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:
Do You Need One?
Don’t be expensively trendy. You have just three other people in the office, and the paperwork isn’t piled that high? Then you might be much better off trading floppies.
But if you’re a busy law office, you might want to get a lot of standard, boilerplate paragraphs from a hard disk shared via a network or multiuser system.
Especially you might consider a network or multiuser system where more than one person is constantly dipping into the same data base. Suppose Production wants to know five times a day how many widget parts Inventory has left in fifteen categories. Then a network could help. The Sales Department, after all, may want to use the same computer to find out how many finished products are in stock.