The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

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. Footnote 76: The example of computerized conferencing comes from Participation Systems, Inc., a Winchester, Massachusetts, firm that provided the software for computer conferencing on The Source. 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 $1 to send 1,000 words computer-to-computer in the U.S.—including Hawaii. Indeed, Jim Fallows says he and some other _Atlantic Monthly_ writers routinely use the service for trying articles out on each other. In addition, MCI offers some neat little wrinkles for heavy-duty corporate users. Companies with in-house systems can set up bridges between the MCI and their existing electronic mail nets. As the MCI bragged in its on-line newsletter, you can simultaneously “send a company-wide memo electronically on your internal system; copy your attorneys, who subscribe to MCI Mail; copy your vendors with laser-printed, first-class letters,” and “deliver the boss’s copy the same day at his conference in Dallas.” If the boss is in London, a letter written on your computer can reach him by courier after a machine prints it out. What’s more, for a fraction of the cost of Telexes, you can directly reach business associates’ computers in England or a number of other countries. Of course, especially if you’re a business, do look at the other E-Mail networks, too. I’ve written much here about MCI simply because it is one of the largest networks and I’m most familiar with it. All the E-Mail services, at any rate, offer the same advantages over conventional letters: speed. Even skeptics see the potential. Peter Ross Range, the man with the WordStar-MCI woes, says, “I want the day to come soon when I won’t have to lick another stamp.” Some of the most useful electronic mail can go from person to another in the same building or complex—a capability made possible through local networking, discussed in the next chapter. 13 ❑ Net Gain$ 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: