2. Who’ll manage the network? Who’ll determine who can see what electronic files? Who’ll keep track of passwords? Who’ll make sure that a careless but talented worker can’t destroy irreplaceable information? You don’t, by the way, want your network manager to turn power hungry. “He shouldn’t be the network police,” jokes Bigelow. “He should be the network janitor—in the sense of keeping everything in place electronically. You might also think of him as a network teacher. He can help tell people the right way to do things.” Bigelow, in fact, warns against one person holding sway over the others by being the only one familiar with network procedures.
3. Do you want to assign special network-related duties to other people? One employee, for instance, may be the custodian of an expensive laser printer and make sure that other people are using it most efficiently.
4. Who will work at what node? That’s jargon for a location or work station.
5. Will some people share work stations? If so, you’d better decide which tasks in your office are going to be done in what corners of the room.
6. Which computers will store which electronic files?
7. How many printers and other gizmos will people share, and where will they go? Presumably, you don’t want a printer five hundred feet from the people feeding their files into it.
You also should decide how many expensive, letter-quality printers you need and how many cheapies like dot matrixes. Make up your mind—before your office wastes $4,000 on a second laser printer when just one might do.
The same idea might apply to high-speed modems if your network allows computers to share them.
8. What kinds of computers are you planning to hook up? The WEB as of mid-1984 was running only with Kaypros. But a version for IBMs was in the works.
One advantage of a big-name network, however, is that it may more easily get machines of different brands on speaking terms. That could count if you’re planning to trade in your old micros soon.