The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

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, 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, 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,’” 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 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. Footnote 75: Some of the material in this chapter originally appeared in an article I did for _USA Today_. I’ve also made use of facts from the _Wall Street Journal_, March 16, 1984, p. 29. “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