The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

He needn’t call himself a “computer lawyer.” A good contracts lawyer or intellectual-property expert, if conversant with computers, might also work out. If the job is simple enough, don’t negotiate in the same detail that GM does when installing a $10-million mainframe. Again, even with small tasks, do sign a contract or write a letter similar to the sample one on page 114. And if you can afford it and the job’s important enough, think about still-another contract—for a second consultant to check up on the first. BACKUP IX ❑ Window Shopping The ad men and writers have had fun with the inevitable: “Microsoft Does Windows.” You read the headline and envision some programmers with buckets and rags, bravely scaling Manhattan skyscrapers to help executives get a clear view when they’re looking up from their computer screens. =Windows=, however, actually are _within_ computer screens. You can split your screen into parts: one window showing a chart, for instance, while the other displays the report into which you’re inserting it. Of course you need a screen big and sharp enough to get good views of many windows. And the software problems could be hairy. Microsoft as of late 1984 was months and months behind in releasing its windows-type product. Other companies were behind on theirs, too. Someone once coined a term for much-talked-about-but-late software—“vaporware”—and it is sure described windows.[104] Footnote 104: I asked John Butler, a Microsoft products manager, why windows would hit the market months late. “We don’t like to announce products too far ahead of time when they’re not fully developed” he said, “but with Windows we had to tell other software companies about its existence early on—so they could write programs taking full advantage of ours.” Well, now that the miracle windows are theoretically here, are they worth gazing at? Depends. _Don‘t_ buy windows if you’re just writing short letters and you needn’t blend anything else into them or regularly don’t consult other material. But consider them if, say, you want to look at many spreadsheets quickly while writing reports. Think what this means to executives with cluttered disks, er, desks. They can stash their material away electronically and not have to print hard copies as often in the future. “I can imagine people having as many as twenty or thirty windows ready to call up with notes or working papers,” says John Butler, a product manager with Microsoft. Also, windows software may let you switch noticeably faster from one program to another. And with a RAM (temporary computer memory) above 500K, you may even be able to do so instantly. The plus of this? You won’t need to return as often to your computer’s operating system and feed the programs one by one into the RAM. So the machine may seem to impose itself less between you and your work. When “windows shopping,” however, you should ask these questions and more:[105]