The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

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