The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

you can program into your computer to reduce the number of keystrokes and save time. A macro language systematizes these shortcuts. ■ ■ ■ He could use 1-2-3 in the future, moreover, as a data base with up to 32 fields and up to two thousand records, and it did allthe basic search and sorting that you’d have in other data-base systems. At the time I talked to him, the names and addresses of investors—receiving quarterly income reports—were still stored on an Apple. Scharf was waiting for the right word processor-mailer to come along to work with the 1-2-3. Then the massive retyping job for the address lists would be worthwhile. With space for two thousand names, 1-2-3 would be much more useful than just a small filer. It wouldn’t be just a primitive record-keeping system with limited capacity. Meanwhile, for Scharf, graphics was a snap. “If I send out a thirty-page bid, I do three or four graphs with it,” Scharf said. “We have a selling job to do with both the potential corporate leasees and the potential inventors. The presentations are complex, and the graphics come in very handy. We use line graphs and bar graphs showing the expense of lease payments versus mortgage payments if they went out and mortgaged the properties conventionally. The minimum terms of the leases are usually twenty-five years; it’s a huge numbers-crunching job, and we try to simplify everything as much as we can. I come up with the figures on the spreadsheet part of 1-2-3. Then I tell what I want on the graph. Maybe I want to make a line for the rental income, interest expense, depreciation, or taxable income. So I select the appropriate columns on the spreadsheet. Then I push ‘V’ for ‘View,’ and I can see my work instantly as a graph. If I don’t like it, I can quickly redo my calculations and look at the graph again. “And 1-2-3 offers a tremendous range of printing options. You can specify how many rows you want per page. You can tell if you want border lines separating some numbers and titles of columns. You can tell if you want a header—can indicate the subject on each page. “The printout can be in any one of several type styles on dot-matrix machines. Or you can use a daisy wheel with its own typewriter-style print. “And you can do color. A colleague uses plotters.” Controlled by the IBMs and Lotus 1-2-3, ballpoint pens, with different colors, wriggle up and down. They can make bars as well as line graphs, and pies, too, among others. Not that Lotus was the answer for everyone. _Soft.letter_, Jeffrey Tarter’s trade publication, noted that all integrated programs compromised in some way and were the software version of a Swiss army knife. “Swiss army knives are nifty gadgets; we’ve got several ourselves,” said _Soft.letter_, “but we don’t use them much. Instead, we use specialized tools for specialized tasks—screw-drivers for poking around inside the Apple, a stand-alone cork-screw for uncorking the Chablis, and a nice big carbon steel blade for carving roast beef. Each of these tools does its specific job better than the multipurpose tool.” At least in the version available as of this writing—listing for $495—Lotus 1-2-3 didn’t have a real word processor. You could write paragraphs. But it lacked the speed of true word processors and was awkward. Nor did it offer communications software to use with a modem. Context MBA, a rival integrated program, did. But then MBA’s spreadsheet module wasn’t nearly as fierce a numbers cruncher as 1-2-3’s was. Lotus planned to improve 1-2-3’s text-processing ability—which it did, ultimately, along with the data base, graphics, and spreadsheet capabilities of a super-1-2-3 called Symphony. The new program, unlike 1-2-3, also let you talk to other computers. At Merrill Lynch Leasing, however, Scharf hadn’t any need to reach a mainframe for his calculations. His four IBMs with 1-2-3 were doing the work. They had cost $40,000, including extras like printers; except for service, that was it. What’s more, with four people, Scharf said, he was tackling the same work load that eight people were handling in a similar office on the equipment-leasing side of the operation. Months later I reached Scharf to find out if his career was still in ascent. “I’m now a vice-president,” he said. His salary had broken the six-figure barrier, and he was hoping for a still more lucrative job there or with another firm. It was a good fit, Scharf and his software. He had the best program for _him_. “Most people would rather talk about hardware,” he said. “I know hardware, but I’d rather discuss software.” He had a point. Especially now, when there are so many clones of various IBM micros, you’ll find that good software will give you an edge on your competition. You can also gain an advantage by experimenting with new _types_ of programs. The next chapter discusses graphics, which, after many years, is at last becoming practical for owners of inexpensive micros. Backups: ◼ V, “3-D” Versus Mail-Order Software—and How to Shop, page 319. ◼ VI, “Easy” Data Bases: Another View (Mensa Member Versus InfoStar), page 323. 7 ❑ Graphics (or How a Mouse Helped Joe Shelton’s Friends Stop Feeling Like Rats) When a California executive invited people to his apartment, they often ended up feeling like rats in a laboratory maze. “I had people driving around for half an hour and find a phone and say, ‘Come on over and get me,’” says Joe Shelton. In recent years, however, the “hit rate” for finding Joe’s place has jumped from 50 percent to over 95, and computer graphics is the reason. Joe’s neat little map shows a mile-square area with up to five turns _before_ you even start wending your way through the complex of 150 units. He isn’t an artist. But he uses a Macintosh computer. With the Mac’s famous “mouse”—the pointer device that Joe rolls along his desk to move the cursor—he can effortlessly make sketches. Granted, Joe isn’t detached about Mac’s virtues, not as a $50,000-a-year software products manager with Apple Computer! And this particular example is trivial. It’s also, however, irresistible. And the story indeed shows how graphics can ease the life of a corporate manager. People also use computer-drawn maps for, say, directing colleagues to meetings in new places. The easier-to-use graphics programs—like MacPaint—are to art what word processing is to writing. They won’t turn you into Picasso. But they’ll make your sketches and designs look less like your kindergartner’s. “But I can’t even draw a straight line,” you protest. Well, Mac-style graphics programs will help you electronically pick a line out. Or a circle. Or a rectangle. You also, of course, can control the sizes and locations of the shapes you select. And you can choose shading. And vary its intensity. And you can also use exotic type styles and even design your own type. By letting you zap mistakes, without messy erasures, computer graphics may eventually halve the time it takes for you to do a complicated drawing. Directions: Turn onto Cary Avenue. Follow Cary around left and then right bends for at least .3 mile from Washington St and turn into apartment entrance on right. Make immediate left turn and continue until you cross speed bump. Park in any uncovered space on left. Apartment 4 is upstairs in the middle on the other side of the building. [Illustration: Would you feel like rat in a maze if you had a map like this to guide you to Apple executive Joe Shelton’s house? Indeed you would. Lest anyone mistake Joe for Customer Support, the map doesn’t contain his actual address. ] Of course there’ll always be resistance to graphics from some hard-core bureaucrats in and out of government. “The Macintosh,” gripes one, “takes us back to the time people were drawing pictures on cave walls.” He’ll tolerate _some_ graphics but loves to read and write twenty-page memos. And if I were an executive, I myself would growl if my people insisted on Macs just so they could use Old English characters for routine paperwork. In fact, for that, I’d rather work with a Kaypro or a mouseless IBM PC. “For the world of letters and numbers a computer without a mouse would be better,” says James Fallows, the _Atlantic Monthly_’s Washington editor, who tried a Mac for several weeks but happily returned to a machine with WordStar. He and I are baffled. We can’t understand the Mac’s lack of cursor keys. Why couldn’t Apple have kindly let Mac users move the cursor conventionally on the screen if they wanted? Omitting the cursor keys was IBM-style arrogance, no ifs or buts. Even if cursor keys become available on a numbers pad, it won’t be the same as having them in a convenient location on the main keyboard. But graphics? That’s where the Mac and similar machines may pay off for people with overscheduled art departments or an honest willingness to experiment: ● A California designer can draw a hot-water system for an outdoor car wash in just four hours, thanks to his Mac; once it took him days. ● A Washington state man uses his Macintosh to design optimal orchard layouts. ● Another user lays out the Yellow Pages with his Macintosh, while still another employs one to plan paintings.[29] Footnote 29: The car wash, orchard, Yellow Pages, and painting examples come from _USA Today_, May 3, 1984. Advertising agencies, especially, may benefit from computer graphics even if the Mac-priced technology still has some flaws. Take one example. Just after a Colorado agency bought a Mac, a bank wanted an ad saying that it gave personal service—that its customers were more than computer numbers. But how to get the idea on paper? “I suggested that the bank use a computer for the ad,” said Rebecca Glesener, assistant art director of Heisley Design and Advertising, a twenty-five-person agency in Colorado Springs. The bank agreed. Using a Macintosh, a Heisley artist drew a man and woman with masses of numbers on their faces. “If your bank sees you this way,” the ad said, “come see us.” Western National Banks loved the results. And when I talked to Glesener, her agency was about to unleash another Mac-drawn ad—the machine’s “self-portrait”—for an Apple dealer. “We have several clients in the computer business,” Glesener said, “and we thought we should be aware of computers.” Of course you don’t start instantly doing first-class graphics work on Mac-like machines. Take the man drawing the Western ad. He had “no computer skills” in his background, and he toyed around with the Mac for some six hours or so before he did the numbers heads for the bank. With the art stashed away on computer disks, though, the Heisley agency could more easily crank out different versions of the same drawing. It’s like word processing. Once you’ve stored your material on your computer disk, you needn’t start over from step one. Mac-like machines may also streamline ad agencies’ mock-up work. Through the marvels of graphics an art director can more easily figure out the best location for Brooke Shields’s derriere in a jeans layout. In fact, the Heisley people said they had used Mac successfully on drafts of a sales brochure and an ad for the U.S. Amateur Hockey Association. Even so, Don Pierce, the artist behind the bank ad, warns: “Inexpensive machines like the Mac can’t come up with drawings good enough for final ads without a deliberate computer effect. A line other than a forty-five-degree line can be pretty ragged because the machine makes them in steps.” And they lack a good-enough resolution to downplay the roughness. Eventually, of course—through high-quality graphics made on laser printers—cheap machines may turn out slick ads that don’t scream, “A computer made me!” Meanwhile, Mac-like computers will do fine for drafts and nonpublished work. Already, when hooked up right to some Compugraphic typesetting machinery, Mac’s sister computer Lisa II can turn out seamless charts for publication. Who else might use computer graphics? Some examples: A SALES REP (OR BROCHURE DESIGNER) Computer graphics would help you simplify a complicated brochure in which twenty statistics proved the superiority of your company’s industrial dishwasher to Brand X’s. There’s no question—graphics can liven up otherwise dull data, and remember: if people don’t read, there’s less chance they’ll _buy_. In that sense, sales literature isn’t so different from a newspaper. Again, though, bear in mind that the inexpensive computers may not produce graphics of professional smoothness. A CORPORATE TRAINING OFFICIAL OR TEACHER You can Xerox your Mac-drawn pictures of a widget maker or Mayan artifacts—perhaps even include them in test papers. And you or your audiovisual specialist can even prepare overhead slides by photocopying the drawings onto clear plastic sheets. A BUREAUCRAT The same slide technique could be a relief to bureaucrats preparing low- or mid-level briefing. A PERSONNEL OR DIVISION MANAGER What a boon to the addicted drafters of personnel charts! Now, there’s a dark side to this. I have a good friend at the Department of Housing and Urban Development named Al Ripskis.[30] “They’re _reorganizing_ again,” he groans from time to time. It’s a waste of good tax money in Al’s opinion. The faces and desks change; the bungling remains. Footnote 30: Ripskis is not the hard-core bureaucrat I mentioned earlier in the chapter. He in fact puts out an underground newsletter regularly exposing his agency. Shelton, though, says the better companies thrive on fluidity, and in Silicon Valley he may be right. It depends on your outfit’s style of management. Don’t play computer games with your people, however, just because the machines make it easier to play musical chairs. AN ARCHITECT Microcomputer graphics might be just the ticket for rough sketches. In fact, on a sophisticated machine, the computer graphics would do for the final version. Who knows? An architect someday might carry around a little computer the size of a sketch pad and do designs to be fed into a larger machine for the detail work. A PRODUCT DESIGNER If I were one, I’d leap at the chance to try computer-aided graphics. Sooner or later, American industry will make widespread use of machines that automatically turn drawings into real frying pans, soap bars, or refrigerator cabinets. Well, it won’t be _that_ simple. But computer graphics and related technologies will increasingly blur the line between creative types and production people. Just look at the newspaper industry. Reporters, after all, on most daily papers are basically setting the type for their stories as they tap them out. But back to the factory. The jargon is =computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing= or =CAD/CAM=. A FACILITIES MANAGER Working on the floor layout for offices that your company will rent? Computer graphics could be just right in this era of instant partitions. A CONVENTION PLANNER What better way to juggle around the positions of various booths on your charts? A CORPORATE PLANNER (AND MANY OTHER EXECUTIVES) Building nuclear submarines, you might worry about your keel before your propeller shaft. An overgeneralization, maybe. But that’s how a defense contractor hit on the need for =Project Evaluation Review Techniques= (=PERT=) software. Charlie Bowie—the home construction executive in the last chapter who worried about his basements before his floors—might have used a PERT-style program with graphics to keep up with his priorities. “With PERT programs,” says Shelton, “you can graphically draw important relationships: ‘This has to be done before this starts.’ Or, ‘Both of these have to be done before the other thing starts.’ Or, ‘This can wait while the others are done.’” A more complex PERT can help you juggle priorities of two hundred or so projects. “It’s a capability magnifier,” admits even my friend the hard-core bureaucrat. “PERT charting by hand takes ten times as long as a computer. You can wear holes in the paper—erasing mistakes—if you do it by hand.” Hearing of PERT, I recalled the Case of The Missing Cafeteria. The taxpayers were supposed to get a cafeteria—worth maybe $500,000 or more—at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. The landlord’s company, however, laid not one brick for the cafeteria. Some say it was politics—he was once a friend of Spiro Agnew’s. The landlord denies anything wrong. Whatever happened, the case boggles the mind. How could an entire cafeteria slip through the cracks; how could the General Services Administration, the government’s real estate agent, have shoved aside such an important detail even in a $60-million-plus lease? You never know. Perhaps with PERT graphics in the right federal offices in the 1970s, some budget-minded lunchers today wouldn’t feel forced to brown bag it. “When you have so many little pieces,” says my friend the Hard-Core Bureaucrat, working at another agency, “it’s so easy to let one drop off the table. We could sure use a good word processor-cum-PERT machine.” Although computers can help you tidy up your work, they themselves can be messy enough unless you know what you’re doing. There’s no substitute for a good computer expert in many cases. And training, too. In the following chapter, you’ll have one answer to “people” problems—the “Who-How Solution.” Backup: ◼ VII, Graphics Tips, page 331. 8 ❑ People: the Who-How Solution Stewart Research, Inc.—a fictitious name, along with the others in this tale, which is true in the main elements—once seemed on the verge of big money. Frank Stewart, a slim, intense young chain-smoker, was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from a large company to monitor congressmen and bureaucrats influencing certain business activities. He planned to sum up gigantic piles of newspaper stories inside a computer. Then his early-warning service would ferret out patterns for his benefactor and other businessmen trying to keep up with the vagaries of government. Stewart’s plan may come to pass, but last I knew, he was fighting off unfounded rumors of bankruptcy. “We’ve wasted upwards of $40,000 on computer consultants and the consequences of their ‘advice,’” Stewart told me in the modest white-frame home where he and his wife lived and worked and took in boarders. “And that doesn’t include the thousands of dollars in business we lost because our computer was down at the wrong times. “I had to lay off five people largely because of the consultants’ lack of interest in anything but turning a buck off us.” Stewart’s story illustrates the need for the Who-How Solution in hiring consultants. Who-How may also help micro users train employees and get the most out of their data-processing departments. Who-How is nothing more than the five Ws and the H of newspaperdom. Like a reporter, you simply ask, “Who?” “What?” “Why?” “When?” “Where?” and “How?” and especially “How much?” Ask those questions often. Ask them when: