The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

machine via the network. “In each case,” said Madden, “there was an increase in time, but it was still acceptable.” So Carsonville bought The WEB and saved a pile compared to doing it with an old or a new mini. 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] Footnote 77: Bigelow’s company, Adevco, Inc., 2145 Market St., Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, manufactures The WEB equipment under a license from The WEB’s designers. That’s Centram Systems, Inc., P.O. Box 511, Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, which also sells to manufacturers to add to their computers. A California company, Trantor Systems, likewise makes a network called WEB: this may or may not mean a name change for the Centram technology. At any rate, Adevco itself may abandon the WEB name for other reasons. “We may drop the name and market the product with the same technology in a different version under a number of names,” said Bigelow. “If we enhance the product enough, I may want more Adevco identification.” 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. Of course, if there are five hundred people dipping into a data base, a mini or mainframe would be the ticket. Also, even Bigelow warns against bringing networks into companies in which people won’t be willing to keep their electronic files in order. He recalls one office in which “people had been using electronic typewriters and they’d switched to micros recently and were careless about where they put their disks. They even left magnetized scissors and paper clips on them. “People didn’t trust each other’s diskettes—or diskette habits. And on a network you can’t be sloppy. You could destroy everything if management hasn’t set up the system well. Even on some good networks people can wreak havoc on each other’s files by overcrowding disks with information. There can even be network saboteurs. “You can’t network unless people act as a team and care about their colleagues’ records. If a company’s isn’t like that, it might be better off with a strong data-processing department to police everyone. Or they might just use micros not connected to each other—so that people will crash only their own disks. “They might network only after they’ve successfully run employees through a training program to promote good work habits.” In General, Do You _Know_ What You Want To Do—With People and Equipment? You’re really planning your office, not just shopping for a connection between computers. All kinds of questions pop up—for instance: