce real estate costs; hire better people, clerical and professional; and get a head start on your competitors, mixing high tech with decency and managerial common sense. No, I’m not going to suggest putting a “For Sale” sign tomorrow on your corporate skyscraper. Telecommuting isn’t for every worker or every company. American bureaucracies, however, public and private, are not yet tapping the full potential of telecommuting. As far back as 1970 Commerce Department statistics showed that half of American workers dealt in information, whether it was travel agenting, technical writing, or filling out 10K forms.
Match those statistics with Jack Nilles’s estimate that more than 2.5 million nonfarmers in the United States already work at home, and you can appreciate telecommuting’s prospects.
Fuller’s case, in particular, shows how countless Americans might leap at the chance to telecommute.
His employer was a bureaucracy, a huge one, hardly a trendies’ citadel, lacking an official telecommuting program, and yet he carved out his own niche as a wired worker. The Navy allowed a few other men from his office to write and think at home. But the resourceful Fuller went a step beyond; he took the initiative of hooking himself up electronically. And he told me, “I’ll never again work where I don’t want to be.” It seemed so logical. Now that telecommuting was technologically possible, why shouldn’t employees ask for it? Why shouldn’t telecommuting be a grass-roots movement among professionals in large organizations, not just the province of corporate planners and rich escapees from Wall Street? Moreover, with his down-to-earth wisdom expressed plainly in a Georgia accent, John Fuller couldn’t be shrugged off as a dreamy hacker.
The purists might not have accepted Fuller into the telecommuting fold, since he was still spending at least one-quarter of his forty-hour week in other people’s offices. To me, though, he was all the better an illustration of how people and companies could gracefully change over.
As an in-house consultant, Fuller went from office to office, telling, for instance, how the Naval Academy could set up a cost-analysis formula for its laundry or how a base commander could consolidate two computer systems. His “clients” were not completely “on-line.” And he appreciated the value of face-to-face meetings where he could smooth ruffled feathers with southern humor. “I may look like another alligator,” he would tell bureaucrats intimidated by the presence of a management consultant, “and I may be taking you away from your work, but I need information from you to help you do it better.” Fuller would also stray into his boss’s office from time to time for library research and to remind people he was still breathing.
Every few days he reminded them in other, more meaningful ways. He would load up his little Heath computer with disks containing the report he was working on and a communications program. The computer would then pipe the output to his modem, which sped the results to a Wang word processor in his office—well, his former office.
A secretary would capture the information on a disk, watching in appreciation as Fuller’s work flashed across the Wang’s screen at several hundred words per minute.
“The secretaries don’t admit to being threatened,” he said. “They’re still busy transcribing the stuff the other guys bring in. And if the others were transmitting it like me, they’d still need to do the final formating, editing, the modifications required of these things.
“Besides, there’s got to be someone there who answers the phone.”
Baby-sitting a computer by the phone doesn’t sound like the most challenging task, but one day many of the secretaries themselves may work at home.
Granted, some management-level workers worry that telecommuting would lower their own job status by forcing them to work keyboards. “If I were a civilian at some companies and I sat down at a keyboard and composed my day’s work,” Fuller admitted, “a clerk or administrative-type person might complain to the personnel office that I was clerical rather than professional and should be demoted.
“As the younger generation of managers grows up with keyboards and rises higher in the power structure,” Fuller said, however, “you’ll find the stigma fading.” By century’s end, moreover, a voice-controlled computer might sell for less than $1,000. Good-bye, typing! You may still use a keyboard, actually—but just to clean up sentences where the computer confused “sleigh” with “slay” or muddled similar combinations.
Should you, then, even today, follow Fuller’s example and make yourself a telecommuter?
Consider:
1. How much public contact does your job require and in what form? And how much contact do you have with your coworkers?
Fuller didn’t need to have strangers passing through his office. His job, rather, called for him to go to “clients.” Also, he was working on his own projects, not entangled in office-wide activities, and he didn’t need constant feedback from his boss.
2. Does your job require much office politics, and how secure are you in it?
John Fuller was about to retire. Had he been a young manager fighting for a promotion, he might not have chosen to remain most of the time out of his boss’s sight. Then again, he did have the benefit of a superior more enlightened than many. His boss wanted results, not mere attendance.
Margrethe Olson, an associate professor at New York University’s business school, warns that some telecommuters may suffer at promotion time. She correctly wonders about “the long-term career potential of an employee in an environment where visibility is still critical to promotability.” In a 1982 paper Olson observed: “Some form of management by objectives, either informal or formal, generally needs to replace ‘over the shoulder’ supervision, in spirit as well as in fact.” As she once said, “Culture changes more slowly than technology.”
Keep in mind the experiences of a vice-president of a New York consulting firm who telecommuted from Florida.
When the New York Times interviewed him, he insisted that he remain nameless, lest the wrong people in the firm find out about the arrangement.[[60]] “I still think there’s a mentality around there that people who work at home are not working,” he said, adding, however:
“I like to have uninterrupted periods of work alone. If I have to stop and go to a meeting for two hours, I lose more than two hours.”
3. What becomes of the clerks and secretaries whose work your telecommuting may change or reduce?
Fuller’s “disappearance” from his regular office didn’t put anyone out on the street. It merely lightened the secretaries’ work loads.
4. How expensive, and how much trouble technically, would telecommuting be to your company and to you?
In Fuller’s case it was relatively easy. His office already had the word processor, and as a computer hobbyist he already owned the Heath micro. Ever ingenious, he devised an easy way of entering data so the Wang, which justified margins by the paragraph, could function with his home system, which did so by the line. (See Backup [XI], “The Micro Connection: Some Critical Explanations,” for more tips on links between your own micro and the office’s.)
John Fuller’s electronic hookup cost next to nothing. A modem like his—the device allows a computer to talk over the phone—would sell for about $100 today. Faster modems may cost $300-$600.
It pays to check out technical specifications and shop around. The old compatibility rule applies here: don’t believe that any combinations of equipment will work together until you’ve actually tested them out. Obtain a store’s promise that you’ll win a refund if the systems won’t talk to one another electronically. You’ll also need to make sure that the computers have communications programs that function together. A good communications program for a micro—one that’s easy to use and lets you store information to be transmitted—can cost less than $150. Even free software may work for you. I didn’t pay a cent for my MODEM7 program, which the writers placed in the public domain.
Normally, as a do-it-yourself telecommuter, you should favor micros over “dumb terminals.” At least make certain you can easily accumulate large masses of material to shoot out over the phone lines. That way you’ll conserve your company’s phone and computer resources. Suppose, however, that somehow they’re both unlimited and you don’t mind a phone line being tied up while you’re dumping material into the big corporate computer. Then maybe you can get away with a dumb terminal costing just a few hundred dollars.
5. How do you normally gather information in your job? By phone? By looking over written material? By tapping into your company’s computer?
If facts normally reach you by phone, you can install a special business line and tell your colleagues that, no, they won’t disturb you at home—that your work is what the line’s for.
Written material is trickier, of course. One answer may be a facsimile machine, which could cost more than your computer but may be justified if drawings are part of your work. In the future, even cheap personal computers will have attachments to scan written documents and zip the images over the phone lines. Already some expensive Wangs offer this feature.
Meanwhile, like Fuller, you may want to catch up with written material by visiting your office every few days, or you may try a formal or informal messenger service—perhaps a coworker.
If you must tap into your company’s own computer, make certain you can do so without any data-security complications. And consider how accessible your corporate data base is to begin with. Maybe there aren’t ways of conveniently plugging in—in which case you’d better rid yourself of plans for do-it-yourself telecommuting.
6. Would your family leave you alone while you telecommuted?
You must work out a deal with them that includes a place to work without interruption, rules for phone messages, and so on.
7. What about potential marital problems?
“If you work in your employer’s office, your spouse doesn’t show up very often,” says Walter I. Nissen, Jr., a programmer-consultant who, off and on, has been telecommuting in various jobs since the late 1960s. “But if you’re home, your spouse can get angry at you, face-to-face, right there.” He finds telecommuting to be easier with his wife now working as a social worker.
8. Do you have the drive to do your job alone?
“I’m not a Theory X man,” says Fuller, referring to the school of management that says people work best with the boss peering over their shoulders.
Don’t mess with do-it-yourself telecommuting if you aren’t a self-starter—a useful trait even in corporately initiated programs. Don’t recommend it to anyone lacking this trait.
9. Can your boss measure your performance objectively? This isn’t necessary but it helps.
Michael K. Caverly, a recently retired captain and John Fuller’s former supervisor, couldn’t give any precise figures comparing the overall quality of the telecommuter’s work to earlier times. But Caverly was plainly delighted. He believes that Fuller performed better without having to worry everyday about the horrors of rush hour. “I almost feel guilty about it,” he said of Fuller’s diligence. “He would rework a problem all night long, and I’d feel almost as if I were taking advantage of him. In our office we did thirty-three studies one year, and John’s studies were the only ones that came in on time all the time.”
Jeremy Joan Hewes is also sold on telecommuting. “Can you work at home?” Hewes’s own boss asked when he hired her for PC Magazine, an independent publication for owners of the IBM PC.
“That’s where the computer is,” she replied happily.
It made sense. Hewes had her North Star micro there, after all. What’s more, she’d written a book on “worksteaders,” as she called them, and by her late thirties had worked at home most of her professional life. So why not use her North Star there and modem her stories in? She might even edit others’ articles sent over the phone lines.[lines.] The magazine wouldn’t have to jam another human sardine into the cramped offices it then occupied above a restaurant in northwest San Francisco. She could work better alone. The pay would be the same for her hundred hours a month. And she could enjoy tax breaks on computer equipment, supplies, even some of her rent.
The magazine, in return, ended up getting more than five thousand words a month from her, sometimes double that amount, while, at the same time, as an associate editor, she regularly oversaw at least one other writer. She also did additional work for which she was paid beyond the hundred hours.
“It’s a lot less chaotic at home,” said Hewes, who also was writing books. “I don’t have to dress up. I normally wear jeans or corduroys. I can start work at dawn in my bathrobe and answer the phone that way if it rings while I’m headed for the shower. I don’t have to drive through traffic jams every day. Or stand up for twenty minutes on a bus, hanging on for dear life to a pole, jolting along the street. I work in surroundings I’ve created.”
She created them with both the IRS and aesthetics in mind. Her apartment, near the Golden Gate Bridge, was on the second floor of a seventy-year-old house with high ceilings and leaded bay windows. A bookshelf and wooden cabinet set the computer area apart. Her keyboard and video screen were atop a custom-crafted table with fruitwood edges; she can work alongside her cocker spaniel-poodle, and through the bays she could see a doll-repair shop. It was vintage San Francisco. No matter that neighbors’ punk-rock music once besieged her ears or that practice pitchers sometimes thudded tennis balls against the house or that apartments cluttered what once were sand dunes. Several times a day she switched on her answering machine, a device she deemed necessary for worksteads. Then she’d swim laps at a nearby pool or walk her dog amid cypress and eucalyptus trees, perhaps with friends, perhaps alone, perhaps mulling over future articles for PC, where she once warned would-be telecommuters of the need for “regular breaks from the concentration of work.” At the same time she lectured herself and others on the need for self-discipline. She trained her friends to realize that she was earning a living, not goofing off—a confusion that may fade as telecommuting becomes a more mundane pursuit.
She kept her sanity and a schedule—well, a writer’s equivalent of a schedule—by remembering how she had promised to research X material by Y date and how she would complete an article on time. “I go to an editorial meeting,” she said, “and I say, ‘Here’s what I want to write for the March issue.’ They say, ‘Oh, gosh, someone else is doing that,’ or, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ or, ‘Fine, hand it in by the fifteenth.’”
“Rarely,” Hewes said of her editors, “can I imagine them calling me at eight in the morning to transmit a story in an hour.”
Mostly, in fact, she sent in her stories at night through her computer. Her IBM—she loyally bought one to replace the North Star—talked over the phone to the magazine’s machine with an automatic-answer modem. She could tell the office computer to save her copy on a disk. Except for light editing and formating, no human normally needed to type another keystroke; PC’s computers tied in with the printer’s.
It sounds HALish, depersonalized, but like Fuller, she and others at the magazine tried to infuse their work with as much warmth as they could.
No one at PC was leaving martinetlike orders—unaccompanied by conversation, phone or otherwise—on the green screen. And Hewes painstakingly consulted over the phone with her writers. Moreover, while Hewes worked from home at least seventy of the hundred hours, she was at the PC offices several times a week to socialize, pick up mail, and swap ideas. And she would have come in, occasionally, anyway, even if she lived fifty miles from the magazine. (Also, she was in the field for face-to-face interviews, just as Fuller, working for the Navy, would visit his “clients.”) As the telecommuting movement grows, workers and supervisors alike should remember to see and speak to others, not just key to each other.
Whatever the case here, both Hewes and PC were tickled with her telecommuting arrangement. “We’re not paying for office space, electricity, desk space,” said David H. Bunnell, then publisher and editor in chief. “She even provides her own coffee.” An office for her might have cost the equivalent of $1,200 a year. More important, however, Bunnell happily noted the thousands of words she writes for each issue: “She couldn’t be more productive, and she does her research conscientiously. Like the article she did on printers. It was obvious she’d surveyed twenty or thirty manufacturers in the field.”
Close to a year later, Hewes told me that she was no longer telecommuting regularly. Bunnell had been so happy with her work that he had appointed her editor at the book division of PC World, which he had started after leaving PC Magazine. Hewes still loved the concept of telecommuting. But she understood its limits better. “When I was an associate editor of PC Magazine,” she said, “I was actually more of a writer than an editor, and I didn’t have to be as much a manager as I am now. But now I have to juggle ten book projects and do budgets and go to several meetings a week. My ideal thing would be to go to the office two days a week and work at home the other three. I figure I’ll work on that for next year. Now all I’ve got to do is get everyone I need to see to come in the same two days that I do!”
Bunnell himself offers another qualification in praising telecommuting—not everyone has the needed discipline—but he says telecommuting can work especially well for people who write or sell. One New York magazine publisher, in fact, developed a special computer system for handicapped people, featuring written prompts to keep sales pitches consistent. And Bunnell thinks that telecommuting can work for executives, too, with the right system, taking advantage of computerized records of the words they keyed in.
Can clerical-level workers, however, also telecommute happily?
A South Carolina case illustrates both the blessings and potential pitfalls of telecommuting for clerical people.[[61]]
Blue Cross-Blue Shield there says it isn’t running an electronic sweatshop. The telecommuters’ rewards are roughly comparable to those of the regular office workers, and some cottage keyers can actually come out far ahead. The program has been going on for years. And there’s a long waiting list.
Ann Blackwell, one of the keyers, transmits her work back to Blue Cross at the crack of dawn; then she can fix breakfast for her two children and take breaks for household work and lunch. “I’d rather do this than go to the office,” she said. “I don’t have to dress. I don’t have someone looking over my shoulder all the time to see if I’m working.”
In a typical day a “cottage keyer” processes 360 claims forms from doctors. The pay is sixteen cents a claim, or $57.60 for the 360, minus a levy of $10.20 for equipment rental, meaning that the worker ends up with $47.40 before taxes.
That’s $2.18 more a day than full-time employees at Blue Cross receive for similar work, if you consider the full timers’ benefits like holidays, sick leave, vacation, and disability and health insurance. A good clerk could earn some $12,000 a year. And $12,000 is nothing to sneer at in South Carolina where many living costs are low.
However:
1. The cottage keyers are paying more than $2,600 a year to rent their machines. Doesn’t this smack of company-store tactics in a mining town? Why not finance the purchase of the worker’s own machine, which he or she might pay off in a year? Blue Cross official Tim Blackwell—who has given his company some useful feedback based on his wife’s experiences—defends the steep charge for the machines. He says it’s actually an incentive. The more a cottage keyer works and earns, the smaller will be the percentage of her income going to pay for the terminal cost.
2. The telecommuters don’t get the security that full timers do.
3. Likewise, the cottage keyers lack the normal fringe benefits. The program could delight a wife whose husband holds a steady job with good health insurance and other benefits. On the other hand, the arrangement could be bad news for a worker depending on the telecommuting for his or her main income. Significantly, women head most single-parent households.
4. The keyers may not be sharing the experiment’s rewards fifty-fifty. Excluding minor administrative expenses, the telecommuters’ services cost the firm $47.40 a day on the average, minus whatever profit the company may make off the terminals it rents to the workers. Let’s say the final expense is $45. By contrast, the regular workers cost at least[at least] $50.52 a day if you include vacation, fringe benefits, and the $5.30 that the firm pays for a terminal lease. Missing, however, are the expenses of office space. Also, the company’s getting slightly more work from the telecommuters with only about 12 percent as many errors!
Could an antitelecommuting backlash develop as workers catch on to the economics?
Already the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Services Employees International Union have proposed the outlawing of computer homework. Given the political climate of the mid-1980s, that seemed unlikely. This could change, however. Gil Gordon, an ex-Johnson and Johnson personnel man turned telecommuting consultant, correctly warns against using telecommuting to bargain down workers’ pay or bust up organizing drives.
“There’s nothing new about shift work, piecework, which is what pay per line of information is,” says Karen Nussbaum, president of 9 to 5, the National Association of Working Women. “Or pay by keystroke homework. That’s a step back into the Middle Ages, if you ask me, and into the cottage industries.”[[62]]
A difference exists, after all, between creative jobs, like Hewes’s, and those that, in any setting, will be drudge work. The question is Where will the typing, the data entry, the other labor, be more palatable—home or normal office? And ideally that’s a worker-by-worker, company-by-company, decision. Perhaps some workers will eventually strike for the right to telecommute. In fact, Glenn E. Watts, president of the Communications Workers of America, while frowning on electronic scabbing, once said that telecommuters might even plug into union gatherings. Union opposition to telecommuting could very well change. The big variable is whether companies will follow Gil Gordon’s wise advice not to use telecommuting as a union-busting ploy.
Of course, presently, home work isn’t for all. Today a telecommuter can’t make steel, cars, or refrigerators by remote control. He or she can’t cook a Big Mac, sweep a floor, run a supermarket checkout, or load a truck; for telecommuting is now strictly the province of white-collar workers and professionals. Indeed, companies in predominantly blue-collar fields may decide that certain office jobs just defy wiring in. Suppose an auto worker suffers a series of late paychecks. Will a payroll clerk sitting in a comfortable suburban home be as responsive as he might be dealing with the man face-to-face?
Even in basically white-collar fields, some bosses and employers may look askance at universal telecommuting.
Some, for instance, may miss the hints of body language, the blink of an eye, the tapping feet, the little, subtle signs that many people feel to “read” friend and foe. Others simply miss seeing people hard at work. A Seattle hospital administrator, a telecommuter supervising two others working at home, says: “It ultimately comes down to an honor system.”[[63]]
So if you don’t trust your underlings and can’t objectively measure their output, you’d better keep your workers at the office and watch for eye blinks.
Not that every employee will want to telecommute, anyway. Management Recruiters International, Inc. asked six thousand people if they’d be willing to telecommute several days a week. Only 36 percent said they would. That’s still an impressive percentage, and it will grow as more people appreciate telecommuting’s virtues and it becomes more socially acceptable, but there’ll always be skeptics like Jack Smith.[[64]]
He’s a columnist with the Los Angeles Times, which once freed him of his commute. After six weeks, however, his granddaughter broke his typewriter, and he temporarily returned to the newspaper, where he rediscovered the joys of face-to-face contact and decided to remain. His columns perked up. He had missed “the friendly faces, fresh in the morning; the clothes; the gossip; the flirtations; the benign conspiracies; lunch-hour expeditions; the open forums on war and peace, Reaganomics, and the Rams quarterback controversy, none of which could be examined with such reckless spontaneity by anything canned for consumption on your home computer.”
“He realized that he really came back to the office not just to write but to renew his interaction with human life,” says William Renfro, a Washington consultant.[[65]]
Then again, Maxine Messinger, a gossip columnist with the Houston Chronicle, writes happily on a computer at home and brags that she hasn’t been to the office in years.
“For a long time it’s been far more efficient for me to work at home,” says another confirmed telecommuter, Hollis Vail, a part-time management consultant with the U.S. Geological Survey.
“I use my computer for writing, reports, and sending reports and messages,” he says, “and I can get all the data I want from the system.” The U.S. Geological Survey has thousands of people using electronic mail, and Vail can even hold conferences over the wire and record the results on his computer disks. Then he can sum them up. In fact, he can electronically cut and paste to produce policy documents reflecting many viewpoints.
David Snyder, now a professional futurist and consultant, fondly remembers the computerized conferences of his days as an Internal Revenue Service official. “I wrote a book with eight other people,” he says, “and we didn’t meet until it was written. It was a much better product because we could work that way. The travel would have been too expensive. And the mails would have been too much of a delay.” The coauthors left their contributions in each other’s electronic mailboxes for perusal and change. Back then Snyder was on a government computer, but later he hooked up an Apple in his Maryland home; he was planning to connect with aunts, uncles, and other members of his extended family, nationwide, who, together, do consulting and produce films. “You can’t have a mom-and-pop steel mill,” he said. “You can have a mom-and-pop information factory.”
Rank Xerox, the office equipment giant’s joint venture in England, is helping to pave the way for Mom and Pop.
It’s letting managers and other professionals telecommute. They’re no longer salaried, and they give up pensions and perks like company cars; but the “networkers,” as they’re called, normally sign two-year contracts guaranteeing them work at least two days a week. Business with other companies may take up the remaining days. In a sense the Rank Xerox program could be a large corporation’s version of the hundred-hour-a-month arrangement that Jeremy Hewes worked out with the computer magazine.
“Clearly,” says Derek Hornby, staff support director and a member of the Rank Xerox policy committee, “we need and will always have a ‘core’ staff within the head office for day-to-day management. Many functions, however, can be fulfilled by networkers.”[[66]]
Computer work, pension advising, management training, even putting out the company newsletter, are some of the tasks with which the networkers may help core staffers. Who qualifies for the program? Someone the company wants to keep but whose services it needs only part time. The first networker, Roger Walker, a former personnel manager in his late thirties, helped cut costs in the most direct way, eliminating his job. He was planning, anyway, to venture out on his own. But the Rank Xerox program eased the transition.
“What do you answer,” I asked the company, “when people say, ‘Isn’t this really just an outplacement scheme?’”
“The rough cost of someone going networking,” said Phil Judkins, a Rank Xerox spokesman in London, “is approximately three times the cost of their compensation if they were simply declared redundant by Rank Xerox.”
More than a year into the program, how were the volunteers doing?
“Extremely well,” said Judkins—all of them. He said two networkers seemed “well on the way to one-million-dollar turnover companies.”
And Rank Xerox, needless to say, didn’t supply all that business.
Along the way the corporation was benefiting from the useful business contacts that the new entrepreneurs were making outside the company. Sensibly, it discounted its model 820 microcomputer for the networkers. They could not only do their normal work but help show off a company product.
Runaway expenses, though, especially rent, were the real spur behind the experiment.
The rent on Rank Xerox’s international headquarters, in London, had doubled in just two years. Small wonder, then, that Rank Xerox wanted to trim every speck of gristle from its headquarters budget. And by late 1983 the knife seemed to be slicing well. The forty-three networkers were helping Rank Xerox save a third of a million dollars a year in office space. Judkins said: “We have rid our books of this sterile expense.”
In the United States, Mike Bell, Xerox real estate executive, is busy toting up the advantages of another form of telecommuting—moving some corporate operations out of expensive downtown areas.
“Why should a company have row after row of workers taking up desk space in back rooms in large cities,” he says, “when it could modernize its office machinery and farm them out to offices in the suburbs? An average office worker and his desk take up 200 square feet at $20 a foot in big cities. That’s $4,000 a year just for rent. Suppose you could move him to a suburb with rent at $12 a square foot. Then rent would be only $2,400 a year.”
If the employee was in a suburban office tied in to headquarters via a computer-telephone hook-up, you might save as much as $3,000 over five years—even if you counted expenses like equipment costs.[[67]]
And you might save $8,200 per employee over a five year period if the workers were at home.
The chart below assumes that (1) each employee takes up 200 square feet, including corridor, aisle, and file space, (2) the downtown rent is $20 a square foot, which is perhaps half of some Manhattan rents, (3) the suburban rent is $12 a square foot, (4) you pay home workers $4 a square foot in rent, (5) your investment in equipment for each telecommuter is $4,000, (6) the effective tax rate is 35 percent, (7) you’ll receive a tax credit of ten percent of the computer gear’s initial cost and (8) depreciation is straight line over five years. Yes, $4,000 is more than the computers might each cost; the inflated figure helps fudge for miscellaneous expenses like moving expenses and phone bills. As for tax laws, they can change. But the credit—as distinguished from depreciation—accounts for only a tiny fraction of the money you’re saving. One last point: the chart below doesn’t consider interest on what you’d be saving in rent.
Large companies, of course, could mix different forms of telecommuting and employment arrangements. They might even let some workers shift back and forth. Some employees, some of the time, anyway, would work at home, while others might be at companies’ regional or neighborhood telecommuting centers of one kind or another.
Jack Nilles’s kind of neighborhood center—at least one of the kinds he’s proposed—would be organized by corporate function. One center would bring all the accountants together, for instance,
| A COMPARISON[COMPARISON] OF OFFICE EXPENSES PER WORKER | |||||||
| CASE 1: DOWNTOWN OFFICE | |||||||
| Years | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Total |
| Rent | 0 | 4,000 | 4,000 | 4,000 | 4,000 | 4,000 | 20,000 |
| Tax Reduction at 35% Rate | 0 | -1,400 | -1,400 | -1,400 | -1,400 | -1,400 | -7,000 |
| Total Expenses | 0 | 2,600 | 2,600 | 2,600 | 2,600 | 2,600 | 13,000 |
| CASE 2: SUBURBAN OFFICE | |||||||
| Years | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Total |
| Rent | 0 | 2,400 | 2,400 | 2,400 | 2,400 | 2,400 | 12,000 |
| Tax Reduction at 35% Rate | 0 | -840 | -840 | -840 | -840 | -840 | -4,200 |
| Investment | 4,000 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4,000 |
| Tax Credit | -400 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -400 |
| Depreciation Credit | 0 | -280 | -280 | -280 | -280 | -280 | -1,400 |
| Total Expenses | 3,600 | 1,280 | 1,280 | 1,280 | 1,280 | 1,280 | 10,000 |
| CASE 3: HOME OFFICE | |||||||
| Years | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Total |
| Rent | 0 | 800 | 800 | 800 | 800 | 800 | 4,000 |
| Tax Reduction at 35% Rate | 0 | -280 | -280 | -280 | -280 | -280 | -1,400 |
| Investment | 4,000 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4,000 |
| Tax Credit | -400 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -400 |
| Depreciation Credit | 0 | -280 | -280 | -280 | -280 | -280 | -1,400 |
| Total Expenses | 3,600 | 240 | 240 | 240 | 240 | 240 | 4,800 |
and another would house a company’s public relations department. This idea does have the important advantage of, say, letting accountants pore over their electronic ledgers in each other’s company. Yet what about the unlucky ones who lived in suburbs across town?[[68]]
They would prefer, presumably, the kind of center propounded by Richard C. Harkness, a former professor at the University of Washington who later joined Satellite Business Systems.
Under the Harkness plan, an employee would go to the center closest to his home. “He might even walk there,” Harkness says. According to him, a large company might have as many neighborhood centers as elementary schools—leasing offices for individual workers or small groups. Imagine a professional building with a real estate agency next to a stockbroker, a doctor across the hall from a commodities trader. Well, that’s how it would be in a building housing neighborhood centers, except a sign outside a suite might say “General Motors” rather than “Dr. Pearlman.” Of course a company might instead have fewer centers and lease whole floors. Stepping off the elevator, you’d see the foot-high letters reminding you you were in GM territory. Workers would benefit from the companionship of perhaps several dozen colleagues, quick access to secretarial and copying services, and similar support.
“My way is more radical than locating people by jobs,” says Harkness, “since an accountant could be in one place and his boss in another.” Computer networks would maintain entire organizations; a whole new branch of management science would develop to hone procedures to manage telecommuters. Perhaps the day will come when IBM will endow Harvard Business School with a telecommuting chair.
A third form of neighborhood center would be a munytel, as I’ll call it—a municipally or privately run center with terminals capable of linking up with many companies’ equipment. Individual employees, not companies, might rent munytel offices.
Munytels would not bolster employees’ corporate loyalties; but some companies wouldn’t care, favoring other ways.[[69]]
Munytels, moreover, could be ideal for free-lance telecommuters who valued a clear line between home and office. Workers would be at these neighborhood centers all the time or whenever they preferred and space was available. Fed up temporarily with toiling alongside a sullen spouse at home? Then you’d flee to a munytel, unless your free-lance work involved confidential company information; in which case you might drive to a GM or Prudential suite with a spare terminal.
Neighbors with similar or complementary skills might gather at munytels and pool resources to seek contracts from large companies. Why not use computerized lists to bring together people in the first place? “Neighborhood work centers could themselves become employers, selling clerical or professional services to other organizations,” said one of the consultants working with Harkness on a landmark telecommuting study for the Stanford Research Institute in the late 1970s.
Munytels, in addition, could be drop-off points for messengers from corporations’ headquarters. They would deliver printed material—books, for instance—that companies couldn’t flash across the screens of telecommuters at home and munytels.
Also, and perhaps just as important, munytels could serve as informal neighborhood clubs.
They could offer food and drink and a chance to mix electronically transmitted gossip with the face-to-face kind. “Meet me,” a stock suggestion might go, “at the munytel.”
Moreover, for telecommuters unable to handle their children and jobs simultaneously, the munytels might provide child care. And in poor neighborhoods, the munytels could combine work facilities with training.
The prefiasco Continental Illinois Bank in Chicago, despite its bad luck with “problem loans,” did some enlightened work in this field. It experimented with a word-processing center twenty-five miles away at a community college. The bank used it for both training and actual bank work, a logical combination; the students have learned on equipment similar to what they would use on the job, not simply the obsolete machinery that many schools must skimp along with. Corporations, encouraged by tax breaks or government subsidies, might together establish munytels in poorer neighborhoods[neighborhoods].[[70]] They would provide the businesslike surroundings that some workers might prefer over home offices in slums or public housing projects.
Munytels would be one response to some thoughtful criticisms of telecommuting made by Janice C. Blood, 9 to 5’s information director.
“If you’re a secretary earning $11,000 a year,” she says, “will your employer build you an addition for your computer room? Even a small Apple wouldn’t be too attractive an addition to my living room.”
Blood is also worried about the cost of the equipment itself, asking, “Should someone get a cut in salary just because her boss gets [her] a new typewriter?”
More likely, however, clerical workers instead would receive some more money for turning out a lot more work. Whatever the case, munytels could be a solution to the equipment issue—in addition to the obvious one of company-supplied computers in various cases.
But workers should still be free to use their own terminals. Remember Hollis Vail’s preference for his printer?
He’s right. I could never stomach working all day on, say, one of the older Apple IIs, which some companies may still use as their universal microcomputer. My Kaypro’s keyboard has a silkier feel. The screen is more viewable than many Apple monitors, and I’m a confirmed WordStar addict. Even if voice commands become the norm, I may well be among the last of the keyboard diehards. And yet, were I telecommuting, it wouldn’t matter. A corporate computer would care about the right series and speeds of bytes, not how they originated. So I might be able to keep using my electronic equivalent of a buggy whip.
Just about anybody, moreover, will be able to afford a useful small computer before the end of the century—because sooner or later one will be cheaper than today’s typical TV sets. Flat screens and keyboards will sell for a pittance as mass production and robotics drive down costs. So much for that one of Blood’s arguments.
As for her fear of an Apple system cluttering up her living room—well, the home computer of tomorrow will probably be smaller and better looking. Or it’ll be part of your TV. If not? You may hide your equipment in a handsome, wooden cabinet that will convert to a genuinely ergonomic table of adjustable height. No, I don’t know of a product like that now. But already stores in trendy Yuppie areas are springing up with names like “Computer Support,” and some of their offerings may be as fit for your living room as for your office.
Less easily answered, however, is Blood’s worry of “a Mae West employment profile”—broad at the top, narrow at the middle, wide at the bottom. That is, there might be lush job opportunities near the top around the equivalent of Mae’s bust. A few senior managers could electronically monitor the masses toiling at home—could count and time their keystrokes.
But between the top people and the ones entering the data, companies would need many fewer run-of-the-mill supervisors.
And that would pinch off some promotion opportunities for the clerical workers.
In some ways, however, companies might make nonsupervisory work more palatable. They might, for instance, pay clerks not by individuals’ keystrokes but by those of small “telegroups,” where peer pressure would keep every member productive.
Also, companies might follow the example of Volvo, the Swedish automaker, and rotate some workers’ tasks. Some numbers crunchers might swap assignments with word-processing people. Indeed, companies could pay extra for versatility. Word-processing work today is sometimes more complicated than regular typing; but that might not always be so, and corporations could relieve some of the boredom of repetitious jobs simply by letting employees exchange them.
Still another legitimate worry is the distribution of the economic benefits of telecommuting. What’s to prevent employers from abuse of the piecework payment system if the government lets it become the norm? Could piecework be just a gimmick to help impersonally squeeze the last drop of blood from the clerical telecommuters? Is telecommuting a mean-spirited or enlightened response to the day-care problem? I suspect some companies are mean spirited. Not all. But some. Ideally, however, this won’t deprive society of telecommuting’s benefits. Munytels, after all, could help solve the child-care problem, and changes in the labor laws could guarantee the fairness of the piecework system for all. Existing ones do cover clerks doing piecework. They must, for instance, keep time records to show they’re collecting the equivalent of the minimum wage.
In a related matter, a controversy was swirling in 1984 around a 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.
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]]
“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]]
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]]
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[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,[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,’”[‘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[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.
“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:
1. Lower phone bills. In a Midwestern office of the H. J. Heinz Company, 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.
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 $1 to send 1,000 words computer-to-computer in the U.S.—including Hawaii. Indeed, Jim Fallows says he and some other Atlantic Monthly writers routinely use the service for trying articles out on each other.
In addition, MCI offers some neat little wrinkles for heavy-duty corporate users. Companies with in-house systems can set up bridges between the MCI and their existing electronic mail nets. As the MCI bragged in its on-line newsletter, you can simultaneously “send a company-wide memo electronically on your internal system; copy your attorneys, who subscribe to MCI Mail; copy your vendors with laser-printed, first-class letters,” and “deliver the boss’s copy the same day at his conference in Dallas.” If the boss is in London, a letter written on your computer can reach him by courier after a machine prints it out. What’s more, for a fraction of the cost of Telexes, you can directly reach business associates’ computers in England or a number of other countries.
Of course, especially if you’re a business, do look at the other E-Mail networks, too. I’ve written much here about MCI simply because it is one of the largest networks and I’m most familiar with it.
All the E-Mail services, at any rate, offer the same advantages over conventional letters: speed. Even skeptics see the potential. Peter Ross Range, the man with the WordStar-MCI woes, says, “I want the day to come soon when I won’t have to lick another stamp.”
Some of the most useful electronic mail can go from person[person] to another in the same building or complex—a capability made possible through local networking, discussed in the next chapter.
13
Net Gain$
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]]
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: