The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

InfoStar won’t let you go on. Oh, and these are only examples! I guess I’m just a simple country girl, but I was amazed and thrilled by all that InfoStar could do with its data fields. ◻ How big are your data fields allowed to be? How many fields are you allowed to have? InfoStar allows you a maximum of 245 fields per record, and a maximum of 255 characters per field—it comes out to a maximum of 62,475 characters per data record. (Perfect Filer, again by way of comparison, theoretically allows 70 fields with a combined total of 1,024 characters. On the other hand, the one time I tried to test this limit with Perfect Filer, the program went comatose on me.) I do wonder whether an InfoStar data record that was 61K in size might mean you would get fewer than 64K data records into your data base. On the other hand, who could imagine a 61K data record on a personal computer? It is, after all, about the same size as a 60-page letter to your Aunt Millie, and how often do you write 60-page letters to your Aunt Millie? ◻ Once you have data in your data base, the =sort keys= determine how you can get the data out again. Do you want to get the information out in alphabetical order by name? Numerical order by ZIP code or phone number? Some combination of the two? (For example, you might, if the information is in your data records, want to sort your friends by who is left-handed, who gave you a Christmas card last year, when their birthdays are, or all of the above.) How many sort keys will the data base allow? What kinds? How long does it take the program to do a sort? To take a primitive example, Perfect Filer allows you up to five sort keys (alphabetical order by sister’s name, for example; numerical order by ZIP code; both; numeric order by phone number; all three; and so on). Perfect Filer will also generate up to twenty subsets from which to sort. (Left-handed Republicans, female plumbers, all those who owe you more than three dollars—you name it.) And it will also let you have up to 40 list format fields—that is, it will allow you to generate up to 40 different kinds of list (all left-handed female plumbers who live on the West Coast). InfoStar, on the other hand, will allow you 32 sort fields, which is a few more than 5; but it doesn’t have any subsets per se and doesn’t seem to allow you more than one list format. On the other hand, the range of “logical expressions” it allows is amazing, and provided you understand BASIC (InfoStar’s data are written in CBASIC) fairly well, you can attain heights of efficiency Perfect Filer couldn’t even dream of (more on this immediately). ◻ What kinds of =calculations= will your program do, and when does it do them? Some programs will allow you to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and other even more abstruse calculations, and all at the data entry stage. The best of these allow serial calculations. For example, take A and multiply it by B; then divide the result by C; then add it to D. A program known as DB Master allows calculations for only two fields at a time: A plus B equals C. D plus E equals F. C plus F equals G. Other programs will only allow you to specify that certain relations between data exist, and then only at the report-generating stage. Perfect Filer, for example, will allow you to specify that you only want your report to contain the people whose ZIP codes are between 20815 and 21903—but it won’t do any arithmetic at all. InfoStar, on the other hand, can do algebraic and numeric calculations and impose such logical conditions as “include this record if it meets X criterion”; “do this calculation unless the data field is Y”; “do this if conditions X _and_ Y _OR_ conditions P _or_ Q exist.” Zowie! ◻ What sort of “=overhead=” does the program demand? That is, what do you need to be stored on your diskette in addition to your data records? One trade-off might be that the more sort keys, subsets, list formats, and/or logical expressions you have, the less space you have for your data records. Unlike Perfect Filer, InfoStar creates an index file for every data file that you create. An InfoStar index file contains only the field values of your sort key(s) and addresses for each of your data records, but even so, with a lot of sort keys and with a nice, big data base, the index file is not going to be tiny. Playing with InfoStar—after a week hunched over the keyboard, I still can’t say I’ve learned it—was, in order, daunting, boring, thrilling, mystifying, frustrating, and annoying. The program comes with four (count em, _four_) diskettes and three instructional tomes of a size and heaviness guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of a neophyte. We’re talking half again as big as the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. We’re talking three three-ring binders crammed to capacity with information. Daunting. The program comes complete with three on-line tutorials—one introductory tutorial that assumes that the person using it has never been near a computer before, one tutorial for data entry, and one tutorial for generating “quick reports.” All three are pretty to look at, slow as molasses to try to go through, and simpleminded in the extreme. The first one, for example, draws you a picture of a computer terminal on its screen just in case you’re suffering from selective blindness and can’t see the terminal you’re running the program on. My advice to those who buy InfoStar and who’ve ever even _seen_ a computer before is not to bother with the tutorials—certainly not with the first one!—but to go straight to the training manual and start plowing your way through. It shouldn’t take more than a hundred years. When I started playing with some of the data bases that InfoStar provides for its customers, I was excited. No, I was _thrilled_. I’ve never seen anything like some of the things InfoStar can do, and watching six fields fill up all by themselves after Id inputted one number made me chortle with glee. InfoStar uses most of the same commands that WordStar does, which is convenient if you happen to _like_ control commands. I first began to get annoyed when I discovered that InfoStar does not use arrow keys. If you want to move your cursor, it’s =CTRL-D=, =CTRL-S=, =CTRL-E=, =CTRL-X=—the same commands WordStar uses and a major-league annoyance. Nor have any Function keys been assigned any values. And every single, solitary time you use InfoStar you have to go through at least four help screens—like it or not. Grrr! I first ran into trouble when I began trying to define my own data record. Drawing the screen is easy; but what does one do when one is trying to assign attributes and runs up against prompts like, “Field derived? Processing order? Copy attributes of field? Pad field? Batch verify? Range check? Edit mask? Entry/content control character codes?” I’ll tell you what I did: I read the training manual. I read the reference manual. I tried native cunning. I tried pounding my fist through the keyboard. I tried crying. InfoStar’s hype says, “On-screen menus give you options in plain English ... while a series of help screens guides you through each procedure.” Yeah; and I am Marie of Romania. The same sort of thing happened when I started fiddling with the generation of reports. As promised, InfoStar “enables you to create and print a report in sixty seconds.” The report prints all the data in the given file. Here’s what the report for the file I’d tried to construct looked like: B:MMPLAY REPORT B:MMPLAY REPORT B:MMPLAY REPORT 10/21/84 10/21/84 10/21/84 FIELD #001 FIELD #002 FIELD #003 FIELD #004 FIELD #005 FIELD #006 FIELD #007 FIELD #008 ____ ____ ____ ____ _____ _____ _____ _____ ____ ____ ____ _____ ____ ____ _______ ____ mwm Mary W. Matthews 4823 Willett Parkway Chevy Chase MD 20815 ec Ed Corrigan Pirmasens American School New York NY 09189 I hope you get the idea. I’m too depressed to go on. So much for the “quick report” that you can create in only sixty seconds. Next I tried to design a “custom report.” The prompts didn’t start out to be quite so confusing—“Is the file going to be used for Input or Output?” and “How large should the disk buffer be?” But by the time I got to “Edit mask,” “Copy attributes to field,” and “Enter algebraic expression,” I was thinking seriously about hara-kiri. We are _not_ talking quick and easy here. We are talking call in the professionals or resign yourself to a lot of long, hard work. Considering that I don’t even get to keep the copy of InfoStar—I only own a 64K CP/M machine, and InfoStar requires a PC DOS and at least 96K of RAM and recommends that you use a hard disk (but will put up with two floppy drives provided that you can get 320K of memory on each disk)—I eventually just threw my hands into the air and gave up. There is no doubt in my mind that InfoStar is a terrifically powerful program that will allow you to do just about anything you want in the world of data bases. The doubt in my mind is whether I’m an ordinarily intelligent person who was thrown by some big-league complexity or whether I’m an absolute moron because I didn’t find the program “simple” and “easy to use.” (Variations of the words “simple” and “easy” appear seventeen times in the InfoStar hype booklet; for example, “InfoStar is ... easy-to-use ... goes well beyond the capabilities of a simple data base system. InfoStar eases the job of managers.... It’s really quite simple. The whole process is really quite simple.... And it’s easy....” All this on one page, mind you.) To sum it all up in a nutshell, InfoStar offers some _wonderful_ features, particularly in the area of making things easy for the clerk typist/secretary who’s doing data entry. And it is, as advertised, lightning fast at calculations and sorting. Its use of WordStar commands is a drawback, and its refusal to allow the arrow keys to function, along with its insistence on making you plod through help screen after help screen that you’re really not interested in, can be infuriating; but I suppose the clerk typist who is forced to use WordStar—at only five years old the dinosaur of word-processing programs—might find it convenient. But if you, the doctor or lawyer or small business owner, want a custom-designed form or a custom-designed report, you’re not going to be able to delegate the job to a clerk typist/secretary/assistant. You’ll have to either hire a consultant to do it for you or resign yourself to spending days or even weeks mastering ideas and language that, to me, range from the arcane to the dumbfounding. It’s really quite simple? BACKUP VII ❑❑ Graphics Tips No matter how you’re using a graphics program, remember the RDHP—the Rough-Draft Hierarchical Principle. It also may help at times when you word-process memos. The principle: create the basic pictures or prose yourself. But if pressed for time? Then farm out the details. Just as a secretary might put your memos in the right format on paper, he or she might also smooth your drawings. Or your art department might. Here are other tips for graphics users: KNOW YOUR CHARTS AND OTHER BASIC TOOLS A =line chart=—a graph with the outlines of hills and valleys—is great when broad trends count more than the numbers themselves. One glance at a good line chart can tell you if wok sales are up or down. And for even better effect, you might try a =curve chart=, or =area chart=, filling in the area below the curves that the lines make. “Instead of looking like a wriggly line,” explains Carl Herrman,[103] an award-winning graphics expert, “it looks like a mountain. It’s much easier to follow.” Footnote 103: Carl Herrman is communications director at MITRE Corporation, a nonprofit research and consulting firm in McLean, Virginia. His address there is W 160, 1820 Dolley Madison Blvd., McLean, Virginia 22102. And if you want to show sales trends in three wok categories? Well, you can still use a filled-in chart. “You might fill in the bottom one solid black,” says Herrman. “You might do a =cross-hatch=—parallel intersecting lines—on the middle one. And on the top one, you might have a straight-line effect or a lot of lines running close to each other. “That way, you can readily see the difference between the three It’s more effective than three graph lines on top of each other.” Another tool is a =bar chart=, with bars of different sizes—horizontal or vertical. =NAME THAT CHART= With Apple’s Macintosh and the Microsoft chart graphics package from Microsoft, you can whip up charts like the ones below. Chart will even pick up numbers from a sister spreadsheet program, Multiplan. My thanks to artist Jo Steele, who works for the Dartmouth College Computer Center and is a partner in Northtronics Associates. Oh, and don’t blame Jo for the use of those over-mentioned woks. My mistake. Next time I’ll use dishwashers or watermelons. [Illustration: Do broad trends count more than the numbers themselves? Then use a =line chart=, a graph with the outlines of hills and valleys. Amalgamated Wok might decorate each sales rep’s office with such a chart, at which a myopic CEO could smile or frown as he walked in. ] Use a bar chart to compare sizes or emphasize differences, including those over time. With the bar chart, you might contrast 1979 wok sales with 1984’s. Don’t normally use the bar chart, however, to illustrate trends. For that, it’s usually back to the old line or curve chart. Just the same, Mike Slade, a product manager at Microsoft, says: “There are times when you can illustrate trends successfully using overlapping bar charts—with bars of different colors or patterns. [Illustration: A =curve chart= or =area chart= is just a line chart with the area below the lines filled in. This is a deluxe version with different shadings indicating different years. A no-frills area chart might actually be easier on the CEO’s eyes than would a line chart without shading. ] [Illustration: Yes, wok sales are increasing and our canny artist used a =vertical bar chart= to emphasize this. Just the ticket for a presentation to a stock analyst studying the prospects of the Amalgamated Wok Corporation. Notice that numbers are easier to take in than those on a line chart. ] “You might have a vertical bar for 1979 wok sales slightly overlapping with one for 1979 widget sales and continue these twin bars for the next five years. “Use overlapping bar charts when you’re showing trends for a number of different products or categories.” [Illustration: Wow! Look at the hefty wok sales in November and December. Someone offer rebates? Actually you’d be better off using a =pie chart= instead to show the percentages of semi-annual sales from different regions. _Regions_, not the 50 states. You can only slice a pie so thin. ] Yet another tool, the =pie chart=, just like a pie, with slices, nicely shows relations of complete parts. Use the pie chart to show the percentage of sales that came from four or five regions. On the other hand, suppose you have many, many small components in your pie—say, you’re interested in the percentages of domestic sales in each of the fifty states. Then a map with percentages on it might be better. I’ll stop here—this is a computer book, not a graphics guide. For more detailed information, Herrman recommends _Designer’s Guide to Creating Charts and Diagrams_ by Nigel Holmes (from Watson-Guptill, New York). KEEP IT SIMPLE—WHETHER ITS A CHART OR MEMO Don’t make your charts look like puzzles. “If you clutter up your chart with too many facts, you’ll lose the very simplicity that graphics can offer,” says Herrman. Home in on your main point. “If need be,” he says, “use a short narrative under the chart to back it up. “In fact, you might be able to say something in words more simply than with a chart. If you’re trying to compare the cost of widget imports in the last fifty years and it’s doubled each year, then why not just say so in prose?” Also, avoid other forms of visual clutter. Don’t make people’s eyes spin with special effects and too many colors. =Grid lines=—a series of little squares like those on engineering graph paper—often confuse chart readers. “Don’t put them in if you can help it,” says Herrman. “Definitely not,” agrees my friend Hard-core bureaucrat. In memos, don’t confuse your readers with a barrage of different typefaces. A little variety is good. But make sure you have a decent excuse, such as special points to stress or different categories of information. “If you show off your fancy typefaces,” says my friend the Hard-Core-Bureaucrat, “it’s just a plague that’ll make your eyes ache. That’s one reason I’m down on fancy graphics for routine stuff. Some Macintosh users are going to produce memos that look like samplers from printing salesmen.” Even on a thousand-word memo, use three of four typefaces at the most. Also, don’t stint on white space. Apple’s manuals for the Macintosh and its more expensive sister, the Lisa, are models of wise use of white space. AT THE SAME TIME, KEEP IT LIVELY! If you can get away with it, why not try a little flair in your graphics and your points will be more memorable. A good model in many cases is the newspaper _USA Today_, which sports some of the liveliest graphics in the country. It regularly publishes charts with such sexy facts as amount expected to go for health care in 1990 or the percentage of women who received haircuts and other beauty-shop treatments in 1983. To jazz up the chart titled “Only Their Hairdressers Know,” an artist drew the face of a woman with her hair blowing out. The lengths of the bunched-up strands varied according to the percentages of women receiving different kinds of treatments. “Haircut” (76 percent) was three times longer than “Coloring” (a mere 24 percent). Today the average micro user may not be able to produce such “hairy” graphics, but the future may be different. Snazzy graphics is like colorful writing. Humanize your work. The “Only Their Hairdressers Know” chart wasn’t in the fanciest of color—just black and white and blue—but it was more eye-catching than most eight-color ones might have been. And if you yourself can’t draw too well even with a computer? Well, what a chance to liven up the workday of a young, talented aide who’d like a break from the typewriter, er, word processor! Besides, on occasion, you can at least do what an editor may have done with the hairdresser chart—think up the basic idea. KEEP THOSE CAPTIONS LIVELY, TOO Imagine you’re writing captions for a hybrid of the _New York Times_ and _The National Enquirer_. Try to be accurate, clear, and interesting. Snare the skimmers! Give them no choice but to read your report. I’ll qualify that. Alas, many report writers, especially the government species, don’t _want_ to be clear with words or charts. Maybe they can scrutinize this section to know what to do in reverse. KNOW YOUR COLORS—WHEN AND HOW TO USE THEM There _is_ life without color. Just look at the nifty things you can do with high-resolution black and white, with its many different shades. If your picture offers widely varied shapes and sizes, color just might not help that much. Think, too, about costs. If Mac had had color, the $2,500 introductory price would have been several times higher. So Apple concentrated instead on resolution. And very likely, some makers of similar machines will do the same. There’s a technical trade-off: color capability often comes at the cost of sharpness. Even black-and-white graphics today—at least the affordable kinds—normally are a far cry from the sharpness required in an annual report or the slickest sales brochure. Still, to a generation weaned on color tv and movies, a 100 percent monochromatic life would be like a monastic life. And color could be just the ticket for enlivening graphs that visually drone on and on with statistics. What’s more, it can help separate elements of charts. Just don’t overuse or abuse the technique. Don’t use color to slice a pie chart too thin. In working with color, you should know the best combinations. Often you’ll want to alternate weak, cool colors with strong, warm, “advancing” ones that leap out from the screen. The strongest colors usually are bright red first, then orange, then perhaps yellow—it depends on your machine and other variables. “Your weakest colors,” says Herrman, “could be blue, green and brown. If you try blue and bright red, your chart will be much more readable than if it has green with blue. You might also use green and orange.” Try, too, to avoid adjacent colors that “vibrate” together in an irksome way. “Red and green is worst,” Herrman says. Another loser: red and blue. Other advice? Match colors to what they stand for. If you’re comparing oil and gas production, the oil might be black and the gas a light blue. Oil sometimes _is_ black. And gas often bums blue. Remember, also, that dark colors often can better represent large numbers. Say your company has its biggest, best year ever in sales. And now you’re bragging with a multiyear bar chart? Well, you use a dark blue or black bar to represent your recent, gigantic revenues. The leaner years, by comparison, might be a very light color or maybe faint grays or perhaps just white inside gray lines. Yet another tip is to be consistent if possible. “If you’re comparing oil and gas through twenty charts,” says Herrman, “stick with oil in black and gas in blue in all the charts.” “But,” you say, “how do I choose my graphics programs in the first place?” Here are the questions you should ask, among others: