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Title: The Silicon Jungle

Author: David H. Rothman

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“David Rothman’s SILICON JUNGLE is an aphrodisiac for anyone
interested in the computer revolution. There is a real sense of self-
liberation for the reader, in whose mind the dawn lights up the
incredible, awful, wonderful reach of the little computer chip.”
William F. Buckley, Jr.

“Everything you’ve always wanted to know about computers but
were afraid to ask for fear of not getting a straight answer in plain
English. David Rothman is Indiana Jones, guiding us through the
hype, hardware, software, and confusing jargon of THE SILICON
JUNGLE.”
Bettina Gregory
ABC News Correspondent
and IBM PCXT owner

“David Rothman’s SILICON JUNGLE is an inspired, fast-paced,
often maniacal view of today’s microcomputer scene. While laced
with hard facts, Rothman’s anecdotal style makes the book fun
reading. The perfect book for the newcomer to the scene and the
old-timer lost in the jungle.”

John C. Dvorak
Technology columnist,
The San Francisco Examiner
and InfoWorld

“THE SILICON JUNGLE has proved helpful in both my business
and personal use of computers. It is down-to-earth, easy to
understand, and has made me and my computers better friends.”
Ellen R. Gordon, President
Tootsie Roll Industries, Inc.

“THE SILICON JUNGLE is an insightful book that provides a
foundation for dealing with the complicated world of personal
computers.”
Chris Christiansen
Senior Analyst
The Yankee Group

“Of all the books about computers, THE SILICON JUNGLE is the
best I’ve seen.... Fun to read and Instructional as well. David
Rothman not only blazes a sure path through the jungle, but he has
told us almost everything there is to tell about the computer world at
this point—and told it very well.”
Jerald F. Terhorst
Ford Motor Executive

DAVID H. ROTHMAN

The
SILICON
JUNGLE

BALLANTINE BOOKS · NEW YORK

Copyright © 1985 David H. Rothman
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division
of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-90645
ISBN 0-345-32063-8
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: July 1985

WITH LOVE

TO
HARRY AND HORTENSE ROTHMAN

Special thanks to Michael Canyes, Mack Truslow,
David Fay Smith, Don Carrol, Robert B. Wyatt, Richard McCoy,
Frank Lavena, Pat Ehresmann, Ruth Aley and Berenice Hoffman

Contents

1 • The Silicon Jungle 1

2 • The Kaypro Phenomenon: How Solana Beach
Took on Silicon Valley 14

3 • After the War 36

4 • WordStar: The Creators 45

5 • The Select Word Processor: Martin Dean
versus the Command-Driven Restaurants 65

6 • Three Software Stories: Motorcycles, Homes,
and the $200,000-a-Year Disk 73

7 • Graphics (or How a Mouse Helped Joe
Shelton’s Friends Stop Feeling Like Rats) 93

8 • People: The Who-How Solution 100

9 • The Hal Syndrome 128

10 • Jewels that Blip 163

11 • Wired to Work 200

12 • How I Found “God” on MCI (and a Few Other
Odds and Ends About Electronic Mail) 228

13 • Net Gain$ 234

14 • As the Jungle Thickens (AKA the Great
Modeming) 249

Afterword 271

BACKUP • More Tips and Tales from the Jungle 279

BACKUP I • Twenty-Six Questions to Ask at (and About)
the Computer Store 281

BACKUP II • A Few Grouchy Words on Printers 294

BACKUP III • The Lucky 13: What to Look for in Choosing
Software 302

BACKUP IV • On the Evolution of Software (and a “Perfecter
and Perfecter” Program) 310

BACKUP V • “3-D” versus Mail-Order Software—and How
to Shop 319

BACKUP VI • “Easy” Data Bases: Another View (Mensa
Member Versus InfoStar) 323

BACKUP VII • Graphics Tips 331

BACKUP VIII • Consultant Contracts: Some Who-How
Questions 339

BACKUP IX • Window Shopping 343

BACKUP X • Of Mice and Men—and Touch Pads, Touch
Screens, Etc. 346

BACKUP XI • The Micro Connection: Some Critical
Explanations 349

BACKUP XII • MODEM7: An Almost-Free and Fairly Easy
Way to Talk to Other Computers 354

BACKUP XIII • Why Not an Electronic Peace Corps? 366

INDEX • 375

The
SILICON
JUNGLE

1 The Silicon Jungle

Americans are fighting each other not just in the marketplace but also in
the Silicon Jungle.
The jungle isn’t greenery. It isn’t land. It’s nothing more than the mineral
in tiny computer chips that switch electronic impulses.
But a jungle it is:

● Airline X accused Airline Y of electronically sabotaging X’s reservations
operation and contributing to a $733-million bankruptcy. The charges
may have been false. But their very existence dramatized the increasing
link between computer security and corporate survival.
● Car thieves have computerized to keep better track of hot auto parts.
That’s bad news not only for police but also for rival thieves with
antiquated record keeping. Meanwhile, a hooker ring, too, has automated.
And a gambling operation analyzed its profits daily through a big
computer hooked up to smaller ones in forty-three cities.[1]
● An editor confesses he snooped on the competition by figuring out the
computer password of Brand X newspaper (“it’s like playing Scrabble—a
matter of time and an interested mind”).
● Millions of more scrupulous Americans are increasingly relying on
micros to outwit their rivals.

Consider two deadline-ridden lawyers locked in combat over the same
case. Lawyer A might ferret out legal precedents through eye-straining
research at libraries, while B could cover the same territory in minutes
through the right taps on a new IBM personal computer.
Siliconized war is “in” between and among giants and gnats.
“One hundred years ago in Colorado, the Colt .44 was a great equalizer,”
a westerner once said; now he said his suitcase-sized micro was.
Today better machines sell for around $1,000. With trimmings they can:

● Electronically zip messages to other computers and people across the
country.
● Be word processors, doubling some writers’ production.
● Prepare spreadsheets, which help businesses quickly calculate the future
costs of providing products or services.
● Keep records electronically.
● Help you whip up jazzy charts to whet your boss’s interest in your work
—in a nice way.

This book will tell you how to make the best use of portables and other
business computers wherever you are—large company, small, or on your
own. Big bureaucracy is here, also, complete with the Case of the Missing
Cafeteria (explained in Chapter 7).
Instead of hearing just about computers in the abstract, you’ll learn about
them in life. Arthur C. Clarke, the world-famous science-fiction novelist
who wrote 2001 and 2010, will tell how WordStar software made him “a
born-again writer.” And the FBI, top consultants, and a felon named
Captain Zap will warn against electronic crooks.
There’ll be computer tips, too, from obscure but savvy business people,
such as a New York real estate executive whose micro skills lead to his six-
figure income.
You’ll also hear from some stars of the industry, including WordStar’s
creators, and you’ll learn how their lives and philosophies tie in with the
products on sale at your local computer store.
We begin with the Ten (Micro) Commandments:
DON’T FALL FOR THE SOFT SELL—OR
HARD SELL.
THE COMPUTER BUSINESS IS A JUNGLE.
“This machine here is a Mercedes,” a Radio Shack man once told me.
“Apple’s the Ford. You want to buy a Mercedes or a Ford?”
How do you cut through the hype to buy a machine that is better than
your competitor’s?
You’ve got your own jungle to survive, and, by learning how computer
firms make and market their offerings, you’ll be a better shopper.
Especially beware of the computer hawker who says he’s a “technician”
with your interest in mind.

BUT REMEMBER THAT GOOD GUYS
CAN FINISH FIRST.
The New York executive saved his blue-chip company a fortune and won
his $100,000-plus salary without firing anyone, groveling before his boss,
or cheapening a product or service.
By picking the right computer or program, you just might get a head start
on the office toady.
AVOID THE SNACK-FOOD PROGRAMS—THE
ONES EASY TO LEARN
BUT LESS SATISFYING TO USE.
With press agents and flashy boxes for disks, the software market is
going Hollywood.
It’s also, however, becoming more like the cupcake industry—geared not
to nourish but to please instantly.
Some marketeers are trying to displace good, solid business programs
with Twinkie-like products that sell well but don’t work well.
LEARN ABOUT COMPUTERS
AS THEY RELATE TO YOUR JOB.
Normally, you and your employees needn’t become true computer
experts.
In most cases you’ll lack the time or talent to write the programs you
need to be fully competitive. Very likely you can use off-the-shelf software
instead.
Also, you can find the right computer consultant and carefully oversee
his work; this book will help you avoid gobblers.
BE HUMANE—PROFITABLY.
Micros can be efficient and humane at the same time. Don’t confuse The
Silicon Jungle with Winning through Intimidation. Often, for instance, some
humanity can improve your efficiency by lowering the number of errors
your people may make. This book tells how to choose equipment that’s
easiest on your people’s eyes and backbones.
BONE UP ON COMPUTER CRIME—BUT
DON’T NEGLECT ROUTINE WAYS OF MAKING YOUR
ELECTRONIC RECORDS SAFE.

You should worry about computer crime, while not neglecting garden-
variety problems of “data security,” like coffee spilled on floppy disks.
Pity a poor wedding-cake maker. The other day on the radio I heard that
he couldn’t fill his orders because a forgetful computer had wiped them
from its memory.
“WIRE IN” TO TELECOMMUTING
IF IT’S RIGHT FOR YOUR
COMPANY—AND PERHAPS SAVE
THOUSANDS IN OFFICE RENTS.
Working at home on a computer isn’t for everyone. Some jobs will
always require face-to-face contact.
Telecommuting, however, is a nifty new way to gain an edge on the
competition while ending some workers’ rush-hour woes. Say, you now
spend $4,000 annually on rented space for each employee. Allowing home
work may save you more than $8,000 per telecommuter, totaled up over
five years, if your tax rate is 35 percent.
REJOICE! MOST LIKELY
YOU’LL JUSTIFY YOUR
TRAVAIL.
Computerization is harder than your friendly computer store might lead
you to believe, but most likely you’ll justify your travail.
Someone once said he never knew of an author who gave up his
computer and returned to a pen. I’ll buy that.
THROUGH IT ALL,
KNOW WHAT THE OTHER GUY’S UP TO.
You’re better off if you know what the other guy—or woman—is up to.
This book is, frankly, for top executives and mid-level people, small
businessmen, and professionals. And if your employees read it? Well, so
much the better.
“You” here is many people.
Some of my most enterprising readers, by the way, won’t just be
interested in computers for themselves or their companies. They’ll also see
them as marketing opportunities involving the rest of the world.

Take Mike Bell, a Xerox executive. We talked about munytels—neighbor
centers offering child care and other services for people “commuting” to the
office via computer. And Mike had an idea. Why not franchise the munytels
like McDonald’s hamburger stands? Maybe Xerox will start a Munytel
Division.
The “other guy” principle also applies to small businessmen selling to the
Xeroxes of this world. If you know how the data-processing people think in
a large corporation, you may be more understanding if you’re having
problems hooking up to a large customer’s computer.
Likewise, the “other guy” idea can help businessmen keep up with
competitors and appreciate their own employees’ computer-related fears.
In short, this book is for people who want to survive—and make money
—by listening.
Ranging over many topics, it may come across as a series of essays rather
than a normal guide. So be it. I’m not going to cheat you of helpful facts
that most readers won’t care about or that are far removed from the main
thrusts of the chapters. You may be desperate for this very material. And
items at the ends of the chapters will refer you to “Backup: More Tales and
Tips from the Jungle.” “Backup” follows my main book.

BREAK OUT OF THE USERS-GUIDE GHETTO.

You already have. The Silicon Jungle is for owners and prospective owners
of Radio Shacks, Apples, IBMs—all kinds of machines.
Do buy a guide for your model of computer or your pet software
program; this book isn’t a replacement.
It offers, however, more detachment than a guide touting the virtues of a
single machine. I’ll write about the computer I own—yes, I have my biases
—but it’ll be as an example, not as the final answer. Frankly, for graphics
work alone, my Kaypro II would not suffice. The screen isn’t good enough.
The Kaypro’s electronic brain just is not very visually inclined, and all in
all, I’d be far better off doing charts with an Apple Macintosh.
Many good paths wind through the Silicon Jungle.

■ ■ ■

There’s no doubt—the computer business is a jungle. While I was writing
this book, Osborne Computers filed for bankruptcy under Chapter XI. “I’m

just devastated,” said Adam Osborne. The previous year, his firm had sold
110,000 portable computers listing at $1,795.
I, too, was sorry he’d failed. Osborne’s was the first company to produce
a bargain-priced business computer with good, free software thrown in. If
his company hadn’t revived itself under new management, the industry
would have offered buyers that much less choice.
Part of Osborne’s problem were his marketing blunders. Also, however,
an arch rival, Kaypro, had come out with a better machine. I bought one.
Chapters 2 and 3 tell how Kaypro has fought Osborne and other foes—
wars of interest to you, since you’ll win a better deal if you know about
micro-makers and the origins of their computers. While this chapter and the
next one focus on Kaypros, much in them would apply to other machines.
Most microcomputers don’t emerge from tile-floored laboratories;
instead, they come from companies that refine existing technology and
carve out niches in the marketplace. But what’s “refine”? High tech is
enough of a gamble for the more solid computer makers. Shakier ones can
be reckless, and often at customers’ expense. A newspaper perceptively
observed, “Computers are hyped before they’re ready, announced before
they’re shipped and sometimes outdated and outpriced before they reach
retailers’ shelves.”
I’ll try to help you find the machine that’s best for you—not necessarily
the one that computer hustlers envision on your desk. Beware:

● In Maryland, a sail maker ended up with a micro useless as anything but
an anchor.
● A midwestern company sued a major micro maker for $456,000 because
an $8,000 computer allegedly didn’t perform as advertised.
● A construction executive invested over $9,000 in a name-brand computer
but could do next to nothing with it, while a colleague was making out
fine with a little Zenith micro selling for around half the price.

“I’ve seen too many company presidents march through there hoping to
make a final decision in less than an hour,” said a sales manager at a
Michigan computer store. “In almost every case he’s ended up paying either
too much for the right equipment or too little for the wrong equipment.”[2]
Just as important as the hardware—the computers and other machines—
are the programs on those plastic disks. In fact, you should even think

“software” before you do hardware, because your machine will be useless if
it doesn’t do the tasks you want it to. And the programs supply these
necessary instructions. More than thirty thousand programs for micros are
on the market; so The Silicon Jungle can’t say which one is exactly right for
you, but it can help you find out for yourself by showing how a software
classic comes into existence.[3]
I talked to Seymour Rubinstein and Rob Barnaby—the subjects of
Chapter 4, “WordStar: The Creators”—and learned that Barnaby and I had
some common work habits. Maybe that’s why I like WordStar so much. I
feel as if the people behind it used ESP to discover how I liked to move
words around on my spooky green screen.
Some complain that WordStar is too complex. I disagree. New versions
of WordStar and other programs, however, will become simpler to learn as
the machines themselves grow more powerful. The new WordStar 2000 is
an example.
Smart production-minded buyers meanwhile should avoid the “user-
friendly” software that’s easy to learn but hard to use. One example is the
Select, a clunky word processor discussed in Chapter 5 after WordStar. I
expressed my loathing with my wallet. Although Select came free with my
Kaypro, I junked it. Had I not spent my $250 on WordStar, I would have
taken much, much longer to write this book.[4]
In Chapter 6, “Three Software Stories,” businessmen tell how they
coexisted—or didn’t—with their software. One of them is the New York
real estate executive mentioned earlier. He saved his new employer
$200,000 a year by boning up on software and using micros rather than
expensive time and an outside company’s mainframe. A Maryland
construction executive did well, too. He thinks his software knowledge
helped him snare a new job as a company president with one-third interest
in the firm. Like the New Yorker, he successfully concentrated on micros as
they related to his job. Another man, an accountant good at his work but
uneasy around computers, offers some observations on the failings of
existing software and his difficulties finding the right program.
Graphics will be one of the hotter software topics over the next few
years, now that cheap computers can do more visual tricks. And in Chapter
7 and Backup VII, you’ll learn (1) the basics, (2) when charts are worth the
trouble, and (3) how to select the best programs in that category. Most
existing computer guides are overly technical about graphics, or they just

about shun the subject. That’s too bad. Graphics can actually save your
company money; computerized charts can help you set priorities and keep
your projects on schedule. At times, too, there are other advantages. A little
Macintosh won’t replace your art department, but it might enable you to
whip up flashy graphs to impress your customers.
Even with the supposedly simple Mac-style machines, however, you may
still need a good consultant—one of the topics of Chapter 8, “People.”
He or she can help you select the right software, for instance, or teach
you how to use it. But you can’t always trust credentials, and here you’ll
read of a young company that wasted $40,000 on the wrong consultants and
their bungles. One man was so learned in computers that he had helped
design the systems on an aircraft carrier, yet he lacked the exact technical
expertise to help the company get its work done.
My old newspaper in the Midwest made another people-type mistake,
letting a computer expert befuddle staffers with technical jargon. A white-
haired editor suffered especially. Although he knew his town better than did
just about any other newsman and had been a fixture in the scruffy city
rooms since World War II, the paper exiled him from the copy desk after the
training program failed him. His health gave out amid the strain, and he
ended up on extended sick leave, done in partly by the course’s scary talk of
bits and bytes. You use a calculator without being—as one man put it
—“calculator literate.” Why must you be “computer literate”? Be so if
you’re an aspiring programmer or if you enjoy computers as a hobby. If,
however, you don’t, well, forget it. Instead, simply concentrate on (1)
finding the right experts for the grubby technical chores and (2) helping
yourself and your employees learn the programs of use on the job.
You can also treat people well by guarding against “The Hal Syndrome.”
I’ve named Chapter 9 after the uppity computer in 2001 and 2010.
The best weapons against Hal are good, common-sense ones, like
viewable screens and easy-to-use keyboards, which can cut down on
headaches and backaches. Forget about the white tiles and bright
fluorescents you see in traditional computer rooms. They can torture your
eyes. As for keyboards, you’ll learn the wisdom of using the detachable
kind, which makes it easier for you to be the right distance from both the
keyboard and the screen. Why not buy equipment that can adjust to both
your eyes and your back? Foreigners caught on to this issue much more
quickly than we did; some European firms even sawed the keyboards off

American-made terminals. And now U.S. workers are demanding action.
“They affected my stomach quite a bit,” a former insurance company
worker says of the machines that caused her to quit her job. “Most days I
worked I would throw up in the ladies room.” Whether you use micros or
big computers, you’ll get more work out of people—and be able to hire
better ones—if the equipment is comfortable to use. Still another precaution
against Hal is good job design. See if you can rotate your employees’
computer work with other duties to reduce the stress of being at the
keyboard all day.
In the Hal Syndrome chapter, you won’t simply read academic wisdom.
Instead, you’ll hear about the true health and safety concerns of people
working the computer keyboards—eminently valid worries in many cases.
And you’ll read in an accompanying backup about another hot topic in
this era of contact between man and machine. It’s the mouse, the palm-
sized gadget that you push along your desktop to guide the cursor (the little
blinking line or other marker that shows where you’re typing on the
computer screen).
Some manufacturers love the mouse as a marketing gimmick. And it’s
indeed nice for graphics. If you’re a writer or secretary, however, and if you
lack three hands, you may be better off mouseless. Why? See Backup X,
“Of Mice and Men.”
I’ll also try some candor on another touchy topic—computer crime.
In Chapter 10, “Jewels that Blip,” you’ll learn how to protect your
company secrets inside your computer and how to prevent the machines
from suffering amnesia and destroying electronic records. Although
electronic Willie Suttons exist, your real worries are often mundane. This
book won’t keep you from spilling coffee on a floppy disk, but it will tell
how, using good software and good habits, you can help ward off both
crooks and accidents.
Much of Chapter 10 is about larger computers, and quite logically so.
Increasingly, your micros will be talking to mainframes, as the big
machines are called, and your facts are only as safe as the electronic
repositories where you store them.
Computer security will particularly matter in the era of telecommuting, a
subject covered in Chapter 11, “Wired to Work,” which will show you how
“electronic cottages” often can be both productive and humane.

A California professor says by 1990 as many as 10 million U.S. workers
could be tapping away on keyboards at home. In Chapter 11, you’ll learn
how you may be able to “telecommute” within weeks or months if (1) your
boss and company are sympathetic and (2) your office politics permit you to
do so without harming your career. Why wait for official telecommuting
programs from corporate headquarters? Chapter 11 advocates nothing less
than a grass-roots telecommuting movement by corporate writers,
programmers, salespeople, and working mothers. Toting up the savings that
telecommuting can yield, more and more corporations will encourage
experiments. Many people—though not all—thrive on it.
“It seems foolish for me to get in a car to go to an office,” said a
Washington-area telecommuter, “if I can go to that office by phone.”
Without the wear and tear of rush-hour driving he became more productive.
You needn’t telecommute every day. The chapter, in fact, starts with the
example of the rush-hour hater who made it a point to keep up with the
office crowd in person on occasion.
Chapter 12, “How I Found ‘God’ on MCI (and a Few Other Odds and
Ends about Electronic Mail),” tells more about sending computer messages
over the phone lines. Some E-mail nets even link up with the old Telex
networks. During the writing of this book I corresponded via computer with
people ranging from William F. Buckley, Jr., to Captain Zap and the MCI
mail-Telex connection transmitted last-minute changes to my publisher.
In Chapter 13, “Net Gain$,” you’ll learn how different computers in your
own office can share the same programs and exchange information without
people constantly having to carry floppy disks from one desk to another. A
Michigan company may be enjoying as much as DLR $1,000 a year more
in effective work time from each staffer as a result of its internal computer
net.
Of course, with today’s imperfect technology, such hookups can be a real
struggle. But so often they’re worth it.
You could say the same, indeed, of micros in general—today and in the
future.
It seemed especially true when, for my last chapter, I tried to reach Arthur
Clarke’s micro in Sri Lanka. I wanted him to answer questions about
microcomputers in 2001—the year in which his Hal was killing humans.
Did our phone-computer connection succeed? Read Chapter 14, “As the
Jungle Thickens.”

Struggles notwithstanding, computers often do pay for harried
professionals and business people. “This $5,000 machine has saved me
from hiring a $20,000-a-year assistant,” said a New York investment
adviser using an IBM PC to write reports and make financial calculations at
home. A young trader forsook the bedlam at the New York Cotton
Exchange for an electronic office in his apartment. Now he can go to work
in his bathrobe and delay his shower until lunchtime. “It’s more challenging
this way,” he said. “More contemplation, less raw instinct.”[5]
Another self-employed man, Jimmy Carter, composed his memoirs on a
word processor—perhaps inspired by the example of a former Carter
speech writer who wrote a well-reviewed book on national defense.
Then there’s Isaac Asimov, the legendary science-fiction novelist, who,
even with an ancient manual, could write faster than the old Teletype
machines could clatter along. But he didn’t always produce the neatest
copy. “How different now!” he exulted in an article. “Staring at a page of
type on a television screen, I eagerly look for typos so I can have the fun of
changing them.” You needn’t be a professional author, however, to benefit
from computerized writing. In Maryland, an architect-consultant, once
typewriter shy, is now churning out reports several hundred pages long on
his IBM PC.
“A boon to the small businessman” is how Hugh Hunt, a son of the late
oilman H. L. Hunt, described micros. “Now he can compete with the larger
corporations as far as obtaining data and processing it quickly.”
Hunt himself was using portable computers in his land-development
business. But he also noted their helpfulness in law:
“Computers are one of the ways that small attorneys can compete with
large corporations. By joining a computer bank, they can research briefs
and do word processing, just as the large companies can.”
Many Americans apparently shared his views. In 1985, they might buy
six million computers for business use, and within two more years, that
number might almost double.[6] While I was writing this book, the United
States was emerging from the worst economic ordeals since the Great
Depression; a few college graduates had been reduced to shopping-bag
ladies, but the microcomputer business was still growing, even if at a
reduced rate. You might wait three months or more for your Macintosh or
IBM. Some companies died, but others took their places; and even in times
of inflation most prices on micros were dropping; years would pass before

scientists could no longer keep dramatically increasing the silicon chips’
powers. Forget about the physical smallness of the chips. It was as if the
entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley—in exploiting the scientists’ advances—
were opening up a vast electronic territory. “The only thing you worry
about with computers,” Hunt said, pleased, “is ‘Should I wait until
something better comes along?’”
“I’m sort of a computer groupie,” said Art Buchwald, the syndicated
humor columnist. He was caught up in the new pornography of the era:
those luscious, ad-packed micro magazines crammed with the vital statistics
of IBMs and Apples. “It used to be that when Playboy arrived at the house,
my wife would say, ‘Your Playboy’s here,’” Buchwald told an advertising
magazine. “Now she says, ‘Your InfoWorld’s here.’ I’m not sure which she
prefers. I have a feeling that Playboy, at least, she could discuss with me.”
It was like radio during the 1920s, this micro craze.
Time had proclaimed the computer “Machine of the Year” in 1982, and I
recalled a song that a friend of my parents, an old woman, had written years
ago. “Marconi, Marconi,” the lyrics went, “the world is at your feet.” How
long until the novelty of microcomputers seems just as quaint as that of
radio? The parallels could be there. Two San Francisco-area authors,
Andrew Fluegelman and Jeremy Joan Hewes, in Writing in the Computer
Age, urged readers to “become full-fledged computer citizens—as writers,
poets, artists, musicians, programmers, number-crunchers, networkers....”
The Fluegelman-Hewes book was useful and well done. But “computer
citizens”? The phrase grated. I was a user at the keyboard, a “citizen” in the
voting booth.
Still, I could understand why Fluegelman and Hewes called themselves
“computer evangelists.” I felt the same way. After having brought us Muzak
and junk food, technology for once was making life better.
I say this with reservations. Educators correctly warned of the computer
literacy gap between Harlem and Scarsdale—of the dearth of machines in
the slums and the bounty in some suburbs. Rich and poor clashed at school-
board meetings. In my own county, Fairfax County, Virginia, a well-off
PTA reportedly saved up for micros, then withheld purchases until it learned
whether the school board would spend tax money helping other schools
catch up. And what about unemployment as automation cost more jobs? Or
U.S. firms using computer-satellite hookups to pipe in the work of $3-an-
hour clerks? The People’s Republic of China was even preparing to sell

programming skills to the rest of the world. A billion programmers, maybe?
So much for high tech as a refuge for the American jobless.
How could you make computerization a joy to all? That was one answer
you’d never find in a computer store.
You could, however, set up the right retraining program for valued
employees to see them through automation. You could fight the Hal
Syndrome. You could work to end boring tasks. In short, you could do your
best to make your computers benefit both your employees and your
company’s earnings.

2 The Kaypro Phenomenon:
How Solana Beach Took on
Silicon Valley

As The Silicon Jungle was lighting up my Kaypro screen one September
day in 1983, several similar machines were whirring and clicking in the
Washington offices of Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign.
Kaypros kept track of donations and the $18-million budget. They helped
churn out news releases, speeches, and letters to voters in important primary
states. Just eighty people worked at headquarters seven months into the
campaign; Kaypros and other affordable micros were a major reason why
Mondale wouldn’t need legions of back-room staffers in Washington later
on. I didn’t know if Mondale would win or lose the primary, but whatever
happened, it wouldn’t be for want of computing power.
Forty-five miles away, near Baltimore, Kaypros at a Westinghouse plant
were receiving computer messages from defense installations abroad. Other
Kaypros sat on the desks of William F. Buckley, Jr., ex-Governor Jerry
Brown’s research director, and the president of Tootsie Rolls; and still
another, some months earlier, had helped study Barney Clark, the first man
with an artificial heart. A Kaypro in the Midwest was tracking something
else, the milk and manure output of cows.
All of us, Mondale’s people, the others, and I, had benefited from the
struggle between Adam Osborne and Andy Kay.
Osborne, a brash ex-columnist for computer magazines, had marketed the
first mass-produced portable computer. Andy Kay had soon followed with
the Kaypro.
Adam Osborne was a dark-haired, mustached man in his forties who
enjoyed toting his product within sight of photographers. His father, a
British missionary of unconventional stripe, had tried to convert Christians
to Hinduism. Nor did the younger Osborne himself blend into the crowd; he
founded his computer company in 1981 and was soon comparing himself to

Henry Ford and the Osborne 1 to the Model T. “I give you,” he said, “ninety
percent of what most people need.”
His rival, Kay, was shorter, about five feet seven inches, but also slim;
like Osborne, he had studied chemical engineering and was a maverick and
newcomer in the personal-computer business. There, however, the
resemblances ended. Kay was soft-spoken, graying, an old electronics hand;
his friends depicted him as a quality-obsessed engineer and Osborne as a
flashy marketing man. They said Osborne had seemed technically incapable
of making a good portable with a nine-inch screen. Adam Osborne, in turn,
spoke of Kay’s computer as if he were a four-hundred-pound wrestler
forecasting an instant demise for a foe: “The Kaypro’s gonna die.”[7]
The computer magazines had portrayed Osborne as a lone maverick
taking on the Silicon Valley establishment with the portable that the rest of
the industry said couldn’t be built. But Kay claimed a similar idea had hit
him at the same time.
Andy Kay had seen his son-in-law struggling to carry an Apple and its
trimmings between home and office and decided that a market might exist
for a small machine for engineers, architects, and other professionals. Then,
Kay said, he had heard of the Osborne. Modifying their original plans
somewhat, his people at Non-Linear Systems had homed in on their rival’s
weaknesses, giving their own computer a better screen and a better
keyboard and the ability to store more data. Adam Osborne had struck back
with a jazzed-up version of his first machine. By 1983, many other
companies were in the fray, including Seequa Computer Corporation, a
Maryland manufacturer whose computer sold for less than $2,000 and ran
most IBM-style programs.
In mid-1983 an industry expert was saying Kay and Osborne might
together enjoy $200 million a year in micro sales at the retail level. That
was just a fraction of the $5-billion-a-year market for business micros, but
the two firms then seemed the largest makers of portables in the
$1,000-$2,000 range.[8] Their fight was pivotal. Lines were fuzzing between
economy business computers and the home machines; the winner of the
portable battle might go on to fight Apple and IBM, provided it survived the
onslaught of $1,000 computers that Japan was expected to unleash. By the
end of the decade, powerful portables with a quarter the bulk of the Kaypro
II might jam the shelves of the discount stores.

Kay waged his marketing war from several hillside buildings in Solana
Beach, a small town near San Diego, hundreds of miles south of Osborne
and the rest of Silicon Valley. His was a family business. Kay’s personal
housekeeper served salads and fruit juice in the corporate lunch room, and
his eighty-six-year-old father, known around the plant as “Grandpa,”
repaired electronic equipment and ran a forklift. Andy Kay’s wife was
secretary of the company. One son, David, was the vice-president for
marketing and had helped develop the Kaypro; a second son worked in
personnel, and a third ran the print shop; and Andy Kay’s daughter and her
husband had designed the buildings—which were now the same light blue
as the “KAYPRO II” lettering on the computer. Altogether, some 450
people worked for Kay’s company by mid-1983. That was more than twice
the number a year earlier when the Kaypro II was just hitting the market
and Kay was counting on a mere $10 million in sales.
Bulldozers were growling away amid the expansion, and the company
newspaper said equipment-cluttered grounds resembled a scene from a bad
disaster movie.
No longer was Kay a semiobscure maker of voltmeters and oscilloscopes
and other test equipment. Sales, once $4 or $5 million annually, were
barreling along toward $100 million. Even his company name soon changed
—from Non-Linear Systems to Kaypro—in recognition of the success of
the division making his hot new computer.
Wall Street and Andy Kay were getting to know each other. That summer
four million shares of common stock hit the market at $10 each; and the
prospectus said Arthur B. Laffer, the “Laffer Curve” economist, would
serve on the board of directors. Kay still owned most of the company
personally. And now, with the new money, he could give IBM and Apple a
better fight. “After 30 years in business,” San Diego Magazine had said,
“he’s suddenly the new kid on the block, clutching under his arms a couple
of excellent bags of marbles.”[9]
Before the Kaypro, Kay hadn’t exactly been on the verge of starvation—
he owned an art-filled home overlooking the Pacific and gave to the local
symphony and other cultural causes—but now he’d reached the point where
his admirers were depicting him as a silicon-age Horatio Alger character.
That’s a little exaggerated. Kay, though poor in his New Jersey days, was
never an orphaned newsboy toughing it alone.

“Grandpa” prodded Andy. Frank Kopischiansky—an Eastern European
immigrant and an ex-coal miner—worked in silk mills and wool factories
and as a chauffeur. Frank had come to the United States from what is now
Poland. Andy Kopischiansky would later become Andy Kay after his
original name baffled some colleagues at work and they kept calling him
“Kay” for short.
The Kopischiansky home lacked a bathtub. “But,” Andy recalled, “we
always had food, and I always had a nickel in my pocket.” Frank enjoyed
fixing broken-down cars and tinkering with electrical equipment, and Andy
himself built a shortwave radio when he was only twelve years old. Math
was another love. Andy even considered a career as an actuary after
Prudential Life told him he could eventually make $15,000 a year. “I
flipped out,” Andy said, “because it was a lot of money in 1935.” Frank
shrugged off the $15,000, however. “That’s not very much,” he said. The
words, incredibly, came from a man who seldom made more than $1,000 a
year during Andy’s youth and who sometimes earned just $15 a week.
Andy, growing up in Clifton, New Jersey, took it for granted he could
never afford college, but then the letters M.I.T. came up in a drafting class.
“What’s that?” Andy asked. “I’ve never heard of the place.”
Frank had lost most of his savings in a bank crash, but his wife somehow
scraped up enough money to help Andy reach M.I.T. on a partial
scholarship. Andy graduated in 1940 with a bachelors degree in chemical
engineering, mathematics, and premedicine and worked for the Bendix
Corporation and several other companies before founding Non-Linear
Systems in 1953. Kay reached California through a job, although for years
he’d been hoping to enjoy the warm climate there. He started his company
in Solana Beach rather than Silicon Valley because he was already working
in the area. Osborne himself would found his own firm while living in
Berkeley—he’d locate it in Hayward, a medium-sized city within twenty
miles of the Valley proper, the Palo Alto-San Jose area southeast of San
Francisco.
For Non-Linear Systems Kay developed the world’s first commercially
successful digital voltmeter. It was the result of some memories from World
War II, when unskilled workers were constantly damaging voltmeters and
having trouble reading them accurately. Kay’s new machine easily survived
the careless. The instrument displayed numbers and didn’t require workers
to make a reading off the thin needle of a conventional meter adjusted for

the right voltage. “I don’t look at myself particularly as an inventor,” Kay
said. “I’m a solver of problems. There are inventors who have many, many
more ideas than I get.” Instead, he tried to refine ideas in “ways that make
sense from an industrial-engineering standpoint and a customer standpoint.”
Kay’s digital voltmeter was perfect for the military and for the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and their contractors;
unskilled people could help test thousands of voltages on American
missiles. “The silos are full of our instruments,” he said. But the NASA
cutbacks of the Nixon era hit Non-Linear Systems hard.
“The seven vice-presidents went,” recalled a trade publication, “as did
their white Cadillacs.” Frank Kopischiansky was willing to help see Non-
Linear Systems through bad times, loaning thousands of dollars of painfully
saved money. But that was hardly enough to sustain a corporation. What
about the future? How to avoid the boom-and-bust cycle of government
spending?
Kay decided to carve out a niche as a maker of rugged portable test gear
for private industry. He wanted to offer many of the same wrinkles found in
costly, bench-bound equipment, and one of those features was a
microprocessor in a voltmeter: a miniature electronic brain that would make
it easier to use. The idea came from an old friend, Bill McDonald, whom
Kay had met decades earlier at M.I.T. Their gym lockers were next to each
other’s there; both men had loved handball and hated team sports.
McDonald, a husky man of basketball-player height, had worked for Non-
Linear Systems in the early 1950s, then had returned East, where he had
acquired a computer background. Then, in the late 1970s, he’d rejoined
Non-Linear Systems, where his friend Kay hoped he would help develop a
computer. Correctly or not, Kay believed that “ninety percent of the
electronics business was computer and ten percent was test equipment, hi-
fi, stereo, and stuff like that.” Non-Linear Systems had offered other
companies’ minicomputers in systems it packaged for military contractors,
but still wasn’t making machines of its own. Maybe a small business
machine would be one way to enter computerdom.
“Two months after Bill came to work for me,” Kay recalled, “he showed
me some microprocessor-based computers for doing accounts payable-
receivable at the local computer dealer’s place.
“They were very reasonable, so I bought some and was very intrigued
with them. And I wondered: ‘Why not make this stuff? I could make a

better disk drive. And look at this: this connector doesn’t work too well.’
And Bill said, ‘We could make them, all right, but I don’t know where
you’d sell them.’ This was in late 1979. I said okay and dropped the idea.”
Two years later, however, Kay watched his architect son-in-law, Michael
Batter, struggling with an Apple and knew the time was ripe for an easier-
to-tote portable.
Kay tried VisiCalc, the electronic spreadsheet, on the Apple and came
away thinking the machine was too complicated, beyond being a hassle to
move from home to office. So Kay told Bill McDonald, “Listen, we’re
selling instruments to engineers. Let’s make a computer that we can walk in
to an engineer and set on his desk and say, ‘Hey, look at this. You can use
it.’”
Still, Kay worried about the new technology. “It’s a fairly stylized
dance,” McDonald reassured him in spring 1981. “You buy the chips, and
there is black magic in getting them to work—but not in how they work.”
“Okay,” came the reply, “that’s it. We’ll get rid of the disadvantages of
the Apple and cram our computer into one box without cables all over the
place.” In ads the Apple looked incredibly compact. Actually, though,
serious computer users needed disk drives to store large amounts of
information for quick retrieval. They also needed a TV-like monitor to see
the letters and numbers they typed out on the computer. And Kay wisely
wanted everything squeezed into one box. If you bought his machine, you’d
get the whole works except perhaps for the printer, which spewed out your
calculations or typed up your letter. Also, it would cost you less than a full
Apple system. Kay could bring down the cost of a complete machine if he
planned on every computer being one.
All this was the logical culmination of Kay’s skill in shrinking gear for
the military and aerospace industry. For years he had been making printed
circuit boards and filling them with components. And he could order the
disk drives, keyboards, and other special computer-type parts from outside
suppliers.
The way Kay tells it, he had no idea—at first—that he was about to take
on Adam Osborne. “It was six months,” he said, “before we ever saw
Osborne’s literature. He introduced his computer in March 1981, but I
didn’t know anything about it.” Some would question that statement, of
course, given the novelty of the Osborne 1 and its creator’s flair for
publicity.

Whatever happened—with Osborne in mind or not—Kay selected the
same basic technology and essentially similar parts.

A Z80-Style Microprocessor

A microprocessor is simply the main brains that tie together the memory
devices, the keyboard, and other parts of the computer. You can also call it a
central processing unit (CPU).
Okay, but why a Z80 in the Kaypro?
That’s simply a style of chip from a company called Zilog. “You could
buy those all over the place,” Kay said. “We wanted something proven and
reliable.” The Z80 was the only kind of CPU that could run CP/M (Control
Program for Microcomputers)-style programs, then an industry standard.
The Z80, though, can’t handle programs as complicated as the newer
8088 chip that ended up in IBM PCs and countless clones. Here’s why.
A bit is a “1” or a “0.” Patterns of bits form bytes. And what’s a byte?
Nothing more than a letter or number. So how does this tie in with the early
Kaypro’s Z80 versus the IBM’s 8088?
Well, the Z80 processes information in words of only 8 bits at a time.
The 8088 in the IBM, however, gulps it down in 16-bit chunks and works
with larger memories—so that the IBM can run more complicated
programs, like the more elaborate electronic spreadsheets for forecasting
profit and loss. There’s another benefit, too. A 16-bitter doesn’t need to call
up programming information as often from the spinning floppy disks, which
are slower than the purely electronic memories.
The Kaypro II, however, won’t immediately become a has-bit—er, has-
been. “Converting the Kaypro to a 16-bit machine is no big deal,” Kay
observed. In fact, several months after he said it, his company announced a
computer called the Kaypro II Plus 88 with both the 8-bit Z80 and the 16-
bit 8088. It couldn’t run all IBM programs, especially those boasting
graphics or pictures as well as words and numbers. Here, as in many cases,
the term “IBM compatible” is grossly misleading. There are degrees of
compatibility, and even if a computer supposedly uses the same style of
floppy disks, you must test it with the program you want to run. (Many
computer aficionados test for general IBM compatibility by running a game
called Flight Simulator, or Lotus 1-2-3, a program combining a spreadsheet
with graphics and several other capabilities.)

Some existing programs, by the way, are configured so that it doesn’t
matter much whether you’re running the 8- or 16-bit version.
That will change as special programs come out for the 16-bit machines
and as old ones, like WordStar, begin to take full advantage of 16-bit
capabilities. Already Apple and other companies are writing new software
for computers like the Macintosh, which, if not universally regarded as a
true 32-bit machine, contains chips faster than the IBM’s 8088.
For many small businesses, however, 8 bits may be powerful enough
even for number crunching as long as the right programs are available.
The wisdom in the micro business is that no machine is ever obsolete—
just so it does the job for you.

64K Random-Access Memory (RAM)

RAM, once the power goes off, will throw out everything you’ve typed.
This temporary computer memory, this electronic scratchpad, is like a
bright student cramming for a quiz in a useless subject: he’s a quick learner
—and a quick forgetter. Don’t confuse RAM with ROM, or read-only
memory. ROMs keep remembering even after the power goes off. But you
can’t “write” new material on them; commonly, ROMs store programs used
over and over again.
What about the RAM, though? How to get around the forgetting? You
just transfer the information to floppy disks, which are slower but as stable
as a music cassette.
Different computers hold different amounts of information in their
RAMs. The Kaypro II holds 64K; K is normally a scientific abbreviation
for 1,000. So 64K stands for a memory capacity of about 64,000 letters or
numbers. No, I won’t mess with the technical explanation of why it isn’t
exactly 64,000.
Okay, but why 64K?
It’s a magic number to the computer. Sixty-four K bytes is the largest
memory with which the Z80 and other 8-bit microprocessors can easily
communicate without too much technical trickery.
Also, you need at least 64K to make good use of some popular software
like the WordStar word-processing program.
Moreover, the RAM must be roomy enough to handle electronic
spreadsheets. Most small businesses will find that the 64K Kaypro can
juggle around enough columns and rows on the sheets. But in some cases
you may still want a micro with 500K or even 1,000K or more of RAM. To
sum things up, that’s because:
1. Bigger RAMs can work with more and larger numbers—a handy
capability for a company with extremely complicated spreadsheets.
2. More RAM can accommodate programs more complicated for the
computer. Note the words “for the computer.” Some of the programs most
complicated for the computer may be the easiest for you to use.
Or they may be the most versatile. Lotus 1-2-3, a combination of a
spreadsheet, a graphics program, and several others, is far too complex

for an 8-bit machine with 64K RAM. Many 16-bit programs require
192K or more just to load the program before you even put in your
reports or spreadsheets.
3. You may want the most sophisticated software to thwart computer
crooks. That could be particularly true in a large company where many
people can poke through a computer’s memory either in person or via
other machines connected by phone or other wires.
Never buy a computer without seeing for yourself that it and the software
will together serve your needs. Don’t take the sales rep’s word. Instead,
make him or his software specialist put the machine through its paces. Do
so even if you’re not buying software at the store. Of course, the sales rep
may not have access to the software, in which case you may want to visit
another store for a demo. And if no one can assure you, no ifs or buts, that
the computer-software combo works fine? Then you may want to hire a
consultant.

Use of CP/M Software

CP/M is a kind of operating system. It tells a computer how to do
garden-variety jobs, like moving data from a memory unit to one that does
the machine’s electronic reasoning. CP/M isn’t the only operating system
that business microcomputers use. When I was writing this chapter,
however, it was one of the more common, with variation present on more
than half a million computers. A company called Digital Research marketed
CP/M, selling to manufacturers, which, in turn, didn’t have to create their
own operating systems. In the early 1980s, the big software hits almost
always came in CP/M formats.
“We wanted to use CP/M because 10,000 programs were available,” Kay
said. They were for computers with 8 bits, not 16—another reason he made
the original Kaypro an 8-bitter.
“If we’d used 16 bits,” Kay said with uncharacteristic profanity, “people
would have said, ‘Where the hell’s the programs?’ IBM could sell their
computers without programs, which is what they did essentially and let the
programs come later.”
In contracting software design to outsiders, “Big Blue,” as IBM is called,
was defying its own tradition. It hired Microsoft—a Washington State
software company headed by a brilliant young Harvard dropout—to create
a whole new operating system. Called MS-DOS, the system would become
an industry standard by 1984. And from the start, independent software
houses hustled to market MS-DOS-style programs usable on the hot new
machine for applications like word processing and spreadsheets.
The existing CP/M applications programs wouldn’t work on an
unmodified IBM Personal Computer unless the programmers converted
them to MS-DOS or another compatible operating system.

‘Two-Disk
They’re the gizmos into which you insert the floppy disks through slots
in the computer.
From the outside a disk looks square. It’s inside a container that helps
protect it from fingerprints and other threats to the plastic disk’s magnetic

coating.
You can’t cover the delicate disk completely, though. Some of it must
touch the head of a disk drive. A head “writes” magnetic patterns on the
oxide coating of a disk; in other words, it stores information that you’ve
typed into your computer or the results of your calculations.
And to fetch the information? Then you simply type out commands
instructing the head to “read” from the disk to the RAM.
It’s much like a tape recorder storing your voice magnetically. But a disk
drive can read or write information much more rapidly than a tape-recorder-
style arrangement could. That’s because the disk spins so rapidly—
hundreds of revolutions per minute.
Why twin disk drives, however?
There are two reasons:

1. You can quickly make safety copies of valuable disks—something that’s
more of a hassle with single-drive computers like the bare-boned
Macintosh.
2. You can more easily work with long electronic documents.

With one drive I’m storing WordStar and a number of other goodies that
take up almost all the space on the floppy; there’d be hardly any room for
the information I’m typing out. All this is happening on my “A” drive.
The “B” drive is my data disk, devoted entirely to storage of my writing.
I can easily squeeze the equivalent of about fifty pages of double-spaced
typing with WordStar, which is one reason I bought a Kaypro instead of an
Osborne. Brand O’s earlier versions could store only half that amount of
material. Before buying a computer, you should always analyze your paper
records in terms of “K.” Each K stands for 1,024 characters; and that
includes letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and spaces in between. A
double-spaced page of typing might be 66 (the number of columns across
each line) × 28 (the number of lines), or 1,848 characters. Bingo! That’s
1.8K, plus a little slack for safety. Since Andy Kay allowed 191K of
working space on each floppy, I’d have enough room for a document some
hundred pages long, except that WordStar makes an electronic carbon copy
for additional security. So my actual working space is around 50 pages.
That’s easily enough for this chapter to fit on one of the Kaypro II’s

floppies. And newer floppy disk drives can accommodate more than 2.5
million bytes.
Although the Osborne and Kaypro both used twin drives, there were also
major differences between the two—beyond the double-density feature that
allowed Kay to squeeze twice as much material on each floppy.
Osborne’s first computer, for example, came with only a five-inch
monitor. “Adequacy is sufficient,” he once said. “All else is irrelevant.” It
was a neat excuse for his early machine’s limited disk space and for the
five-inch, black-and-white screen, which could display only 52 columns
and which wasn’t as kind to the eyes as green.
The production-model Kaypro, on the other hand, boasted a nine-inch,
80-column green screen from the start.
And the Kaypro keyboard made the Osborne board seem flimsy. “I like
something I can feel when I’m pressing a letter down,” said Kim
DeFilippis, a dealer relations woman who was one of the touch-typists
chosen to try out different keyboards for the new machine. “The board
doesn’t feel like one on a computer. It feels like a typewriter.” And the keys,
unlike the Osborne’s, were in all the right places for people weaned on
Selectrics. Kay had used the same Tiffany-quality keyboard found on
computer terminals costing thousands of dollars more than his economy
machine.
Kay, moreover, had given his Kaypro a metal case unlike the plastic one
of the Osborne. Metal dispersed heat better, and that meant that the parts
might last longer than those in the early Osbornes. Brand O tended to
overheat floppy disks. Recalling that Non-Linear Systems made test
instruments, however, one reviewer gibed that the metal case betrayed the
Kaypro’s heritage. I didn’t care. The Kaypro reminded me of old Heathkits,
of smoky soldering irons, of crisp, cold evenings in my youth when I’d
listened through the static for the whistling dots and dashes from my fellow
hams. But many people shrugged off the Kaypro’s appearance as
unprofessional, and so I asked about the case. Kay said its contents dictated
the shape. “Unless we created air space and made it larger,” he said, “we
couldn’t have made the shape much different.” A hood shaded the Kaypro’s
cathode ray tube (CRT; the TV-like screen). And as it turned out, that
matched the comfortable slope of the keyboard that attached to the front of
the machine for carrying. I noticed only a few adornments added for
buyers’ eyes. One was the blue “KAYPRO II” lettering on the case and the

stripes on it and the keyboard; another was the blue color of the keys on the
calculatorlike numbers pad. No, you couldn’t mistake the Kaypro for a
Gucci creation. And yet, as good, functional design, the Kaypro succeeded:
at least one other portable appeared in a sharp-edged metal box.
The location of my Kaypro’s two disk drives, to the right of the CRT, was
especially logical. Kay and his engineers wanted them well separated from
a high-voltage transformer on the left—an electrical component that was
part of the video circuitry and whose magnetic radiation could interfere
with the operation of the drives. Bill McDonald noted the Osborne disks
were on either side of the tube. Circuitry for a nine-inch tube produced
more electronic noise than that given off by a five-incher. And McDonald
speculated that this was one reason Osborne had to make do with the
smaller size.
Inside the Kaypro, atop the printed circuit boards, you saw integrated
circuits with leglike leads of the kind that one writer compared to
caterpillars. You found somewhat similar looking parts inside the Osborne.
But there was a difference. “Oh, my God,” said Michael Pond, owner of a
Washington-area Kaypro dealership, the Computer Shoppe, “once you take
the cover off the Osborne, everything sort of falls apart in your hand. It’s
held together by the wiring harness. It’s like a jellyfish.” That may have
been a bit off target. Chris Christiansen, however, a computer analyst with
the Yankee Group, a high-tech marketing research firm, compared the
Osborne to a Chinese puzzle and said an Osborne user “in the next office
gets very nervous when I come around with a screwdriver.” By contrast the
Kaypro looked eminently repairable. “When you take one part of the
machine off,” Pond said, “the rest of the machine doesn’t fall apart.” Andy
Kay’s people had divided up the circuitry into several modules that
repairmen could remove easily. His computer had far fewer chips than the
old Apple II. And with fewer chips, repair people more often could locate
glitches by replacing various parts until the machine was working again.
Fondly, Pond said the Kaypro II was “over-engineered,” like an early-model
Volvo.
“Well,” you’re wondering, “what about the Kaypro I?”
It never existed except as a prototype. Of course, the II didn’t hurt Kay’s
efforts to convince buyers that he had one up on Osborne.
The prototype’s screen was between the disk drives, interfering with
them, and another flaw became clear: the shortness of the cable between the

keyboard and the main unit. Bill McDonald was worried. Suppose a
customer crushed a finger while wrestling with the little cable? Why not
hinge the keyboard to the twenty-pound console? And that’s how Non-
Linear Systems indeed built the prototype. But McDonald still fretted that
someone might undo the latches; and so, driven by fear of a lawsuit from a
klutzy Kaypro owner, the engineers redesigned the computer to
accommodate a coiled cord several feet long.
Altogether, Andy Kay’s people spent only a year and less than half a
million dollars developing the Kaypro II.
“After we’d been at it eight or nine months,” he said, “someone brought
in some literature from Osborne, who had just announced his portable
computer. I said, ‘Oh, oh, somebody beat me to the punch.’ But I saw he
had a different idea in mind—a smaller screen, plastic case, different
market.”[10] The words “different market” are more than a little off mark.
Andy Kay, like it or not, was in direct competition with Osborne. Kay
might sell his computers at independent stores rather than at the
ComputerLands and Sears stores where many of Osborne’s machines ended
up. But at meetings of Kaypro owners and “Ozzies,” I found the same
hodgepodge of small-business people and professionals.
Hearing of Osborne, Kay actually was grateful in a sense. “When he
started telling the world about how many orders he’s got, I said, ‘Well, if
he’s getting all these orders, I’ll start making more of them.’”
Kay used an electronic spreadsheet on his newly developed computer to
forecast its sales. The Kaypro II had better succeed, since the half million in
expenses didn’t include marketing costs and miscellaneous ones such as
manuals—another million altogether. Kay, however, said the high-interest
loans for the project “never really bothered me that much. I felt confident of
getting it done. In one sense I place very little value on money. My wife,
Mary, is quite different. She said, ‘You’ll lose your money.’ She was
secretary of the company. She had to sign mortgages on our home that we
had paid for, property we owned, the plant site. It was a heavy burden for
her. If you’re in an airplane or car, going up a winding road on a mountain,
the fellow who’s driving isn’t as nervous as if someone else is driving. I
was involved in getting it done. She was on the sidelines worrying about it.”
The Kaycomp—that was the original name before the Kays changed it
because it resembled another computer firm’s—first went public at a San
Francisco computer fair in March 1982. Just a routine item appeared in

Byte, the phone-book-sized microcomputer magazine. I wondered why.
Maybe it was because Andy Kay’s technology wasn’t new, merely good
repackaging, and he wasn’t selling himself as God or Henry Ford. But
dealers at computer shows were raving. The Kaypro’s suggested retail price
was $1,795, the same as the Osborne’s, and Kay, too, threw in software: a
word processor, an electronic spreadsheet, and other programs that could
have cost more than $1,000 if purchased individually. Kay was smart.
Osborne had pioneered by including business software for “free” with an
economy-priced machine, and now Kay must follow with its own
“bundled” programs.
“Has Catch 22’s Milo Minderbinder, World War II’s greatest wheeler-
dealer, hired on as a software buyer at NLS?” San Diego marveled.
“You don’t think that took a lot of time to put together?” Kay said. “We
purchased some software outright and pay royalties for some.”[11]
By mid-1982, customers and dealers had placed several thousand
advanced orders. Kay’s production lines cranked up, though the pace was
slow at first as his people searched for bugs. They did not always stamp
them out. A disk drive on my Serial #3083, lasted only a year; my warranty
was for the industry’s usual ninety days. Moreover, despite visits to several
dealers, my computer still streaked lightly across the screen when I typed,
and finally I had to have the monitor replaced. But the view easily beat the
Osborne’s. And later, modifying the circuitry and positioning the disk drives
horizontally instead of vertically, Kay ended the streaks on new units. “In
an emergency I get all the senior engineers on the job,” he said. “We don’t
let problems go on like old man river.”
Andy Kay rewarded his top problem solvers with benefits like stock
options, and the stock offering prospectus from Prudential-Bache Securities
anticipated that in 1983 Kay himself would earn $187,000 in salary,
bonuses, and other remuneration.
Not everyone fared so well; Kay said his labor costs were half those of
competitors. “The wages on the line are so low,” quipped a disgruntled ex-
employee, “I’d call them south of the border.” Kaypro was typical of many
high-tech companies; the production workers were mainly women, many of
them foreign born, some of them incapable of speaking English, all of them
nonunion. Adam Osborne, too, tried to cut labor costs to the bone. And
Atari had laid off scores of Americans and farmed out jobs to cheaper labor

abroad, reddening the faces of the politicians known as “Atari Democrats”
who believed that high tech could fight unemployment.
Regardless of the low wages, Kay’s own company at least appeared to be
the antithesis of a sweatshop. His hillside buildings didn’t look like normal
factories; they were long and narrow, well windowed, split into small rooms
without the racket of mechanized production lines. Kay described his
workers as “always moving, interacting constantly. If one piece is missing,
they work around that. If one person is slow because he happens to be new,
they work around him and help him out. It’s exactly the same approach we
used for stuffing printed circuit boards on the voltmeters. It uses the least
amount of capital equipment, and it’s the easiest on the assemblers, because
they aren’t just sitting or standing in one spot.”
Lacking a conventional assembly line, Kay said he needed few mid-level
managers; and even after Kay went public, he still hated to bring in MBAs.
Managers built empires. They feuded. They got in producers’ way. That was
how Kay felt, apparently—a legacy of the 1960s when Non-Linear Systems
had splurged thousands on those seven vice-presidents and their white
Cadillacs. But some practices from the go-go years lingered. One, said Kay,
was participative management, the philosophy that had led to the formation
of those small, friendly assembly teams. The atmosphere around the plant
was informal. “We have very few written policies on anything,” he said. No
dress code existed, save for an informal ban on attire like short shorts—a
policy bent to accommodate workers who labored in the hot Southern
California sun.
Also, Andy Kay’s company at times hired people with unusual
backgrounds. Clifford Odendhal, a musician-dancer-songwriter in his
thirties, had come by way of COJO Wind, David Kay’s alternative energy
firm. David asked Odendhal to help Non-Linear Systems catch up on back
correspondence, leading to a customer-service job there. Eventually,
Odendhal was helping with public relations. “This is the first job outside of
entertainment that I have ever cared about beyond my paycheck,” he said.
Andy said of David, “He’s less cautious about hiring people than I am. If
they don’t work out, he just lets them go.”
David, a six-foot-three-inch surfer with a degree in math and a hobby of
collecting dictionaries, had himself started with the company several years
before the birth of the Kaypro. Now he was vice-president for marketing,
and when an investment banker asked Andy if David was a vice-president

because he was Andy’s son or because he was the best man for the job,
Andy replied: “Both.” He believed that David’s role in the development and
marketing of the Kaypro “was extremely important. In thirty years I’ve
never seen a man in marketing who measures up to one-tenth the dedication
and performance he’s shown.”
Andy’s son used what the Wall Street Journal described as
“idiosyncratic” marketing techniques. Dealers couldn’t sell Kaypros by
mail. They didn’t enjoy extended credit. The Kaypro Division, in fact, did
not even spend much at first on national advertising.
Examined closely, however, each policy seemed logical. Most customers
couldn’t just walk out the door of their computer dealer and wave an eternal
good-bye. Chances are that they’d be back for advice or repairs. So Kaypro
wanted local dealers not to face competition from cutthroat mail-order
houses that left the customer on his own.
Without a strong network of local stores, Kaypro might perish. Andy Kay
appreciated this. “If a fellow does mail order and the contract says he
can’t,” Kay said, “David cuts him off without a qualm. Maybe the dealer
says we need him or he won’t be able to support his family and kids. Well,
forget it. This is a business, but it’s also our livelihood, too.” Of course, not
all mail-order establishments in the computer trade were unethical: I knew
of some good ones. But from a manufacturer’s viewpoint the policy made
sense. The Kays at the time wanted to befriend the independent dealers,
who were less likely to flood the market with heavily discounted computers
than the chains were.
However sympathetic to the independents, Kaypro didn’t follow the lead
of some expansion-minded computer companies and grant extended credit
—a sensible policy in this volatile business. A California chain folded,
owing hundreds of thousands to Apple as well as customers. As to how he
originally picked up many dealers, Andy Kay said, “The orders just started
rolling in. Now we’re sort of clearing out dealers which are operating out of
backs of cars or whatever.”
Kay was also benefiting by selling through his own network rather than
being at the mercy of distributors—and supporting their profit margins.
By the summer of 1983, Kaypros were selling at some thousand
dealerships. Christiansen observed that Kaypro gave dealers “30 or 40
percent margins. So does Osborne. That’s how they get the dealers to carry
the damned things. You know, when you have fifty guys a week knocking

on your door, you pick the one who’s going to put the most money in your
pocket, and Osborne and Kaypro both know how to play this game as well
as or better than anyone else. How do you think Kaypro went from nothing
in 1982 to 100,000 units in 1983?” Kay disputed this. He said that the
Kaypro’s quality sold the computers, that he hadn’t offered more than 25
percent dealer discounts, and never would; and his claim seemed creditable
enough when some stores dropped the Kaypro because the markup wasn’t
big enough. Whatever the facts, Kaypro in 1983 boasted sales offices in
some fifteen U.S. cities and one in the Netherlands. One-third of the
computer-store ads in the Washington Post business supplement of August
8, 1983, mentioned the Kaypro.
The limited national advertising was equally wise. Why not depend at
first on local ads telling where people could buy the product? And what was
the use of creating a demand for more computers than Kaypro could make?
Andy Kay had learned from Osborne’s example. Adam Osborne’s splashy
ads had helped create the market that the Kaypro was now enjoying.
Besides, Kay was benefiting from something better than advertising: the
articles of friendly writers. And why not? Writing was just another form of
word processing—a category for which most Kaypro owners had bought
their machines. Certainly the Selectric-style keyboard and 80-column
screen had impressed me. Peter McWilliams, the very same writer who had
led the cheering in the micro magazines for the Osborne, was a Kaypro
convert. “Put simply, as a personal computer, the Kaypro II is superior to
the Osborne 1 in almost every detail,” he wrote—“yet it retails for the same
$1,795. As David Letterman might say, ‘Unbelievable!’” James Fallows,
the Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly, free-lancing for TV Guide,
called the Kaypro “the best value” for “complicated accounting” or “heavy-
duty word processing.” I was used to seeing hype in and out of computer
magazines for inferior products. The Kaypro, however, deserved the paeans.
Granted, I didn’t like Perfect Writer, a word processor included between
1982 and early 1984; and the sharpness of the monitor was no match for
some more expensive machines. The Kaypro wasn’t the best computer,
period. But at the time Fallows praised the Kaypro to the millions of TV
Guide readers, it may well have been the best dollar-for-dollar value.
Fallows himself didn’t own a Kaypro. He honestly reached his conclusion
unassisted by a special offer from Kaypro: 40 percent discounts for writers;
the company said—convincingly or not—that it didn’t attach any strings.

As production increased, Kaypro finally did trot out national
advertisements. One, in Esquire, showed a young Kaypro user in an office
swept by a fierce wind, blowing coworkers’ papers away and tousling his
hair, while he was typing happily away with his chair and desk raised a foot
off the floor, “KAYPRO RISES TO THE OCCASION,” said the advertisement. I
didn’t really see the point. The technical specs were buried in small print at
the bottom of the page; why couldn’t the ad tell me in large print and simple
language what the Kaypro could do? A Kaypro staffer said the ad was to
build name recognition. Then the company might unleash a campaign
portraying its steel ugly duckling as the Volkswagen of small computers. It
seemed a sensible-enough idea. Then, again, it was another indication that
the computer business was becoming more like Detroit—selling not only
economy but the image of economy.
Finally, the new ads came out. In simple, helpful language they told
novices what to look for in a small business computer. And yet you could
hardly confuse the ads’ goals with Consumer Reports'. The ads for
beginners recommended consulting with an expert before choosing a
machine; at the same time ads in sophisticated magazines like Byte asked
computer pros to suggest the Kaypro to beginners. (“Once you tell people
about the complete business computer for $1,595,” said an ad appearing
after the Kays lowered the price $200, “they’ll probably stop bugging you
with a lot of questions.”)
The public relations campaign was just as slick. No one lied. But Hill &
Knowlton, the fast-track public relations agency, laced its Kaypro releases
with quotes skillfully reflecting the computer makers’ self-interest. In one,
David Kay said, “If it isn’t portable, it doesn’t pay to buy it.” That was
hyperbole, pure and simple.
The nine-inch screen, for instance, was a major improvement over the
Osborne, and it was entirely right for an economy portable from which
many buyers would eventually trade up, anyway; but writers and other
heavy-duty users might prefer a twelve-incher from the very start. For not
much more than the Kaypro at the time of the release, you could buy a
desktop computer called the Morrow Micro Decision with good software
and a twelve-inch screen. Milton Viorst, a Washington journalist, couldn’t
stomach the Kaypro monitor. He considered the Kaypro the kind of
machine you might tote back and forth between home and the beach but not
the best for heavy-duty viewing. He bought the Morrow, or two, actually:

one for himself and one for his wife, Judith, a well-known poet and
magazine writer. However pro-Kaypro, I could see why. The Kaypro,
strictly speaking, wasn’t even portable; instead, it was transportable. Unless
you were a 300-pound tackle playing for the Pittsburgh Steelers, you
weren’t about to tote a sharp-edged, 26-pound computer and battery pack as
casually as you would an attaché case.
Other “feature information” from Hill & Knowlton in spring 1983
offered more tips for computer shoppers in a way cunningly designed to
steer them to the Kaypro without the customers’ quite knowing what was
going on.
“KAYPRO Division of Non-Linear Systems” appeared on the first page
in big blue letters above the text. But the seven-page “feature
information”—the part intended for publication—mentioned the computer
by name just once and in an inconspicuous location. It laid out the specs for
a good portable. Then, several hundred words after the Kaypro mention, it
triumphantly concluded, “For as little as $1,795, you can already buy the
only fully portable personal computer with a full-sized screen, one that
offers large enough memory capacity to handle business, entertainment and
educational programming and a service network that’s available anytime or
anyplace—just like the optimal portable personal computer itself.” I
recalled the canned releases from food companies that women’s pages ran
verbatim. How many newspapers and magazines would do the same with
“feature information” from Kaypro? David and his father had made a good
machine. And yet I wondered how many manufacturers of bad computers
might start using similar tactics. Joel Strasser, at the time the Hill &
Knowlton man handling Kaypro, later protested that he was engaging in
standard public relations practice, but his remarks simply dramatized how
the welfare of shoppers might clash with that of the manufacturers.
Disguised puffery was hardly in keeping with David Kay’s portrayal of
himself as a consumer advocate.
Around the time the Kays were calling in high-powered public relations
people, Adam Osborne himself went a step further. In January 1983 he
hired a professional manager to be Osborne Computer’s president, Robert
Jaunich II, formerly president of Consolidated Foods. Osborne would later
blame Jaunich for many of the computer firm’s problems, telling a reporter
that Jaunich wasn’t fleet-footed enough for a young company in an industry
with a fast-changing market.

Jaunich’s recollections would differ. Recalling the discoveries he made
during the audit before the never-to-take-place public offering of Osborne
stock, he told the Wall Street Journal, “Every day you came in, the numbers
got worse. Every number you touched went soft.” He blamed the corporate
chaos on Adam Osborne. “The real message,” said Jaunich, who resigned as
Osborne president in December 1983, “is the professional people got here
too late to help.”
Osborne was also critical of another executive; he accused him of cutting
a deal with a supplier—while still working at Osborne Computer—to make
a rival machine. Whatever happened, the internal squabbles at Osborne may
have wasted time and energy that he and colleagues could better have
devoted to their battle against the Kaypro.
He himself would later admit in his book Hypergrowth that “new product
development moved slowly” until the second half of 1982. A smaller,
cheaper Osborne 1, the Vixen, never reached the market while he was
running the company. His $2,495 Executive computer—with a seven- rather
than five-inch screen—did make it out the door. “Wayne” didn’t. Introduced
early enough, Wayne could have given the Kays fits. This $1,995 model
was to offer a nine-inch screen and include a built-in printer and a pile of
free programs for word processing, communications with other computers,
and other tasks. But technical problems bedeviled Osborne. When Osborne
finally caught on that IBM had established a new industry standard, he
sought to make his Executive compatible, but he was aware of his own
company’s “dismal record in engineering development.”
Osborne entrusted the task to a San Diego firm. By May 1983, however,
Osborne realized that the firm’s IBM-compatible prototypes were
“expensive, late, and included wholly unacceptable features such as circles
that would be displayed as ovals when an Executive user switched from
CP/M to IBM compatibility.”
Adam Osborne was clearly losing his sales war with Andy Kay. He had
talked to reporters about the Executive in early 1983, and in July
newspapers said this had discouraged some dealers from ordering too many
Osborne 1s. The story was that Osborne’s cash reserves had fallen as orders
for the older machines dropped from 10,000 a month to almost nothing.
Apparently he’d forgotten one of the precepts of any business with
changing products: you're always competing against yourself. If you make
too many old models or brag too soon about the new ones, then you may

imperil your cash flow and see surplus product inventory pile up. Your
customers will keep their wallets shut as they await your coming attraction.
It was a most plausible explanation for Osborne Computer’s cash-flow
problems but perhaps not the main one. In Hypergrowth Osborne revealed
that his sales levels for his Osborne 1 had been dwindling even without all
the puffery about the forthcoming Executive model; he confessed that he
had lied to the press to throw it “off the scent of the real story.” His bankers
were threatening to call in loans; he was laying off workers, yet he still
hoped to woo private investors.
As the end neared, Osborne dealers were fighting Kaypro ones with price
reductions. An Osborne 1, discounted, sold for as low as $1,000 by late
August 1983. Stores also were dropping the Executive’s price, and with
good reason: why so expensive a machine without IBM compatibility right
off the bat?
The first prototypes of the new IBM-compatible Executive weren’t being
built until September 1983, or as Osborne later observed, “precisely at the
time the company was filing for bankruptcy.”
The bankruptcy papers showed next to no income and $45 million owed
creditors. Newsweek ran a photograph of Osborne leaving his office without
a portable computer in sight. Instead, a briefcase was shielding his face, and
the caption read: “Founder Osborne exits: IBM was too big.”
That was somewhat wrong. The IBM-compatibility issue
notwithstanding, Kaypro had been Osborne’s main competition.
“I’ve always had a great deal of respect for Kaypro,” he would later
confess to Popular Computing. “You’ve got to make those statements
[knocking the Kaypro]. It makes good copy, damn it.”
It didn’t make for the best-informed computer buyers, however. Bowled
over by Osborne’s marketing campaign and well-publicized disparagement
of the competition, some consumers had ignored the information that
mattered in the end: the numbers. The screen measurements, disk-drive
capacity, almost everything, said the Kaypro was a better computer for
common applications. Osborne had faced a moral dilemma. Should he
badmouth the competition and help his company survive? Or should he tell
the truth—that Brand X was better than his own product? Not surprisingly,
Osborne, like any other computer manufacturer, had made the former
choice.

In fighting Osborne, Kay had dropped his suggested retail price $200 in
May 1983 to $1,595, an indication that small business computers were
becoming no more impervious to price wars than the home ones were. He
also offered a souped-up version of his II and beefed up his software. His
Kaypro IV—the jump from II to IV reflected the substitution of two 400K
floppy disk drives for the II’s 200K ones—sold for $1,995.
Yet another weapon against Osborne was the Kaypro 10, a deluxe model
with a 10-megabyte hard disk. It sold for $2,795, an amazing deal at the
time. A hard disk is an aluminum platter coated with magnetic film, and 10
megabytes is the equivalent of 5,000 double-spaced typewritten pages; yet
Kay was selling the computer and software for less than the prices of many
hard-disk add-ons.
“Adam Osborne,” said Kay, “has said he couldn’t make a portable hard
disk because the hard disks are so sensitive to shock. Well, engineering
advances are such that hard disks now are capable of being moved. Our
very first one was shipped to a show in Germany.”
An InfoWorld headline was less sanguine: “Hard disk, portable
‘newlyweds’ face some problems.”
Could Kay succeed with his hard disk? Another company made the disk
itself, and Kaypro had to replace some drives on the early Kaypro 10s. But
some glitches were hardly a surprise in any new micro, hard-disk style or
floppy. Meanwhile, no less than Control Data, the computer giant, was
planning to offer a 5-megabyte hard disk for portables. Already some
smaller companies had put out portables with hard disks. And yet Kay,
turning out thousands of the machines, was gambling more heavily on their
reliability than the others. It could pay, however. New technology might or
might not succeed; but in his fast-moving industry, old technology sooner
or later would surely fail. To stay alive, he must be among the leaders. More
than 150 companies were clawing their way through the micro business in
late 1983, and some analysts believed that fewer than 20 could survive five
more years. Many of the 150 had only what one expert called “press release
products.” But others were real threats; and without the resources of an
IBM or Apple, Kay ideally would fight back through innovation as well as
good marketing. He needn’t invent any new micro technology. Yet as a
survival-minded “solver of problems,” he had better be prepared to make
prompt use of the breakthroughs of others.

So major risks were ahead—inevitable—as Kay girded for his next fights
with the valley.

Backups:

◼ I, Twenty-Six Questions to Ask at (and About) the Computer Store, page
281.
◼ II, A Few Grouchy Words on Printers, page 294.

3 After the War

The Silicon Valley gossips in late 1983 said Adam Osborne was trying
science-fiction writing. Then, the next spring, stories suddenly blossomed
about his new software company; he bragged that it would be the paperback
publisher of the micro world, a mass-market operation that would undercut
rivals just as his computer firm had. The name of the new company, in
Berkeley, California, was Paperback Software International. And his quotes
against competitors were just as colorful as in the old days.
“There’s a helluva lot of software out there,” Osborne told USA Today,
“and a lot of it’s overpriced garbage.”
He planned to sell his programs at book chains and book racks at less
than one-fourth the prices of the Brand Xs. The idea seemed apple-pie
admirable, but most people would rather not buy more software than they
had time to learn and use; how many hardcore buffs were out there itching
to spend hours mastering cheap new programs? Circumstances might
change as software becomes easier to use. But could you imagine a Word-
Processor-of-the-Month Club or a spreadsheet rack to the right of the gothic
romances? No, except for games programs and very cheap enhancements of
existing business programs like Lotus 1-2-3, the paperback concept seemed
dicey. Even Osborne wasn’t infallible as a seer and market analyst. Once
he’d predicted that IBM would fail in the micro market, and hadn’t he been
too slow to grasp the importance of IBM compatibility for his own
products? Still, although Osborne Computer Corp. itself had floundered, it
had not been for want of the right vision at the company’s inception. His
new software enterprise might indeed survive in the proper niche. First,
however, he would need capital. In fall 1984 InfoWorld reported that
Osborne had paid for a booth at a software show but had not set it up
because, for want of funding, his first products weren’t ready. Investors may
have shied away due to Osborne’s earlier failure to overcome the classic
entrepreneur’s challenge: not just to start a company but keep it prospering.

In shrunken form, with Osborne having resigned as president in
September 1983, his old company lingered on in early 1984, selling old
machines and still promising a new IBM-compatible portable. Andy Kay at
the time had no need to fear this corporate husk. For a while, in fact,
Kaypro may even have been the fourth largest maker of personal computers
shipped to stores specializing in them. And his hard-disk gamble was
paying off for the moment—the same risk that Osborne himself had
avoided as too perilous for a portable manufacturer.
Orders had kept piling up for Kaypro 10s. Then again, so had the
problems with Tandon, Kaypro’s major hard-disk supplier.
David Kay even claimed that Kaypro was receiving Tandon drives “with
‘IBM’ stamped on them that also have ‘reject’ stamped on them.” Delivery
delays allegedly had cost perhaps $30 million in sales of the Kaypro 10s
over eight months. Tandon, while conceding that some rejected drives may
have accidentally reached Kaypro, claimed that such problems were rare.[12]
The Kays’ 1984 sales would exceed $100 million. But some rivals were
growing faster, and IBM, Panasonic, and other household names were now
muscling in on the portable market. “Kaypro’s immediate prospects are
good,” said one analyst of the industry. “I don’t know about the long-term
ones.” He told of a big white tent that the Kays had put up on a hillside to
store badly overstocked computer parts. The Kays might argue that they
wanted to keep expenses down. To the analyst, however, the white tent
symbolized amateurish management. In September, Kaypro acknowledged
that millions of dollars in computer parts might be missing from the tent
and some large trucks; and whatever the cause, theft or bad accounting, the
crisis hardly endeared Kaypro to investors. They now could recover only $4
per share—a fraction of the $10 offering price. Around the same time, some
angry investors filed lawsuits charging Kaypro with falsely reporting its
finances. Kaypro denied this. I hadn’t any idea of the validity of the suits.
An official with Osborne Computers, however, discussing the tent and the
general management problems it symbolized, appropriately observed: “It
was déjà vu to hear about Kaypro’s inventory situation.”
Six regional sales managers had left earlier that year for a competitor.
Former Kaypro executives griped that the Kays paid too much attention to
trivia. Andy Kay even interviewed prospective security guards. Some
employees relished this personal touch, but Blair G. Newman, ex-director
of marketing and strategic planning, complained to Business Week, “There

are too many Kays and not enough pros.” Unconvincingly, a Kaypro
spokeswoman shrugged off the resignations, saying a small clique of
friends had left and plenty of people had lined up to replace them.
Andy Kay’s antipathy toward professional managers was coming back to
spook him. All along his attitude hadn’t been so different from that of Adam
Osborne, who, stubbornly, told a reporter after the Chapter XI filing, “The
major lesson I learned from this thing is that I’m as good a manager as any
of those guys.” An ex-Kaypro employee complained to me: “The Kays are
worried that professional managers will take away their power. Andy Kay
wants to run the company himself. It’s a feudal society there. A lot of
employees call it the Kay fiefdom. It’s like a training ground for young
knights. You can learn a lot, but it locks you into a rigid structure. There are
no changes from the bottom up. That’s the big problem. I don’t know how
they get away with calling it ‘participative management.’ Ordinary
employees never have any meetings with Kays to discuss major decisions.
There’s no checks and balances. If the guy at the top makes a mistake,
there’s no way to correct it. No one can call the king’s bluff and stay.”
The Kays fired someone close to the outspoken Newman. It was Clifford
Odendhal, the bearded musician who a year earlier had told me, “This is the
first job outside of entertainment that I ever cared about beyond my
paycheck.”
“Part of it had to do with salary,” he said: his request for a raise.
“They’d been paying me no more than what an assistant manager makes
in a K-mart. And I’d handled user groups, done publicity, and edited their
in-house newspaper.”
The users groups were mostly local organizations of Kaypro owners who
traded technical tips and gossip and bargained with stores for discounts on
equipment; they kept Kaypro in touch with the best-informed customers,
the trendsetters. They also relieved the strain on Kaypro’s own technicians
and stores. But Kaypro had cut back the money budgeted for sending
people out of town to meet with the users groups; skeptically, Odendhal
said the company had hoped to do this work almost entirely via a computer
network.
Then there was the question of whether Kaypro had a true marketing
department.
“They don’t,” Odendhal said. He and others around Newman had hoped
that the Kays would sound out the need for products scientifically before

turning the engineers loose. Odendhal may or may not have been right. If
marketing men at the large computer companies were so smart, how come
Kaypro and Osborne had been the first firms to make portables usable in
business? And what about all the IBM clones? Couldn’t the marketing
men’s me-too-ism have stifled innovation? Then again, another company
dominated by engineers—Texas Instruments—had flopped in the home-
computer market because it didn’t pay enough heed to marketing.
The Kaypro Corporation, at least, still boasted a dealer network of more
than a thousand stores in mid-1984. But some stores in my area had
dropped or downplayed the Kaypro line in the earlier part of the year. One
reason was that just about all the Kaypro machines were still 8-bit and
didn’t run the new IBM-style software. Also, ComputerLand and other big-
name chains, a growing part of the business, complained that margins on
Kaypros were ten percentage points under competitors and that the
machines' software hurt sales of off-the-shelf programs. So ComputerLand
shunned Kaypro.
It was a clear case of the interests of the consumers being at odds with
those of the computer dealers. For the Kaypro II at the time was a
remarkable bargain; Andy Kay had lowered his retail price in March to
$1,295.
What a contrast to the overpriced PCjr from IBM. Just rumors of the
machine—nicknamed the Peanut—had kept the entire industry on edge. It
bore the three magic initials. And as the pros said, IBM was compatible
with IBM. Only it didn’t work out that way. The PCjr, at least the first
version, couldn’t run some electronic spreadsheet software and other
important programs written for the IBM. The introduction in November
1983 had been anti-climactic in other ways. Jr's little keys were like
chiclets, horrors for the touch-typist, and by the time you bought your
software and added a second disk drive, you’d be paying hundreds of
dollars more. Even after IBM upgraded the PCjr's keyboard in summer
1984 and lowered the price to $999 with one drive, the Kaypro II was still
superior for word processing. So were other machines. With two disk drives
and WordStar, the Sanyo MBC550—a somewhat IBM-compatible desktop
from Japan—listed for just $1,400. Not that the Sanyo lacked limitations of
its own. Its keyboard, too, was no match for the Kaypro’s.
In 1984 the Kays introduced the New Kaypro II, which offered only one
disk drive but sold for just $995 and allowed for another to be added for a

few hundred dollars more. Anyone using the New Kaypro II for business
would be foolhardy to depend on just one drive. Not surprisingly, the $995
machine inspired jibes that Kaypro was guilty of using the same gimmickry
as IBM and Apple had been with their single-disk computers.
Moreover, all the Kaypro models, despite their low prices, made some
customers pay for their bargains with headaches.
Take Chris Jensen, a writer in Cleveland. He futilely tried for months
before he could send his stories to his newspaper from home via the phone
lines. His dealer had sold the Kaypro IV, promising that Jensen could. “It’s
really scummy to put this out,” the Plain Dealer reporter said of his
machine, “and know that the communications software has serious bugs in
it. It’s the kind of thing that the government would kick the shit out of the
automobile companies for doing.” A Kaypro employee admitted that the
communications software for the Kaypro IV had come out with bugs, but
not those of the kind that were plaguing Chris Jensen. He confirmed another
of Jensen’s complaints: that the Kaypro IV model with the modem couldn’t
use the most popular communications software at the time. Coincidentally
or not—shortly after Jensen griped to me, the New York Times, and
computer writer Peter McWilliams—Kaypro released SuprTerm version
5.3. And that did the trick for him. The machine delighted Jensen in other
ways, but he still wondered about all the ordinary customers out there who
were unwilling or unable to wage a media campaign to get their software up
to snuff.
Jensen’s story was atypical—many Kaypro owners still spoke as if their
computers were micro manna.
Still, the new Robie, introduced in early 1984, might be a sign of troubles
to come. It was unique, a desktop selling for $2,300 with two 2.5-megabyte
floppy disks. But disks didn’t run as quickly as a hard disk, and as of late
1984, the Robie just hadn’t caught on. The Robie looked so ugly—ungainly,
plastic cheap, fit for a discount store—that even some value-minded buyers
might have thought twice about bringing it into their offices. It was a
computer that only a designer could love. And it was just an 8-bit machine.
In the 8- versus 16-bit battle, people were accusing Kay of living in the
past. It was Osborne all over again, some might have said—just like Kay’s
old rival babbling on and on about the virtues of a machine with a tiny
screen. This may have been unfair. For simple word processing, for
instance, an 8-bit machine could be a terrific bargain. But many buyers still

gravitated to the 16-bitters, worrying that future software might not appear
in the Kaypro CP/M format.
Kay’s attitude didn’t help. He was showing less of the adventurousness
that had led to his hard-disk portable.
And he now felt that the Kaypro II was just like the old Volkswagen bug
and would always be around—an ominous parallel considering VW’s recent
fiascos in the auto market.[13]
Some software programs endured because enough people learned and
liked them; and the Apple II in one form or another would last; but the
Kaypro II? Even with hundreds of thousands of users? What about the ill-
fated Osborne? No, computer buyers normally spurned antiques. Within a
year or two Andy Kay might change his mind and ponder whether to update
the Kaypro II drastically or kill it.
In November 1984, well over six months later than Kaypro had promised
investors, a 16-bit IBM-compatible machine appeared.
“He’d rather not call it an IBM clone,” said an industry observer. “He’d
rather call it just a 16-bit computer. It’s a matter of pride.”
The 16-bit model, a portable with a 10-megabyte hard disk and 256K
RAM, looked somewhat like the Kaypro II and IV. It had an expansion slot
into which you could plug a device to hype up the performance of the
machine or expand its versatility; and it offered free WordStar along with
other software. At $3,295 it sold for $1,700 less than a hard disk portable
from Compaq. But it faced stiff competition from machines such as the hard
disk desktop from Leading Edge, which was discounted to as low as
$2,000. The 16 just wouldn’t wallop rivals the way the original Kaypro II
had.
And it shared some of the drawbacks of the Compaq and many other
IBM clones—especially the keyboard. The left shift key was in an awkward
position like the IBM PC’s, with a weird, nonalphabetical character
separating it and the “Z”; imagine the reaction of touch typists who had
enjoyed the Kaypro II’s close resemblance to the traditional Selectric
keyboard. Many makers of 16-bit machines had aped the horrid PC
keyboard, causing one reviewer to liken them to idiot savante piano players
who imitated the mistakes of true geniuses.
The 16, moreover, showed Kaypro’s internal weaknesses. Dan Berger of
the San Diego recalled how Kaypro had futilely struggled for more than
eight months to design the computer in-house. The project had flopped.

Kaypro farmed the design out to a San Diego firm, which did the job in a
fraction of the time. Earlier in 1984 Andy Kay had told Berger that Kaypro
was spending only 1 percent of revenues on research and development,
compared to the industry average of about 10 percent. How frustrated he
must have felt paying an outside firm. Osborne had had to do that, but
technically Kay had placed himself and his company in a different league.
Kaypro was heavily depending on the 16. The company hoped it would
provide 40 percent of income for the year ending August 31, 1985.
Early signs were good. A small dealer in Virginia, for instance, The Disk
Connection, sold six Kaypro 16s in one week—half to existing Kaypro
owners and half to new customers. Some people had demanded an IBM
clone, bungled keyboard and all; now Kaypro had given it to them with a
vengeance. Appearing late, however, the 16 had lost much of its price
advantage. In another six months IBM might well sell its XT hard disk
model for as little as the new Kaypro portable.[14]
The 16, if successful, would triumph at a helpful time. In the 1983 budget
year, the company had earned $12.9 million on $75 million in sales; the
next budget year it had lost $267,683 on sales of about $120 million—
blaming everything from advertising costs to price-cutting and inventory
problems. No longer was Kaypro a success story. It remained strong in
some stores specializing in computers; but the share of the whole domestic
market for personal micros would be 2.5 percent in 1984—a drop from
1983.[15]
In the long run, moreover, unless Andy Kay made major production
changes, his computers might lose what price advantage they did have.
Automation was improving rivals’ quality control and whittling down
their labor expenses. Eventually, they’d be just a tiny fraction of the cost of
a computer. Apple already had built a $20 million plant to crank out the
Macintosh computer, using Japanese-style manufacturing savvy; Macs even
helped oversee the manufacturing of Macs. “I don’t even know if the Kays
could automate their plant,” said the ex-employee who’d accused the family
of running a feudal society. “You’ve got these four buildings no wider than
a single room. They have a lot of windows, and that’s great for the people—
but hard on computer parts. Often people placed piles of parts on the lawn
overnight when they didn’t have space elsewhere.” The Kays, to be sure,
had put up a semiautomated warehouse designed by Andy’s daughter Janice
and built by his son-in-law’s construction firm. “But,” said the ex-Kaypro

employee, “that’s not the same as automating the whole plant.” And Andy’s
selection of the architect and construction firm was further evidence of the
Kays’ tight-grip management style.
This lack of flexibility could especially hurt them in responding to the
threat from lap-sized machines with flat screens. Sooner or later they would
menace the Kaypro-sized “luggables” in the business market.
About 120,000 flat screens sold in 1983, and although they weren’t
moving off the shelves as rapidly as expected in 1984, sales still might
exceed several hundred thousand.
Some showed 16 lines at one time. That wasn’t as many as the 24 on the
Kaypro II screen, but enough for light-duty word processing. And soon
others would do for the heavy-duty kind and a slew of additional uses.
Thousands of traveling reporters and executives were already using the
Radio Shack Model 100 introduced in 1983—despite its tiny built-in
memory (no more than 24K in a typical configuration) and small screen (8
lines only 40 characters wide).
But where had Andy Kay hoped to get his first flat-screen model? From
Mitsui & Co. in Japan, which would offer it to other U.S. companies,
including perhaps some with marketing clout far greater than his. The Kays
had thought they’d be the only people selling the note-book-sized computer.
By late summer 1984, half a year after the original hoopla, Kaypro should
have been shipping this miracle machine, but a spokesman in September
could not even tell me if the Mitsui deal was still alive. Then word came out
that the deal had fallen through and a flat screen Kaypro wouldn’t appear
until 1985.
A rival company, Morrow, Inc.—headed by George Morrow, a witty,
balding ex-grad student in math, one of Silicon Valley’s better hardware
gurus—had meanwhile acted more successfully. In late 1984 it began
marketing the Pivot, a ten-pound, $2,495 MS-DOS portable with one disk
drive and a well-reviewed clone of WordStar called NewWord. And a
revitalized Osborne—on the verge of escaping the Chapter XI bankruptcy
proceedings—would soon sell its own version of the machine.
Data General, the mini-maker written up in the best-seller Soul of a New
Machine, was another threat to Kaypro. In September 1984 it unveiled the
Data General/One, which offered IBM compatibility, a built-in 737K floppy
disk drive, and a 25-line flat screen. A software developer joked that the
letters on the screen were so faint that the machine should be sold with a

coal miner’s hat to read it. But eventually the flat screen would be just as
readable as the Kaypro’s cathode ray tube. With the inevitable price drops
and refinements, machines like the Pivot and the Data General/One would
wreak havoc on Kaypro sales unless Kay retaliated with the right flat-screen
portable of his own. IBM, AT&T, and Compaq, too, were designing their
own flat-screen machines. And already Hewlett-Packard had been selling a
$2,995 flat-screen computer with the popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet
program in Read Only Memory—permanent memory.
Another firm—Epson, a branch of Seiko, the giant Japanese
conglomerate known for watches—was shipping a $995 computer with a
compressed version of WordStar in ROM. The screen displayed only 8 lines
of information at a time. But within months a 16-liner from NEC (formerly
called the Nippon Electric Company) hit the market at the same price,
complete with WordStar and built-in gadgetry for talking to other machines
on the phone.
WordStar was now the only word-processing program offered free with
the “luggable” Kaypros. If Andy Kay’s lap-sized micro couldn’t run it or a
clone like New Word, he might be paving the way for some of his
customers to buy rivals’ flat screens that did.
Most buyers used Kaypros to write or type. And how many would relish
a switch to a new word-processing program?
And what about piping WordStar-composed letters and other documents
from the luggables to the lap-size Kaypros? Customers could do so, but
then they might have to insert new commands to tell their printers to
underline or produce other special effects.
Beyond everything else, Andy Kay had better offer good software to fight
rivals selling flat-screen machines similar to his. And WordStar over the
years had generally been the most popular word processor for micros.

4 WordStar: The Creators

Arthur Clarke is the Arthur Clarke, the science-fiction writer who gave us
2001 and that beastly computer named HAL. Seymour Rubinstein is a
California businessman with only fleeting mentions outside the magazines
of the computer trade. He is literate but not literary. When I talked to him,
he had not read Clarke’s latest novel. Yet Seymour Rubinstein and a
colleague played more than a small role in the the writing of 2010; for they
created WordStar, the word-processing program that Clarke uses.
WordStar is to micro software what Citizen Kane is to movies: it is old—
by computer standards, anyway—but it’s one of the best of its kind.
If, when writing, Clarke wants to insert a phrase several sentences back,
for instance, he can just zip the cursor to the proper place, then type in the
addition. He needn’t enter a special “Editing” mode. Some WordStar rivals
may break up your thoughts by making you change modes.
Moreover, with simple keystrokes, Clarke can insert, drop, and move
whole paragraphs.
“I can make corrections without hesitation that I wouldn’t have done
before,” Clarke said enthusiastically about WordStar and his Archives
micro. “It’s at least doubled my production with a quarter of the effort.” His
normal output for his books and articles was still around a thousand words a
day, but WordStar had made his writing more fun, and now he was churning
out letter after letter to “my neglected friends.”
“I said I’d retired,” he told me over the phone from his home in Sri
Lanka, “but now I’m working on three or four things simultaneously. I
haven’t touched a typewriter since I got this computer a year or so ago.”[16]
You can easily understand why he hasn’t. No longer, for instance, does a
noisy bell tell Clarke that he’s nearing the right margin—he just keeps on
typing and a feature called word wrap automatically takes him on to the
next line.

Granted, WordStar is traditional software. It doesn’t use icons, for
instance, those cute little pictures of wastebaskets or file folders that some
snazzy new programs will flash across your screen to tell you what you’re
doing. And as of this writing, anyway, the original WordStar didn’t offer
split screens to show more than one electronic file at once. WordStar 2000,
a related but not identical program, does. First marketed in late 1984, it may
supplant plain old WordStar eventually, but the original program will
always have a special place in the hearts of the cognoscenti. It’s an
indisputable classic. More than a million people have used WordStar since
it appeared in 1979. Rubinstein and Rob Barnaby, the brilliant programmer
who did the actual coding for WordStar, are legends.
As computer technology matures, the machines themselves will be mere
commodities like televisions or Walkman imitations. It’s the programs that
run on them which will make the difference.
WordStar is at least adequate, and mostly superb, in all but the last of
these areas:

1. Absence of bugs. The software maker should have gotten all the bugs out
so that the program will run reliably on your computer. You can’t write a
complex program that will be absolutely bug-free. But you can make it
bug-free 99 percent of the time.
2. General ease of use. A program should be easy enough to learn and use.
Being logical helps; ideally, you can use combinations of familiar
commands to coax the program into doing many things that you haven’t
done before.
3. Good documentation. The manual should be clear and logically
organized. Either the simplest material should come earliest, or else there
should be a beginner’s version; also, the manual should boast a good,
comprehensive index.
4. Usefulness to beginners and old pros alike. You can adjust the best
programs to suit your own level of skill with them.
5. Speed. It lets you do your job fast, especially when you use it with a hard
disk.
6. Power. Related to speed. The program can quickly accomplish
complicated tasks like substituting one word for another in a contract
thousands of words long. Imagine the boon to lawyers plugging new
names into standard boilerplate.

7. Fewer chances for botch-ups. Good programs limit the chances for
careless errors in the first place.
8. The Jewish-uncle effect. Ideally, your software will slow you down or
flash a warning when you’re about to ruin your work with a few taps on
the wrong keys.
9. Damage limitations (if you do goof).
10. After-the-goof feedback. After you’ve botched up—and we all do
sooner or later—the program will tell you how you did so.
11. Ability to customize. You or at least a software expert can customize
good programs for your use on your machine.
12. Availability of “accessory” programs to make your original software
still more useful.
13. Support. Ideally, the software seller will stand behind his product if you
have problems. MicroPro’s record here is far from the best; this may
change.

Again, WordStar isn’t perfect (see Backup III, “The Lucky 13,” for a
more detailed description of it and criteria for choosing good software), but
it comes closer than most other popular programs.

■ ■ ■

Here are a few terms useful to people shopping for a word
processor:

1. A cursor is just the marker on your screen—a blinking line,
maybe—that shows where a letter will appear when you type.
Cursor keys move the cursor up, down, left, or right.
2. A file is an electronic version of a letter, report, or other
document or collection of data.
3. A control key is what you start holding down to turn a letter or
series of letters into commands for your computer. Used with the
control key, the letters normally won’t show up in the document
you’re typing. Some programs, by the way, may use the control
key and an escape key, which could be a way to get from one
part of the program to another. Or the escape key may take on
functions similar to the control key. In addition, there’s an

alternate key that you may also use to help boss your machine
around.
4. To scroll just means to move from place to place in your
electronic document. It’s like rolling or unrolling a Torah or other
scroll, except here there’s no ink or paper, just patterns of
electrons in your computer memory and dots on your screen. On
most computer monitors you see only 24 lines of typing at a time.
5. A menu lists commands on your screen. It can tell you how to
locate a document on your disk or what to do while you’re at
work there.
6. A block move is the ability to move material from one part of
your document to another.
7. A global search tracks down specified words in your document.
8. A search and replace substitutes one word (or group of words)
for another.

■ ■ ■

WordStar’s creators, Seymour Rubinstein and Rob Barnaby, are like Orson
Welles and Herman Mankiewicz of Citizen Kane. The movie would have
been hack melodrama without the brilliance of both the producer-director
and his writer; and yet critics still argue over Kane’s exact origins. So it is
with WordStar. When Time said Rubinstein had written the program, a
friend of Barnaby’s whipped off an angry letter to the editor. I won’t take
sides here. Rubinstein, however, far from playing down Barnaby’s
WordStar role to me, unhesitatingly passed on his phone number when I
asked. Barnaby is equally willing to acknowledge the importance of his
collaborator. Even the letter writer emphasizes the usefulness of
Rubinstein’s salesmanship and his perception of the software market back
in the late 1970s when WordStar was born.
A short, stocky, bespectacled man in his fifties, Rubinstein grew up in
New York City, the son of a pinball- and novelty-machine owner who died
while Seymour was still in grade school. His mother worked as a clerk.
“My first job,” Rubinstein said, “was a helper on a fruit truck when I was
twelve years old.” Two years later, however, his neighbors were “letting me
ruin their radios,” and by his mid-twenties, he seemed settled into the
routine of a TV repairman.

But Rubinstein grew restless after six months’ reserve military duty in the
1950s; he attended night school at Brooklyn College and took up technical
writing.
Decades later he recalled a navigational computer he encountered while a
civilian, speaking as if it were his “Rosebud,” as if he were Charles Kane
thinking about the Colorado snows and the name on his childhood sled. He
gave me the machine’s exact measurements, eight by nine by twelve inches.
Then, mixing nostalgia with awe, he said, “If you opened it up, it would
look like a Swiss watchmaker’s nightmare, all those gears and little
electronic things whirring and clicking away. But with it you could take off
from an aircraft carrier and circle overhead and press the reset button and
fly anywhere you wanted, and wherever you flew, an indicator kept track of
how far you were from that spot on the ocean and told how you could
return.” Ask Rubinstein about his early career and you may hear more talk
of machines than of people. “$2” The hardware, however, helped make the
man. Rubinstein spent years working with data-communications networks
—the ones that, for instance, handle airline reservations or credit-card
information. Without quick, accurate updating, these real-time systems are
worthless: just ask anyone whom an airline has booked on an already-full
flight. You could have the best-designed computers in the cosmos. But the
question in the end may be “Did the airline clerk key in reservations for you
on the right flight at the right time?” And Rubinstein’s software philosophy
later reflected his real-time work. He originally did not intend WordStar for
the bumbling and the lazy but for “the production typist” on whom the boss
heavily counted for both speed and accuracy.
In my last interview with Rubinstein for this book, he downplayed his
statement that he created WordStar for the fleet-fingered typist. “I believe
that everyone deserves a product appropriate to his particular
classification,” he said, “and while WordStar may have been aimed at a
particular niche, that is not to say we shouldn’t enlarge the scope of this
product.... We’re going to make the next version easier to learn.” As
thousands of professionals and executives can verify, however, WordStar all
along has been quite learnable.
Early in his computer career Rubinstein also grasped the importance of
clear documentation to guide people through the programs. IBM at the time
was one of the world’s largest publishers, at least in sheer volume of paper
consumed, ranking right up near Random House and other giants, and

Rubinstein recalls the old manuals as abysmal: “You really had to have a lot
of drive and patience to get through their stuff.” Programmers rose or fell
according to their ability to push through “arbitrary collections of material
arranged in an arbitrary order.” Rubinstein, who by now had forsaken
technical writing for programming, made a discovery helpful to any
software user: you won’t serve yourself best, necessarily, by completely
memorizing the manuals. The trick, rather, is to know where to turn in a
hurry when you do have a problem.
In 1977, wandering through a store for computer hobbyists in San Rafael,
California, Rubinstein saw a box with blue-and-red switches and lights, and
“it looked really interesting. I went home, built it, and a week later I had a
computer.”[17]
It was his first micro, perhaps more of his Rosebud, after all, than the
navigational computer.
“I had spent many hours of my life in very brightly lit, cold rooms in the
middle of the night, surrounded by millions of dollars’ worth of junk,” he
once recalled. And yet his new dwarf seemed “a true computer” to him “in
every sense of the word. I could see the potential, and I got very excited.”[18]
His elation grew when he saw that a company named IMSAI, run by an old
boss, had produced the kit. He once remembered the firm, now defunct, as
“one of the tiny companies that really made this industry happen. The
industry did not happen by some big, famous manufacturer deciding this
was what he was going to do. It was a grass-roots movement.”[19]
Rubinstein joined IMSAI as software-products manager and within two
months was marketing director; there he signed the first contract between a
computer manufacturer and Digital Research for CP/M, the popular
operating system—the only one with which WordStar at first would work.
Leaving IMSAI in 1978, Rubinstein “knew exactly what I wanted to do.”
He would “build packaged software” for businessmen and others unfamiliar
with computer arcana. Registering out a business name in June, he included
“International” after “MicroPro” because “I felt that with the right, well-
designed products, Europe would be an approachable market.”[20]
Rubinstein was barely out of the IMSAI fold when he dropped by Rob
Barnaby’s flat in Berkeley, California. The two had met at IMSAI, which
Barnaby had left a short time earlier, for different reasons, after hot words
between the moody young programmer and his boss. Barnaby was a
Harvard graduate, a physics major, a tennis pro’s son, the descendant of an

old New England family. A pattern in his life was seemingly emerging by
the time he reached his thirties; he would throw himself into computer jobs,
program masterfully for a while, then find his interest waning. Just before
joining IMSAI, Barnaby had been fixing up old houses. “I kind of like
creating things with computers and forgetting them and getting away from
them when I’m not creating something new,” Barnaby told me. He was in
no hurry, quite likely, to return to work after IMSAI, having salted away a
good part of his salary. “I like the flexibility that saving money produces.”
He isn’t materialistic—the very antithesis of it. And yet money and
WordStar are together a touchy subject. Barnaby’s work for MicroPro
seemingly did not make him rich, at least not California rich.
“It was originally royalties,” Barnaby said, “and when the royalties
played out, I took a salary and a stock option.” His total earnings from
MicroPro were somewhere in the six figures.
“I want you to understand where his ego is,” said the friend who wrote
Time. “He’s often chided by people for allowing himself to be taken
advantage of and he simply does not want to discuss it. He says, ‘I made a
deal. I kept my promise, Seymour kept his promise and that’s it.’”
Describing the circumstances in a peculiarly Californian way, the friend
said: “If Seymour was really greedy he would have gone to Rob two years
ago and said something like, ‘Hey, you got to believe me, Rob, I never
expected this thing would ever do what it’s done. And I’d like to do right by
you and so I would like you to graciously accept this check for $150,000 I
brought with me here today.’ Then Seymour would have owned him. Rob
did not get rich writing WordStar. People think that, but it’s simply not true.
I’ve seen it. The guy’s a friend of mine. He’s back to work again because of
financial need.”
“We were both very poor,” Rubinstein told me earlier about himself and
Barnaby. “I had less than $8,500 to my name, in fact, but I gave Rob a
$2,500 retainer, a third of my cash reserves. I owned a house, but the bank
owned most of it.”
Rubinstein offered to make Barnaby a partner. Barnaby, characteristically
wary of entanglements, turned him down.
An early program Barnaby did for Rubinstein was a programmer’s aid,
which, among other things, let you move words and numbers around more
easily on the screen. It was no more a word processor than a pencil. Nor did
Barnaby intend it to be one: “I was writing a program editor, a tool for me.”

Yet “computer stores would be trying to sell people something they could
write letters with, and it would get back to Seymour that our program
definitely did not have those features.” Rubinstein recalls taking a big hint
from dealers’ enthusiasm for a program called Electric Pencil. “What they
liked,” he said, “was you could both enter and print from the same program,
and you had a lot of control over the printout. You could specify things like
underlining and margin settings, but it was very primitive. You certainly
couldn’t imagine what it would be like until you printed it. You didn’t know
where page breaks would occur, where one page would end and another
began,” and so you might have to print several times before you got it right,
since each change might create new breaks in the wrong places. That was
micro word processing 1970s style. You either put up with all these nasty
details or prayed for a sweepstakes killing so you could buy a $20,000
“dedicated” machine from IBM or Wang.

■ ■ ■

When You Should Buy a Dedicated Word
Processor
Here are some times when you should seriously consider it:

1. When you work for a stuffy old bureaucracy that’s rich and
afraid of the new.
2. When you’re a procurement officer on probation. As they say,
no one’s lost his job for buying Xerox rather than Brand Non-X.
Then again, your boss may bawl you out for not buying a
Xerox micro.
3. When you want to dump the training problems in the
manufacturer’s lap. Of course, many independent companies
and consultants nowadays are training people to use micros,
especially IBMs.
4. When you prefer an extra-large, extra-sharp screen and giant
memory and when you can’t easily find micros of comparable
quality. Here, too, I’m skeptical. The gap between micro
hardware and the dedicateds is narrowing.

5. When you’re looking for a machine that will run special
software that the micros won’t. Fondly, a Hollywood writer-
director tells of a script-formating program “dreamed up by
some lunatic in northern California.” Nowadays, however, more
programmers are writing for micros than for dedicated word
processors.

You should think “Micro” if you’re working for (1) yourself, (2) a
needy company or organization, or (3) a rich, frugal one.
“But,” you ask, “what about repair?”
Well, surprise: many big companies—including Xerox itself—
are now in the micro repair business.
Besides, for the price of one dedicated, you might buy both a
micro and a backup.

■ ■ ■

Psyching out the market, Rubinstein not only listened to computer-store
owners but read up on the features of the dedicateds, determined to match
them.
In some ways, in fact, he hoped to surpass these rivals. From the very
beginning he was against built-in function keys features, believing that they
actually slowed down typists by forcing them to take their hands off their
main keyboards.
Pitting himself against IBM and the other giants of the word-processing
world, Barnaby worked in a spare bedroom from which he evicted an
electric-train set. He wrote the WordStar with a brand-new IMSAI
computer, 64K RAM, two 530K disks. His big, fat Teletype Model 40
printer crawled along at a pokey 10 characters per second, but he poured
out his code as if he were a muse-inspired novelist.
“Working out whatever it was he was going to code,” Rubinstein
recalled, “he would sit in front of the machine and his fingers would fly.
And he would actually growl at the machine with his chin jutted out—rrr,
rrr, like that—and he would pound the keys as fast as he could go, because
he couldn’t get into the machine fast enough.” Between fall 1978 and
summer 1979 Barnaby typically worked eighteen hours a day on WordStar,
and sometimes many more in the frenzy of it all. Rubinstein said, “I stayed

up a few nights with him, in fact. He was younger than I was—still is,” he
said dryly, “so I couldn’t do it as much as he could. He was an excellent
coder, one of the best I’ve ever seen in terms of speed and accuracy and
putting in features that are real clever.”
Barnaby, in turn, praises Rubinstein’s contributions to WordStar.
“Seymour set the general goals. I wouldn’t have known what the world
wanted because I’m not in touch with the world. He gave me a lot of
specifics. He was probably the person who used WordStar the most and
gave me the most comments, because he bridges the range from being able
to understand where technical people’s heads are at and being able to relate
to the outside world and the market. He was a programmer years ago. He’s
familiar with the process I go through. He doesn’t like to do it anymore, but
he sort of understands what I’m doing. I think the menus were his idea”—
the instructions that pop up on the screen if the typist takes too much time
to execute a WordStar command. Rubinstein also recalls contributing
touches like the Q effect, which accelerates the impact of other WordStar
commands; and he says he thought up the dotted lines that cross the screen
to mark page breaks. No matter who did what for WordStar, however, it’s
likely that Barnaby, regardless of Rubinstein’s helpful studies of the market,
was writing mostly for Barnaby. “I don’t hear a voice from the world,” he
generalized to me about his coding habits. “I hear a voice from the back of
my head.”
Rob Barnaby, you might say, was WordStar’s first user. He used
WordStar as a programming aid to write WordStar. Then he used WordStar
to write the manual for WordStar.
As we talked, I realized how close his working habits came to mine and
how, coding WordStar for himself and Rubinstein, he had also programmed
it for me. It was not so much a fluke that the program’s logic coincided with
mine. So, in many ways, did Barnaby’s personal writing habits. “I fiddle
around a lot with text,” he said. “I try to get the points down, and then I try
to get good sentences to say them with. If I find I try to word the thing right
from the start, I lose it. I must see things on the screen.” Amen, Rob. I don’t
write my best English inside my head, either; I, too, must see. Like me,
Barnaby might have loathed the programs that didn’t let you zip the cursor
to an error and correct it without much ado.
The creation of WordStar, by the way, wasn’t the only act of genius from
MicroPro. The name was a marketer’s dream. Why “WordStar”?

MicroPro already had the programmer’s aid called WordMaster, and
Rubinstein apparently held an informal name-this-product contest for the
new word processor.
“Who’s this for?” asked an employee named Barbara.
“It’s really for the production-minded secretary,” he replied.
“Why don’t you call it Word—?” she said, using a vulgar synonym for
“cat.”
“What?”
Barbara mulled it over. “Maybe that’s a little too risqué. But you say the
secretary’s the hero?”
“Yes,” said Rubinstein.
“The star?”
“Yes.”
“Then why not call it WordStar?”
And so it was.
Hitting the marketplace in the summer of 1979, the product clicked; no
competitor came close; at least none offered WordStar’s get-what-you-see
printing features.
Rubinstein had come out with good, timely software, and now he was
riding the beginnings of the micro wave. Just as with VisiCalc, buyers soon
asked about WordStar by name—before they bought their computers. In
fact, often it was why they bought micros. And Rubinstein found WordStar
wasn’t merely a good first sale for dealers. Frequently, it would be a second.
Balking at WordStar’s price, customers would make do with an inferior
word processor but remember the sales reps’ original praise of the MicroPro
program.
Ironically, as WordStar was taking off, Barnaby, its writer, was headed
toward another burnout. The atmosphere around MicroPro was changing.
Rubinstein, who eventually would name a yacht the MicroStar and move
into a hilltop home with a sunken tile tub, was losing touch with some
programmers. “They locked us up in this little windowless room with
Customer Support,” recalled Jim Fox, Barnaby’s former assistant, who
worked on WordStar Version 3.0, the one I’m using. “It was messy. It was
very noisy—not very good air circulation. And then they were expecting us
to do programming. Rob asked months and months for shelves, and they
never gave them until he threw a temper tantrum.” It seemed strange for
Rubinstein to let this happen. Everyone agrees that $400,000 home or not,

he was the opposite of a golf-course president. And yet Rubinstein had
burdened MicroPro with high-tech bureaucrats who were turning it into a
mini-Washington, inflicting reorganization after reorganization. The real
producers, whether sales reps or programmers, sometimes suffered.
Barnaby quit in the summer of 1980 just after working on an important
sister program of WordStar, MailMerge, which helps businesses personalize
letters with names plugged in from mail lists. “To my knowledge,”
Rubinstein told me in early 1983, “he has not coded anything of
significance since.”
Rubinstein was telling the truth as he knew it. Barnaby, indeed, had
largely forgotten about computers. He had lost excess weight; he had
traveled; he had stopped smoking and shaved off his beard. In superficial
ways he seemed a different man from the writer of WordStar. And yet
Barnaby had left software before and returned; and in late 1982, unknown
to Rubinstein apparently, he had again.
It wasn’t just that he needed the money. He could no longer flee
computerdom so easily. A barrier had tumbled, the one between his work
and the rest of the world. Once micros had been mostly hobbyists’ toys,
demanding hours of soldering and programming. Many of his friends hadn’t
fathomed what he did. But now Barnaby was hearing a woman—formerly
perplexed—say that WordStar was the rage at the stores where she was
shopping for her new business computer. Barnaby’s father got 2010 for
Christmas and read that Arthur Clarke had written it with WordStar; Clarke
had sent the book to New York on a five-inch floppy and transmitted final
corrections from Sri Lanka through his computer over a satellite link.
Another science-fiction leader, I discovered, also was hoping to catch up
with 2010—Seymour Rubinstein.
Returned to computers, bearded again, Barnaby in early 1983 was
working for a small rival of MicroPro, Chang Laboratories, aiming at the
lucrative market for software compatible with IBM’s 16-bit PC. He was like
a canny Hollywood scriptwriter. Barnaby was somewhat vague about his
software plans, in part because he really did not know what he would create
in the end, but perhaps also because he did not want to alert the
competition. He would not, in early 1983, say he was working on a new
word processor, only that he was at the keyboard of his new IBM. It ran
WordStar. Barnaby, like thousands of other people, had bought his IBM
version at a local ComputerLand store. You might say it was the neat

completion of a circle, for the founder of the ComputerLand chain was none
other than Bill Millard, the man behind IMSAI, Barnaby’s former employer.
Barnaby offered his opinion of the WordStar version he had bought at
ComputerLand—competent but unimaginative. Well, how could he outdo
his WordStar? Barnaby answered, and despite his refusal to be pinned down
on a future project (“It could be a spreadsheet”), he gave at least an inkling
of what another word processor from him could be like.
Among other things, Barnaby would take advantage of the newer
machines’ more powerful memories; he’d write more instructions for the
RAM. So he wouldn’t have to choose as much between making the
program either (1) more easily understood or (2) capable of moving around
words in the fastest or most efficient way. Smart computers and dumb
humans could coexist more gracefully.
Also, he’d reduce the number of commands in WordStar, a good idea if
not overdone. “I’ve thought, Gee, couldn’t I have only two or three ways of
deleting text rather than twenty. And I look at my habits, and I do use a lot
of them. But most of them I could replace with the same number of
keystrokes or only one more keystroke using a combination of other
commands. I’d never tried to write a program where you didn’t have to read
the manual before. And I still don’t think I’ve succeeded. I think that’s a
worthy goal for the future—to write a program that doesn’t have to have a
manual.”
Back at MicroPro, Rubinstein, by early 1983, had fallen behind some
previous goals of his own. Fewer than 250 people worked for the company,
or less than half the peak number, and the company had saddled itself
earlier with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in office leases it no
longer needed. “There were some odd things that happened internally with
these visions of increasing numbers of sales,” said a former MicroPro man,
“and they hired too many people too quickly. They pay very well, and their
salesmen were getting incredible commissions. I know one guy—his first
month in sales he took home five grand in commissions.” Did he sustain
that amount? “He didn’t,” said the ex-MicroPro employee. “Every month
after that he fell.” And so, it seemed, did the sales rep’s colleagues at
MicroPro. “They kept trying to break record after record,” the former
employee recalled, “and the only way to do it was to extend generous credit
and get their products out the door.... They had to produce all the programs
people ordered, but they weren’t getting their money immediately.” With

high interest rates, some buyers would stall payments as long as possible.
MicroPro’s growth problems weren’t unique. Another pioneer in micro
software, Lifeboat Associates, a distributor, also found itself overexpanded
and laid off employees.
MicroPro likewise suffered when programmers, ordered to meet
Rubinstein’s deadline, cut corners on an early version of WordStar for the
IBM PC. The software was too hard to adapt to customers’ printers. And
then IBM threw MicroPro a loop. It suddenly changed the PC’s operating
system in a way that made WordStar glitch up. MicroPro wasn’t the culprit
here. And yet it was the one receiving angry phone calls from frustrated
customers. It was, in a sense, a victim of its own reputation for quality.
MicroPro products had bugs like other software makers’, but fewer of them
than most, so that the IBM WordStar problems—since corrected—enraged
customers with high expectations.
Old friends of Rubinstein’s, meanwhile, complained that the firm had
nothing truly original coming out, that MicroPro had evolved from a
programming company to a marketing one. I disagreed somewhat.
MicroPro had succeeded largely because Rubinstein had aggressively sold
himself and his programs. And yet it was also true no other MicroPro
product had commanded as much attention as WordStar, the first big one.
Michael Canyes, a computer consultant, complained that it was “getting a
little gray around the temples.” It was time for updates, drastic ones. If they
didn’t come, if competitors kept duplicating various features of WordStar,
the program would eventually perish.
So far, however, that hadn’t happened.
Nothing had appeared that was both as good as WordStar and marketed
as successfully.
“If you’d asked me when I first introduced it,” Barnaby said, “I would
have said as soon as we stopped moving, somebody would have done
something better. I sort of thought WordStar would be gone by now, but it’s
growing instead. It may sell a million by the time it’s done.” He wasn’t
bragging; he was right.
We were talking now in summer 1983. Barnaby had removed himself
from the payroll of Chang Laboratories, and I suspected it might be because
he worried about living up to his first success. Barnaby didn’t discourage
that impression. When asked if another WordStar might be on its way, he
said, “I hit once; I may not hit again.” I understood. He was no different

from a writer trying to create another blockbuster book or movie; he would
be competing against himself—a contest made more difficult by the fact
that MicroPro’s marketing expertise would no longer be on his side. I
suggested that he and Rubinstein might both benefit by working together
again as a team. If Barnaby agreed, though, he certainly didn’t make that
clear to me, and I hung up thinking that the Barnaby-Rubinstein
collaboration was as dead as the Welles-Mankiewicz one.
“Let’s just put it this way,” said Barnaby of MicroPro. “They could have
made me happier there and I’d still be there, and MicroPro would still be
growing instead of being flat.”
“Rob is beloved around here,” said a public relations woman at MicroPro
when I suggested that the company might benefit from his return, “but we
have many other good programmers.”
Not long afterward I was talking to Seymour Rubinstein. He was
decidedly more upbeat about MicroPro’s fortune than Barnaby had been.
He had added some fifty people to his staff since we’d last talked.
Rubinstein predicted record sales of about $42 million in 1983, of which
WordStar would be 65 percent; he expected that his word processor would
thrive inside the ROMs of $1,500 lap-sized computers.
During our conversation I expressed my astonishment over a newspaper
article; supposedly, a programmer—unnamed—had dreamed up WordStar
in a week or so during vacation.
“I was amazed to see it myself,” Rubinstein said. “It was really
romanticizing something in a way that wasn’t necessary, beyond not being
true.”
“I talked to Barnaby,” I said, “and he has the normal worries of
programmers and writer-writers—whether he can ever repeat his success.
And I still wonder about the chances of you two coming together again.”
“Well,” Rubinstein said without the slightest pause, “I got him back
working again.”
“Now?”
“Yep.”
“When?”
“Just started a week and a half ago.”
“Christ,” I said, “I sort of popped the question to him.”
“I’d just as soon you didn’t broadcast it,” Rubinstein said. “He’s not in
solid yet, but I expect he will be. You can put in there a blurb that as of this

writing Barnaby came back for a test run to see whether he could get
involved again.”
“As a WordStar user,” I said, “I have a selfish interest in his developing it
further. Will he be working on WordStar?”
“He’ll be working on WordStar,” said Rubinstein. Like a movie man, he
excitedly described his coming attraction. (“It’ll just knock their socks
off.”) The new WordStar would contain a spreadsheet. Also, used with the
right printers, it would offer proportional spacing, meaning that an “I”
would take up less room than a “W,” making the print look more booklike.
What’s more, the new WordStar would be simpler to learn. Listening to
Rubinstein raving over his forthcoming word processor, I could tell that if
Barnaby didn’t work out on the new project, MicroPro might use someone
else. Ideally, however, it wouldn’t. “Just incredible,” Rubinstein had said of
Barnaby’s coding of WordStar. “The man is a consummate artist.”
Surely, I thought, Arthur Clarke would agree.
Barnaby stayed some months with MicroPro. In fact, he had helped fit
WordStar into the little memory of the Epson lap-sized portable marketed
that year. A micro magazine, meanwhile, came out with a report that a
version of WordStar for big machines, Version 4.0, might contain split
screens. In October 1984, however, I was still waiting. And Rob Barnaby
had left MicroPro in July.
“Things didn’t click,” he said without going into the specifics. “We
talked about a lot of things, but they didn’t jell.” He was now consulting.
MicroPro suffered in other ways. Yearly income was up 53 percent, and
the company was still shipping thirty thousand copies of WordStar each
month, but quarterly revenues reported in September 1984 were $12.4
million versus $15.6 million for the same period in 1983. The company
sustained a loss in earnings of six cents a share, $756,000. Hoping to cope
with threats such as NewWord, which sold for $250 and used the same
commands as the older word processor, it laid off 10 percent of its workers
and reduced WordStar’s list price from $495 to $350. NewWord even
offered twists of its own. You could tell it to go to a certain page number,
for instance, without having to specify a word on the page you were looking
for. The natural question arose: Why should people pay $100 more for the
real WordStar?

■ ■ ■

Six Reasons Why Customers (or Noncustomers) Feel Free
to Cheat Software Companies
WordStar clones like NewWord aren’t illegal. Getting a “free”
WordStar from a friend, however, is.
“It’s like illegally getting a second typewriter—copied from a
friend’s, down to the serial number,” a software columnist
observes. “You’re stealing a valuable tool.” H. Glen Haney, the
president of MicroPro, told me that most copies of WordStar in use
are bootlegged ones.
While opposing the practice, I’ll list six reasons why customers
cheat:

1. It takes all of two or three minutes—maybe less—to copy a disk
worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Yes, anti-
bootlegging gimmicks exist. But often they reduce software
sales; would you be as keen to buy a $500 disk if you couldn’t
easily make backups?
2. Everyone does it.
3. Computer users want to befriend others with similar machines
so they can draw on them for technical hints or back up
equipment.
And what better way to cement a new friendship than at a
copying session where the users swap programs? That’s the
thinking.
4. Many software companies overprice their wares. Yes, it’s
expensive to develop good programs; but some companies,
rather than creating innovative products, gouge you to pay for
development of copycat offerings. They themselves rip off people
—their more imaginative rivals. (No criticism of NewWord here. It
is much cheaper than the original WordStar and offers some
improvements.)
5. Some people in large companies think software houses don’t
give big-enough discounts to corporations buying the same
program for a number of machines.
6. Many software companies don’t offer enough guidance or other
help. Customers think, Why should I buy this program when

they’re just going to ignore my problems once they have my
money? The columnist counters: “That’s like saying, ‘I’ll just
throw out the old Judeo-Christian ethic that it’s wrong to steal.’
The other guy being wrong doesn’t make you right.”

■ ■ ■

MicroPro’s responded to such competition by keeping WordStar but
developing another word processor, WordStar 2000, aimed at offices that
had shunned micros as too hard to use.
WordStar 2000, named because MicroPro said it would stay modern into
the next century, discarded most of the older program’s commands. There
wasn’t one line of code from plain old WordStar. And WordStar 2000
couldn’t easily read its files—imperiling an industry standard that MicroPro
itself had created. Moreover, it couldn’t run on less advanced micros like
the Kaypro II. Machines in that vein were still good for word processing,
and critics claimed that MicroPro had kissed off the 8-bit market. MicroPro
replied that it had wanted to take full advantage of the hard disks and other
capabilities that were showing up in powerful new computers such as the
IBM AT.[21] WordStar 2000 did not run well on the slower floppy-disk
machines. Its early version was pokey, moreover, even on an IBM XT hard
disk computer. However, it indeed simplified WordStar’s commands and
offered split screens, a form-letter program, a spelling checker that you
could use as you typed a letter rather than having to leave the file to call up
the speller, proportional spacing, underlining displayed on the screen, and
the ability to go to specified pages—in other words, what one writer called
“a catalog of wishes” for people using the older program. WordStar 2000
lacked a spreadsheet and sold for an outrageously steep $595; for $100
more you could buy WordStar 2000 Plus, which included a simple list-
keeping program and software to help hook you up to other computers via
phone. A slogan captured the MicroPro sales pitch: “Easy Word Processing
You’ll Never Outgrow.” WordStar 2000 wasn’t “easy” word processing—
all powerful products took some time to learn—but it was easier than plain
old WordStar.
I went to a MicroPro dealers’ meeting just outside Washington in early
November 1984 and saw a slick, professional sales campaign that would
have done a shaving-cream maker proud. Company officials, including

president H. Glen Haney, said WordStar 2000 wasn’t a fluke: “We’re going
to repeat this process again and again.” Educators, even science-fiction
writers, were said to have helped forty programmers make The Product easy
to use. MicroPro billed 2000 as having been “beyond the capabilities of one
or two genius programmers.” This philosophy, as much as anything,
perhaps explained why Rob Barnaby was no longer with the company. Like
many talented people, especially writers, he was the very antithesis of a
team man. There was a difference between being one of forty programmers
and rrring away in front of the keyboard at midnight while the head of the
company watched. And yet as a user of WordStar I still hoped that Barnaby
might return to the MicroPro fold. No matter how many creativity experts
MicroPro brought in—and the company in fact had experimented with one
—you could no more replicate a Rob Barnaby than you could a Welles or
Mankiewicz. It was entirely inevitable that the MicroPro officials at the
Twin Bridges Marriott felt compelled to say that 2000 was beyond one or
two genius programmers. WordStar 2000 indeed had some merits. Still, it
was far from the earthshaker that the original WordStar had been. Barnaby
and Rubinstein had so brilliantly conceived their program that it could hold
back the competition for years and years.
Well into the 2000 presentation at the motel, the room darkened. It was
movie time. The dealers chuckled at “word processing throughout the
ages.” A cartoon caveman wrote on stone, a Greek shuffled around stones
bearing inscriptions for a temple, and a cartoon George Patton barked
orders to the troops as part of a pun based on the phrase “command-driven
word processor.” (See Chapter 5 for a definition.) MicroPro officials trotted
out advertisements that would appear in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune,
Time, and other major publications. The company was as proud of the ads
as of WordStar 2000. A lie-detectorlike device, measuring electricity in the
body, had even gauged test subjects’ responses to the copywriters’ creations.
After lunch—salad, roast beef, potatoes, and a redemptive low-calorie
dessert—MicroPro let the dealers try out WordStar 2000 themselves on
IBM XTs and ATs. It was a combination sales talk and seminar. MicroPro
quizzed the dealers with questions in the vein of “What do you like most
about the product?” The session greatly increased the dealers’—and my
own—understanding of 2000. At the same time, using a teacher-student
relationship, MicroPro people fortified their depiction of themselves as the
world’s top experts on word processing.

Similar dog-and-pony shows would take place in cities across the country
and overseas. MicroPro by now had four hundred employees worldwide
and thirty-five hundred retail dealer outlets—a far cry from the days when
Rob Barnaby had been writing WordStar in the room from which he’d
displaced the electric-train set. If WordStar 2000 didn’t sell well, however,
MicroPro would shrink into just another software company. It was a crucial
time. MicroPro was deemphasizing products like data bases and
spreadsheets, flaunting its reliance on word processing, and inspiring
headlines like “MicroPro Back to Its Roots.”

■ ■ ■

How to Work on Two Files at Once While Using Plain Old
WordStar
Windows, among other things, let you view several files at once
and move material back and forth (see Backup IX, “Window
Shopping”).
Even though plain old WordStar lacks windows, you might be able
to upgrade your software to include them. Ask your dealer about
IBM’s Topview software and Microsoft’s Windows.

■ ■ ■

For Rubinstein personally, 1984 had also been eventful. He and his wife
had separated—different interests, he said—and he had a heart attack. He
had lost thirty pounds but had come back “stronger than ever.” Meanwhile,
an initial public stock offering in March had made him richer than ever. It
brought MicroPro $13 million.
“After all is said and done,” Rubinstein told me about the offering, “I’ll
end up with a little more than $5 million.” He already owned a gold-colored
Corvette and a house worth hundreds of thousands. “And okay,” Rubinstein
said, “so I’ll decorate the house. I’ll buy some furniture. So maybe I’ll
spend another couple hundred thousand, but most of the money will be used
for investment, not to go on some wild spending spree.” He said that
“unless you’re a dissipated type, your life really doesn’t change.”[22]

His corporate life, however, would be different. Perhaps chastened by
Adam Osborne’s failure, some investors had insisted that Rubinstein give
up control of MicroPro. He would still serve on the board. And he would
help plot long-range strategy and develop new products, but the old
entrepreneurial environment was vanishing at MicroPro and in much of the
industry at large.
The Osborne failure haunted Rubinstein in ways besides making money
raising somewhat harder. Some investors in Osborne filed a suit saying that
Rubinstein—owner of Osborne stock—had bailed out ahead of time, using
insider knowledge. “It’s such hoked-up bullshit; it’s just ridiculous,”
Rubinstein said in May 1984. He had “needed the money ... principally to
pay my taxes.”[23]
By now, the sales of personal-computer software exceeded $1.5 billion a
year.[24] Throughout the industry, accountants and others in three-piece suits
were increasingly calling the shots. Marketing considerations—advertising,
even the designs of the boxes housing the software—often overwhelmed
technical ones. A word-processing program called Select typified some so-
called user-friendly software aimed at the burgeoning market.

Backup:

◼ III, The Lucky 13: What to Look for in Choosing Software, page 302.

5 The Select Word Processor: Martin Dean versus the
Command-Driven Restaurants

“Gentleman Farmers” don’t appear just in whiskey ads. One showed up
in InfoWorld—ballyhooing Select, a craftily marketed rival of WordStar.
Embracing Madison Avenue-style tactics, software companies like Select
Information Systems were luring some customers away from programs that
would have been far better for heavy-duty business use.
Select’s word processor retailed for about $500 in 1982, a year after its
introduction, including speller and mailing list programs and a tutorial disk.
Just WordStar—without accessory programs—listed for about the same.
More than twenty-five thousand copies of Select sold in less than two
years, and major manufacturers started offering it with their computers. I
myself loathed Select. And yet I could see how the program could wow the
throngs jamming their local computer stores. The tutorial disk was a
salesman’s dream: he could walk away while the program baby-sat the
customer tinkering with the computer.
Select Information Systems, moreover, a forty-employee company in
Kentfield, California, was running an advertising campaign as slick as any
distiller’s.
“No contest,” proclaimed a San Francisco Examiner columnist in one ad
in 1982, looking up from his Xerox 820, dangling a pair of glasses from his
hand, like some refugee from a Famous Writers School. “Select was easier
to learn.” The ads didn’t say what he was comparing it to, but a popular
computer magazine named his equivalent of Brand X, WordStar.
The columnist, Dick Nolan, never returned my calls, and Select wouldn’t
put me in touch with the secretary featured in another ad, but I did track
down “Richard Russell, Gentleman Farmer.”
“Nebraska soybeans,” said the ad, “are Richard Russell’s business. But
he rarely gets there. Richard manages his farms from a Victorian flat in San
Francisco. And he does it with little more than a telephone and the SELECT

Word Processor.” What was this, an ad for a word processor or a
communications program? And yet the copywriter had done her job. I read
on eagerly, curious about gentlemanly word processors—human or disk.
“Select supports his interests as efficiently and often more quickly than
could a well-run office back home. The briefest bank instructions or
thickest annual report can be recorded in minutes and retrieved in seconds.”
Was software so powerful? Maybe. The ad quoted Russell: “Select manages
the business. I just reap the harvest.”
The gentleman farmer, however, wasn’t mainly a gentleman farmer—
rather, an interior decorator.
“I spend more time doing that,” Russell told me when I called up out of
the blue, “than on my farm operation, which is managed in the Midwest.”
Then why be a gentleman farmer in the ad?
“I think they just thought the idea of a gentleman farmer was more
interesting than an interior designer,” Russell said. It must have been. He
was deluged with calls, including one from NBC, which was in the thick of
a computer series.
Well, I asked, did he actually use the word processor?
Yes, Russell said, but mainly in his designing business. It was a
successful one, 20 percent commercial, 80 percent residential, including
work on some mansions in the million-dollar range. “I design architectural
interiors, furniture, fabrics,” he said, “the whole thing.”
What did he most like about Select?
“The self-teaching program was the main thing that appealed to me,” he
said—the tutorial disk.
I asked Russell about the cumbersome series of keystrokes that the
Kaypro version of Select inflicted on people making insertions a few
sentences back in their writing.
He knew about the problem. And he knew about WordStar, too.
“I’m a lot more aware of that since the ad ran,” he said of WordStar’s
reputation as a powerful word-processing system, “but I don’t think I’m in a
position to say much about it since I gave Select my endorsement. But
you’ve brought up some valid points. The whole business of personal
computers is new to me in the last six months, and so I’m learning about it,
as well.” Russell said he used Select several hours a week, that he could
legitimately endorse it even if he wasn’t actually using it mainly as a

gentleman farmer. He was right. I didn’t question his basic sincerity. But for
me, anyway, Select had proved tediously cumbersome.
In early 1983 I called up Martin Dean, the head of Select Information
Systems, and did the proper thing.
“Martin,” I said in effect, “I hate your software.”
Why gladhand information out of him, then stab him in the back?
Dean was smart and a good sport. Not only didn’t he hang up on me; he
spent an hour on the phone giving his point of view. Like the developer of
WordStar, Dean had a philosophy, one born of his own business experiences
—in this case, a WordStar debacle. He was a real estate lawyer eager for
one of his staffers to work with a sophisticated word processor. “I handed
her WordStar,” he told me, “and said, ‘It’s the standard in the industry.’ And
she came back two days later and said she was not going to do that.”
“She was vehement,” Dean said. She wasn’t going to spend the seventy
hours she felt it would take to master WordStar.
And she wasn’t “just” a secretary. She had a year of law school, had done
ten years of legal secretarial work, and was supervising Dean’s legal
research staff. “She’s one of the brightest women I’ve worked with in the
legal business,” he said. “But she didn’t have the time to learn WordStar.” A
major manufacturer had done a study comparing the two word processors’
learning time. “And my understanding,” said Dean, “is they determined it
takes about fifty hours of working with WordStar to become as
accomplished as you could become in ninety minutes of using Select.” I
disagreed. WordStar took much less time for me to learn; Select, much
more. With other people, it might be the reverse, but a good company
normally wouldn’t have so much turnover that the employees would lack
time to master a decent word processor.
Defending Select, Dean praised the tutorial disk and the program’s built-
in memory aids. Want to erase? If you hit the “Escape” control and pressed
the “E,” you’d eventually do that. Eventually. Dean and I went through a
keystroke count. He claimed that actually his system—improved since the
one I’d tried—was as fast or faster than rivals if run on the right machines.
He said the Kaypro just wasn’t right for his program.
“If you felt this way,” I asked, “how come you let it be bundled with the
Kaypro?” Why did he and the Kaypro’s maker sign a contract that allowed
Select to be the “free” word processor provided with the computer?

“Well,” Dean said, “we had that version on the market only three
months”—in 1982. Then, according to him, Perfect Writer underpriced
Select. “Kaypro then thought that was a bargain. They do not now.”
“Why?”
“Try to get a call through to their service department.” He was right.
Kaypro owners were swapping war stories. Theoretically, Kaypro—not
Perfect—would guide the owners through the software maze. Actually, it
didn’t. Not always, anyway. I heard people at user groups deciding which
machine to lie about owning so the Perfect Writer staffers would listen to
their problems. Kaypro, in fact, dropped Perfect software in 1984 after
dealers said they preferred WordStar.
Okay, but what about my printer not underlining with the Kaypro using
Select?
Here again, Dean blamed Kaypro, and the printer maker, too, but I wasn’t
about to zero in on who was at fault here. All I knew was that my daisy
wheel wasn’t that exotic a machine. And yet, involuntarily, I’d been sold
cumbersome software that, unmodified, did not even work right with the
other parts of my $2,500 investment.
You may love Select, maybe even after you’ve been running it a while.
“Cumbersome,” remember, is my opinion. A Washington Post staffer named
Eugene Meyer, a Kaypro owner, liked Select and said the slowness “gives
me more time to think.” He was working on a book around the same time I
was and turned out one as long. “But,” I half joked, “if you’d been using
WordStar, then you might have written one three times longer than mine.”
I called up Ben Shneiderman, an expert on matches between humans and
software systems. Just what did an academic feel about Select-style systems
and WordStar? Shneiderman, an associate professor of computer science at
the University of Maryland and author of Software Psychology: Human
Factors in Computer and Information Systems, said:
“Select has very few commands. There are very different people in the
world. You’re very attracted to choice and options, and you seek the power
that WordStar offers. But very simply, people are different. Some like to
drive Maseratis, and some like to go twenty miles per hour.”
He was right. There might even be a version of Select better than today’s
WordStar; software is constantly changing, and when you shop, you must
do your homework to make sure you’re buying the best program available

for your needs at the time. But while I was writing this book, I loathed
Select—even a version more advanced than the one for my Kaypro.
Who, anyway, wanted to hire a typist content to do the keyboard
equivalent of twenty miles per hour?
And yet I tried to be tolerant. I hit the control key to fire up WordStar’s
commands; Select users tapped “Escape.” “There are twenty-five thousand
people happy with using ‘Escape’ instead of the control key,” Dean had told
me, as patiently as a liberal Baptist explaining to a Klansman that Jews
didn’t have horns.
Certainly it was true: one man’s joy, another man’s plastic-disked kludge
—that was software for you. And what you learned first was often your first
love. A computer magazine even called one article “Getting Married to
WordStar.” “Can you erase your memory modules?” Mark Robinson, a
marketing man with Lexisoft, asked before he mailed me a copy of his
company’s Spellbinder word processor. He had a point. I liked Spellbinder
more than Select, much more, because it ran faster on the Kaypro, but I still
could not abide by the need to enter a new mode to make insertions or
corrections. It seemed inhibiting, this requirement, though perhaps more in
writing than in secretarial work. Michael Canyes, a computer consultant, at
the time loved Palantir. It offered many of the better features of both
WordStar and Spellbinder and let a nonprogrammer set up the numbers
pads of many computers to serve as function keys. Canyes also appreciated
The Final Word, an excellent word processor for footnoting and other
academic requirements. It was clear. There were serious alternatives to
WordStar—some, anyway—even if, like the writer of the “Married” article,
I was already well matched.
In some ways, however, I felt uncomfortable about the general direction
in which the software business seemed to be moving. Would less powerful
but well-marketed products like Select drive out the future WordStars?
The WordStar had benefited from Seymour Rubinstein’s salesmanship.
But Rubinstein also had boasted a solid computer background; and unlike
some of the new people in software, he wasn’t just a businessman cashing
in on an exploding market.
Again and again a pattern was beginning to repeat itself. Programmer-
entrepreneurs would tough it out in the proverbial garages—for some
reason programmers work in garages, authors in garrets—and score with
the right software hit. Propelled by little more than their drive and technical

expertise, their companies would grow. Then, however, other businessmen,
real businessmen, would want the same niche, and the marketing people
would muscle in and set the tone. Or, as with some new companies, they
might have been setting the tone from the very start.
This had been the classic pattern in many industries—Orville and Wilbur
Wright hadn’t exactly gone on to become major aviation magnates—but
computers were improving faster than had airplanes. And so the process
was accelerated; well-financed managers were rapidly replacing garage-
style entrepreneurs.
The stakes were higher, and striking back, software authors were even
hiring agents. The question arose, however, of the extent to which the
market would remain open to more imaginative garage people, anyway,
what with increased use of teams to develop complex programs.
“The frontier,” said Jeffrey Tarter, publisher of Soft.letter, an industry
publication, “is already closing.
“A couple of years ago you got to be successful primarily by competently
executing an innovative idea and by picking the right machine to produce
that execution for. VisiCalc for the Apple is the classic example here, but
lots of other programs achieved success on a smaller scale by doing
something useful for a microcomputer that came to dominate a market
niche”—or, I would add with WordStar in mind, by producing a program
valuable for its very ability to run on a number of machines.
“Now, however,” Tarter said, “the rules are changing.... Marketing factors
are becoming more important. You have to package and distribute the
product with far greater sophistication than before and be able to spend the
kind of money that sophistication requires.”
“It’s like the record business,” said Nick Vergis, then a marketing man
with Perfect Software, telling me about the new programs his company was
developing. “You get a lot more bullets ready than you actually fire. Some
will be hits, and some won’t. You hope you’ll get enough hits to pay for the
new bullets.” Research and development (R & D) was a major part of the
costs of new programs. The original WordStar had come cheaply; Rob
Barnaby had toiled night and day for a fraction of the money that his
counterparts now often demanded.
Then again, advertising and other non-R & D expenditures in the
industry had increased, too. By spring 1984 Select had sold 50,000 copies.
That should have been enough to sustain a small or medium-sized software

company, but even after a public stock offering in November 1983, Dean
still felt capital-short. “We just couldn’t spend enough on ads and still have
money to pay the sales force,” said Dean, who “saw it coming” by February
1984. That summer he licensed Select to Intelligent Systems to publish and
promote at the retail level. Intelligent, privately held and based in Georgia,
enjoyed yearly sales of $90 million; its Quadram subsidiary made well-
advertised computer accessories. In late 1984 Select merged with Summa
Software Corp., an Oregon firm that offered a stock-market program called
Winning on Wall Street, and Dean laid off six marketing people from
Select, so that his original firm had only twenty-one workers left. The
Intelligent deal went on despite the merger.
“There are many more products available today than the market can
support, and it’s very confusing to consumers,” said an Intelligent vice-
president named Frank Marks. “The user needs to know that he’s buying
from a company that will be around in the future.” He was right. In that
sense, the large companies’ growing ascendancy in software may have been
to the benefit of the consumer. Still, old micro hands may have gnashed
their teeth when they heard that Intelligence would turn Select into the
“Quadsoft” line of software and when Marks said that the name “leverages
Quadram’s brand awareness.” Quadsoft might as well have been a new
shampoo.[25]
To Select Information Systems’ credit, the company had garnered some
favorable reviews of new products in the months before the Quadsoft deal.
(They included Select Write, a $99 stripped-down Select.) Even so, some of
the old-time micro people correctly questioned Dean’s style of “user
friendliness.”
In a Byte article, “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify,” Dean had pushed menu-
driven software like Select.[26] The idea seemed logical. You’d see the
choices on the computer screen rather than having to recall combinations of
keystrokes, as you would with command-driven systems. Dean likened a
computer menu to a restaurant menu. He lampooned the idea of “a
command-driven restaurant” in which, supposedly, you’d try “to remember
what sort of sauce the veal came with last time and whether it was pepper or
peppercorns that you liked in your green beans.”
Wasn’t that stretching it, however? If you ate at the same restaurant day
after day, couldn’t you order many kinds of meals without bothering to
glance at a menu? How would you feel about a waitress who insisted you

see a menu even if the fare never changed? She would be pushy, wouldn’t
she? All of a sudden “user friendliness” would be antiuser pushiness to
those using a program regularly. Strictly menu-driven software should
normally be just for occasional users, children, and adults wanting to be
treated like children; and many if not most adults in the business world
worked too often with words and numbers to let Select-style programs keep
them in the infant stage. Granted, exceptions existed justifying this kind of
software. A micro user who occasionally retrieved information from a
mainframe, for instance, could take advantage of menus to guide him
through complicated routines. What’s more, even WordStar employed a
menu to handle installation procedures to match the program up with
various computers and printers. But that was different from menus that
slowed you during your regular work with the program.
Some of the so-called command-driven programs, moreover—at least
WordStar—actually did have the option of letting you keep a list of
common commands on the screen if you wanted.
Jerry Pournelle, a prominent computer columnist, growled back at the
“user friendliness” crowd, saying that their software didn’t let ordinary
people enjoy the full power of their machines. “It takes a little work to join
the micro revolution,” he said, “but the rewards can be high.”[27] I agreed.
You didn’t have to learn programming, but you owed it to yourself and your
company to make good use of the best software for your job. A user named
Alan Scharf had done exactly that—saving his firm $200,000 a year.

Backup:

◼ IV, On the Evolution of Software (And a “Perfecter and Perfecter”
Program), page 310.

6 Three Software Stories: Motorcycles, Homes, and The
$200,000-a-Year Disk

Zzzzzz. I doze off reading lists of the right software for, say, beekeepers
or chiropractors. So sorry; I won’t cover everyone’s programs. Besides,
software is evolving. I hate Select now; I may love its future editions. And
what about WordStar? Although 2000 offers many improvements over my
beloved WordStar 3.3—and I may eventually convert to it—I don’t like all
the changes.
So don’t think specific programs here. Think concepts.
In fact, if possible, don’t even think computer concepts. Instead, think
business. Just how could the lessons of the three people in this chapter
apply to yours?

Ed Boland: Accounting

Ed Boland helps run a motorcycle shop, but you’ll never find him roaring
off on a bike, dodging myopic drivers. “I’ve got a wife and three kids,” he
joked. “Scares the hell out of me.” It doesn’t matter. Boland, a graying,
middle-aged accountant, is just as useful to Clinton Cycles as a top
mechanic or a crack Suzuki salesman.
Above all, a good controller obviously knows where the money is. He
helps his employer avoid unneeded trips to the bank to borrow more.
Clinton Cycles, in fact, borrows rarely.
That’s one reason why, when U.S. motorcycle sales suffered the
economic equivalent of a head-on crash, Clinton survived. The firm even
expanded during the early 1980s. Also, years before, owner Don Smolinski
had wisely diversified. Clinton Cycles was actually Clinton Cycle and
Salvage, Inc., a miniconglomerate with three motorcycle stores and
dealings in scrap metal. Sales exceeded several million a year.
But size and complexity weren’t pure joy. Boland’s accounting software
just couldn’t handle a holding company and five subsidiaries, not without
costly customizing, and nearly a year after computerization, his feelings
were still mixed.
“I don’t regret the decision,” Boland said. But at the time he had spent
thousands of dollars more than planned, and he told me, “There’s been a
few times I would have thrown this computer out the door in a second.”
His horror story—even if it eventually turns into a success tale, as it
probably will—is instructive. He’s good. And he bought his software from a
good store. Clinton Computers, in the same Maryland suburb, won top
ratings in a consumer guide in the Washington, D.C., area. A software
executive, moreover, an outspoken one critical of some other D.C. dealers,
praised Clinton.
So a bothersome issue arises. If a $3,800 accounting program doesn’t
work out easily with good people selling and using it, what happens among
mediocre people?
And there is a second point here. Don’t expect even the best computer
store to serve as your private consultant, intimately familiar with your

business; not, at least, unless you’re buying a big mini or mainframe from
the likes of IBM.
A third point, too, comes through. Don’t computerize a multi-million-
dollar business without a consultant—at least not if you’re running an extra-
hairy program like an accounting one—unless you’re willing to talk and
think computerese or at least take a training course. Accounting software,
anyway, just isn’t simple and reliable enough yet. Any idiot can flick on a
computer and stuff a floppy disk into a drive or crank up a hard disk; most
of the time his hardware will work fine, but even the brightest of
businessmen may need a consultant to unravel the mysteries of many
programs—even “canned,” off-the-shelf accounting packages like the one
that bedeviled Ed Boland.
A blunt, tough-talking man, Boland himself is no moron. He holds a
bachelors degree in accounting, and he’s worked for employers ranging
from hospitals to restaurant chains, including one where he caught a chef on
the take from a supplier.
“Accounting is accounting,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s food or
motorcycles. Life exists the same way.” Moreover, life is a series of ratios,
of intertwining figures. That’s how Boland caught the chef. He knew that
food costs were normally 20 percent of the company’s expenses; two
months after the chef’s hiring, they were 23 percent, creeping up toward 27
percent, finally. The incident perhaps colored his attitude toward
computerization. He would computerize, but not overdo it, not lose himself
in tangential statistics, not hire extra clerks to key in data.
“We carry more than seventy thousand new parts numbers alone,” he
said. “Seventy thousand different kinds of screws, bolts, nuts, fenders,
rims.” But if he couldn’t track every single bolt, he at least could work with
major numbers like sales figures for various categories.
Normally, for instance, new bike sales and accessories sales went up and
down together, and if one of the two had fallen off alone, you could bet that
Boland would demand a reason. If nothing else, computers, by making past
information available more quickly, could help him sniff out trouble.
Computerizing, he saw a micro as one way to avoid greedy consultants
and their expensive recommendations.
“I’ve seen too many instances,” said Boland, “where businesses paid out
$50,000, $60,000 to a consultant who spent six or seven months analyzing
computer requirements. Then he’d recommend $50,000 or $150,000 worth

of computer equipment.” Boland wanted the benefits of the bigger
machines without the costs. His goal was to reach the point that a somewhat
larger competitor in the D.C. area already had; the rival owned an IBM 34
system with a six-digit price.
“He used to work for IBM fifteen or twenty years ago, before he went
into the motorcycle business,” Boland said. “He now has just about every
one of his salespeople on commission, and he knows exactly what they sell
every day. He can tell you where each motorcycle, each piece of inventory,
is.
“He can tell you whether it’s in a truck, what color it is, where it is, what
stage of preparation it’s in for delivery. He puts his purchases in the
computer with an inventory program. The moment a salesman sells a cycle,
the register itself deducts it from inventory. It’s a point-of-sales system. So
theoretically, at the end of the day he knows exactly what he started the day
with, what he sold, what he added to it, and what the bottom-line figure is.
We’d love to get to that point.
“The likelihood of this happening with us, though, is very low. I don’t
know if all this detail is necessary. And our business is seasonal, and I don’t
want too much cash tied up in the system. And what’s the sense of keeping
instant track of every nut and bolt sold? But we’d love to get the major
items in on computer. The motorcycles, for instance. They can easily sell
for up to $6,000 apiece, so it’s worth it.
“It’s a question of software. This competitor has spent more than
$100,000 to develop specific software to get what he wants. Now if you’ve
got $100,000 to throw away and want to hire a programmer full time at, say,
0,000 a year, that’s fine. Most companies like us can’t afford that.”
So Boland bought several programs off the shelf from Clinton
Computers, including Accounting Plus, which he began trying to use as an
electronic general ledger. He ran it on a North Star computer with a 5-
megabyte hard disk—a memory device capable of stashing away the
equivalent of maybe 2,500 typed pages of information. The North Star
system was just a way for him to get his feet wet in computing with a
general-ledger program. Boland, though, would switch computers even
sooner than expected. The system’s memory space wouldn’t suffice for the
records of his miniconglomerate, and it wasn’t easily expandable. And he
would have trouble getting the machine repaired as quickly as he needed.

Clinton Computers, however good its service department, just could not
respond fast enough to suit his requirements.
And the software seemed just as major a disappointment, what with the
need for complicated customization.
“The biggest problem I ran into at the store,” he said of the hardware and
software, “was ‘We’re going to sell you a system that we think will do the
job, but not necessarily so.’”
Both the buyer and the seller, in this case, apparently lost the software
gamble; they apparently came out on the wrong side of “necessarily.”
Clinton Computers did not win, because it isn’t a fly-by-night operation.
Boland’s name had come to me from none other than Sue Grothoff, who’d
sold him the software. She had enough confidence in herself and her store
to offer Boland as the source of a “candid” story, and my respect remains,
especially after having talked to another business customer, raving happy
about her ability to understand his company’s software needs.
Boland emphasized that Clinton wasn’t out to cheat him. “Sue is a very
nice person.” And he liked the software expert there, too. “He knows how
to change software, but you have one person trying to meet the needs of too
many customers. He’s spread too thin. Clinton never gave him enough time
to get the program running at my business. And we never could seem to get
together to get the twelve hours of training they’ve promised me. To be
frank, I think we spent the twelve hours trying to correct the problem I had
rather than on training.”
Giving Clinton Computer’s side, Grothoff said, “Because of changes that
Ed wanted in the software, it took longer to adapt the program to meet his
needs. And that used up the twelve hours.” Evidently, Boland and Grothoff
stayed on good terms, because she later sold him a new Kaypro portable for
home use.
But with his big computer system at work, Boland—for one reason or
another—seems to have suffered more than his share of woes.
“Accounting Plus,” said Boland of the software he bought there, “is a
very good program, but it was designed for one single company to be
subdivided into departments. You could have six departments, everything
from sales to used parts, and it will work beautifully. But it wouldn’t for
what I wanted. It would not treat a motorcycle store, for instance, as a
subdivision of a holding company. I could not pull off separate profit and
loss statements or separate balance sheets.”

Clinton Computers, to its credit, referred Boland to a consultant familiar
with the source code of Accounting Plus—a part of the program that would
enable it to be customized. The consultant took in Boland’s North Star
computer system as a trade-in. He sold him a Delta microcomputer and
TeleVideo terminal in return, along with a hard-disk system upgradable to
70 megabytes. With the software customization included, the cost came to
$20,000, minus the $12,000 trade-in. The consultant, like Clinton
Computers, didn’t know as much about accounting as Boland had hoped.
But through sheer tenacity Boland at least got himself a halfway usable
program.
“I had the software changed,” he said, “so that instead of one company
with departments in it, it now reads a holding company with subsidiary
companies. The software was changed to print out separate balance sheets
and separate income statements for me.
“On the income-statement side this machine will ask me if I want a
consolidated or individual by-page income statement. It will print out a
holding company and then, in successive order, on each page, the income
statement for each company. When I go to the balance sheet, it will ask me
that same question.
“If I tell it I want individuals and a consolidated by page, it won’t do it. I
must ask it individually each time for company one, then company two,
right down the line. I have to give the computer individual instructions to
do that.
“And that was the best my consultant could do to change the software. It
got the job done, but not all the way.
“I’ve since found out that for $400, not ,800, I could have bought an
accounting package that would do exactly the same thing I wanted.”
So why didn’t he buy it?
“Why spend another $400 to delve into it further and then find out it isn’t
what you wanted?” Boland asked. “I think it’s stupid to spend money at this
point. I have a system I know I can make work within certain limits. I’m
still in the learning phase, and I’ll probably still be there for another year,
for all I know.” I thought he was too patient. If his software system was a
dog—perhaps not for everyone but for him—he should change it. Four
hundred dollars was a pittance compared to Boland’s total investment of
$20,000.

Ideally, too, as he said himself, he would have gone to a consultant in the
first place, not just any consultant but one familiar with accounting. And yet
it’s understandable why he acted as he did. Why repeat the mistakes he’d
seen at other companies? Why not frugality? Better to be out $20,000 than
$50,000 or $100,000 after paying for a mini, a consultant, and the other
trimmings. His computer wasn’t making or saving buckets of money for
Clinton Cycle and Salvage as of early 1983; but it might in the future as he
got his software under control and could, for instance, easily put salesmen
on commission.
He told me, moreover, that he would soon stop farming out the company
payroll—up to seventy people—to a computer firm. He also was mastering
an electronic spreadsheet. He did not plan an accounts receivable program,
because Clinton Cycle collected quickly through checks and credit cards,
but an accounts payable one was in the offing.
“It’s going to give me the companies’ names, the payment terms, the
volume I deal with them each month,” Boland said. “It will flag when the
bills are due, and it will also generate checks.”
He was also going to crank up a mailing-list program, using a list of all
buyers of new bikes within the last three years—a sensible project,
considering the market for accessories and repeat sales. Obviously, here, as
in other applications, the more information built up on his hard disk, the
more his machines would justify the $20,000 investment. The benefits of
computerization for Edward Boland might not be immediately dramatic, but
with his stick-to-itiveness, sooner or later they’d almost surely come.
Boland’s battles with computers were to continue. When I caught up with
him in spring 1984, he said he’d bought yet another computer system.

Charlie Bowie: Data Base and Spreadsheet

Remember the customer who was raving happy about his software—also
bought from Sue Grothoff at Clinton Computers?
That’s Charlie Bowie, who, when we first talked, was a vice-president of
Washington Homes and manager of its Southern Division. He told me he
expected two Zenith micros to save his company perhaps as much as
$50,000 a year, maybe more.
In just one month, in fact, his $5,000 computer had already saved the
equivalent of thousands of dollars in executive man-hours.
Even before he and I met, his assistant, behind his back, was singing
praises of her boss and their new machine. “I wanted to learn word
processing,” said Julie Grimes, a young, blond woman who could have
been the secretary in the IBM commercials saying the advertised product
was “a piece of cake” to master.
Gazing at the Zenith—which she and Bowie use for data-base work,
spreadsheets, and some word processing—she said: “It really comes in
handy.... We were both worried. Charlie told me, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll teach
each other.’”
Bowie by now was in the room, and it was immediately clear he’d won
her respect through his brains and dedication, not through the normal
trappings of executivedom. He was bearded. He wore a sweater and heavy
boots and wire-rimmed glasses. He plainly was the construction industry’s
version of the proverbial shirt-sleeves manager. He must loathe paperwork,
prefer the field to the executive suite, even if he was a vice-president of a
publicly owned real estate company with twelve hundred stockholders. He
was in his mid-thirties. That wasn’t so much younger than Ed Boland, who
himself, interviewed on a Saturday, had worn casual clothes. And yet the
two somehow came across as being on opposite sides of the generation gap
that all the pundits were babbling about during Vietnam. I could imagine
Boland watching M*A*S*H; I could imagine Bowie, in the right setting,
being a mild version of Hawkeye. He wouldn’t necessarily do things the
traditional way, but in the end no one would care, because whatever it was,
he’d succeed. Ed Boland was a man with a fondness for constants—a

characteristic that in his profession had served him well. Charlie Bowie, I
sensed, enjoyed surprises and change.
Bowie’s company, like Boland’s, had to be good to have survived so long
in a boom-and-bust industry. Everyone needs transportation, everyone
needs housing; everyone does not need recreational motorcycles or new
homes. Across the country, home sales had plummeted at the start of the
1980s. Washington Homes’ sales had been almost $30 million in 1980 but
just half that two years later.
Yet Bowie’s company had survived the ups and downs since 1965. The
management philosophy struck me as the same as Clinton Cycles—the lean,
mean school. It was early 1983 when we first talked. Another housing boom
seemed ready to explode, and Bowie was working a sixty-five-hour week,
“because we’ve gotten very busy, very quickly, and we haven’t built up our
staff rapidly. It’s hard to find qualified people, and we don’t know whether
the recovery’s here to stay.” Small wonder that he welcomed his computer
as a sort of financial radar—an early warning system that would buzz
before the bombs fell.
Washington Homes was a general contractor. In other words, it was just
as much in the management and budget business as the building business.
Bowie and his company didn’t hire laborers, didn’t buy every nail and
brick. Rather, they farmed out the construction to subcontractors, some of
whom, if not policed, could wreak havoc on Washington Homes by, say,
finishing work late.
You can’t do plumbing and the electrical wiring, normally, if the walls
aren’t up yet. You’ve got to keep your invisible assembly line moving. The
sixty phases on Bowie’s “House budget summary” started with items like
“Engineering” and “Water Sewer Charge,” continued through “Brick
Veneer” and “Siding” and went on to such details as “Fences” and “Trash
Removal.” If Bowie was late in submitting bids or getting what he paid for,
it wasn’t a bureaucratic abstraction. It meant a late house, an unhappy
customer, perhaps, and above all, more interest to pay the bank on
Washington Homes’ construction loans.
Bowie, moreover, had to keep track of his customer’s own financing
arrangements. The company’s houses sold for anywhere from $55,000 to
$135,000, but most customers were first timers who had never before
wended their ways through the mortgage maze. Bowie could reduce his

company’s carrying charges if he didn’t rush homes to completion before
the customers were ready for them.
“We don’t make any money until we deliver the house,” he said, “so we
need to keep track of the time between when people contract and make
application with a lender and how long it takes for them to win loan
approval.
“When our company had ninety or a hundred houses and was
backlogged, it was fairly easy to do manually. But now we have almost five
hundred houses in our backlog.”
Shopping around for a system to handle all those grubby details, Bowie
found that computer stores didn’t treat their first-time buyers as well as he
wanted to treat his. “I looked at computers for a year,” he said, “and the
biggest thing I found was the condescending attitude of the people in the
sales centers to someone who knows nothing about it.
“I’d walk into a store and give them a written list of my requirements,
and the first thing they’d tell me was ‘Your requirements are wrong.’ And
that was the case until I got to Clinton Computers.”
Bowie showed Sue Grothoff, the sales rep, his sixty-phase budget sheet
—a basic common-sense rule of software and hardware shopping. If you’re
working with documents, at least nonconfidential ones, then show them! Do
so to a store. Do so to a consultant if you have one. Explain as clearly as
you can just what kind of paperwork you’re computerizing. Here,
incidentally, you can’t compare Bowie and Boland in an apple-to-apple
way. Accounting programs can be much trickier than data bases and
spreadsheets, especially for companies with unusual circumstances like
Boland’s—that is, all those subsidiaries in a small-to-medium business. It’s
clear, though, that whatever happened, Grothoff and Bowie communicated
much better than she and Boland.
“At this point,” said Bowie, “I was only interested in loan processing and
budgets, and the main thing I was interested in was budgets.”
He thought he needed above all an electronic spreadsheet. Here, however,
for once, a computer sales rep knew his needs better than he did. Grothoff
persuaded him that most of all he needed a data-base program—one that
would help him track loans on hundreds of houses. It would store
information and rearrange it in patterns he needed. He might not want full
copies of all loan-processing reports, for example. Instead, he might want
just the names of the home buyers, say, or just the foundation costs of each

house. Or he might want the program to tote up all the foundation costs or
perform other arithmetic, including complicated multiplication and division
or calculation of ratios and percentages. And with a program like dBASE II
that’s possible. Like many of its rivals, it will do some complex
calculations, not just shuffle facts around. There are many books on dBASE
II—yet another advantage and indication of its popularity. (Two good
choices are dBASE II User’s Guide by Adam B. Green and Everyman’s
Database Primer featuring dBASE II by Robert Byers.)
Here are some ways in which dBASE II might organize your records if
you’re an executive like Bowie:
1. The CREATE command lets you begin a file.
2. A file in a data base is the electronic version of a file drawer or cabinet.
It’s just the space on the disks holding records—say, the house-budget
summaries for your homes.
3. A field is a category of fact like the amount of money spent on each air-
conditioning system for each house.
4. Structure is simply the way a record is set up. There are three big
considerations—the field names, the field width, and the field type.
The field name is simply a field’s title. The field width is the number of
spaces required for the information in each field. The field type can be
one of these categories:
a. A numeric field—just numbers
b. A character field or alphanumeric field—numbers, letters, question
marks, miscellaneous symbols like “@,” or spaces between letters or
numbers
c. A logical field—one with just two choices, like “Y” for “Yes” and
“N” for “No”
5. The EDIT command changes the contents of a data field. You can type in
modifications after putting your cursor in the right place.
6. A command to APPEND can add new records to your electronic filing
cabinet.
7. Sorting lets you reshuffle records alphabetically, by date or other ways,
just as you would index cards.
8. The LIST command tells dBASE II to flash across the screen the records
that you specify.
9. .AND. helps you narrow down the information you’re looking for or
changing. Consider this hypothetical example: LIST FOR SALE:PERSN

= ‘BABBITT’ .AND. LOAN:AMT = ‘$70,000’ would guide you to all
houses that a sales rep named Babbitt sold to a customer borrowing
exactly $70,000.
10. .OR. is another way to describe the desired facts. LIST FOR
SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ .OR. LOAN:AMT = ‘$70,000’ would
indicate you wanted to see records involving either Babbitt or a loan of
$70,000.
11. LIST FOR .NOT. SALE:PERSN = ‘BABBITT’ could help weed from
view, or the files, all records involving Babbitt.
12. Command files are programs that tell the machine how to manipulate
the data so you needn’t repeat complicated procedures one by one. You
might work out these files to simplify your secretary’s work—or he or
she might do the same for you.

Bowie and Grimes mastered dBASE II basics in eight hours of classes at
Clinton Computer. “dBASE II was real easy,” he said. “The manual is in
plain English. Even without all our records in the computer now, it saves
me and Julie probably five or six hours a week. We were doing it manually
before, and we’re on the verge of saving other people in the company lots
of time with the loan processing by using dBASE II. I think we’d have to
say with five hundred houses in our backlog there is the potential for this to
save us $50,000 a year in carrying charges that may have accrued under the
old system of keeping loan-processing records.
“We are going to buy another machine,” Bowie said, “for the Northern
Division.”
The potential $50,000 annual savings from the two machines, by the way,
would include just reductions in carrying charges—not in executive time or
tasks besides loan processing. Consider the economies that would result
simply from less paperwork.
“When we first set up the computer,” Bowie said, “we set it up exactly
like we were doing things manually. As a division manager, I’m in charge
of marketing and production. And earlier we had (1) marketing reports, (2)
production reports, and (3) reports combining highlights of each for me to
determine whether to start houses and things like that. But now all three
categories appear on one loan-processing form.”
dBASE II (or the new dBASE III) may not work for you. But for Bowie
it was a dream program through which he could store and retrieve records

quickly and conveniently for any one of many purposes. He might set up
his records mainly for loan processing. But the “SALE:PERSN” field,
combined with the “SALE:PRICE” one, could tell him which outside sales
reps were selling the most expensive homes. In other words, the loan-
processing data base was one good way to keep track of the salesmen
catering most successfully to the $135,000 buyers. For who cared what
Bowie called his data base—“Loan Processing” or “Sales”? The point is, he
could follow the salesmen’s performance, too, through cross-references
between fields. dBASE II was a treasure trove of information about trends,
sales, or otherwise.
“The problem,” said Bowie, “is that dBASE II would work fine with my
budget summaries for my houses, except they require sixty fields and
dBASE II is limited to thirty-two. So Sue suggested the Multiplan
spreadsheet program. Multiplan is easy to use, even easier than dBASE II.
Julie got started with Multiplan with just fifteen minutes of instruction.”
Multiplan works on the same idea as the better-known VisiCalc program,
which, like WordStar, has sold hundreds and hundreds of thousands of
copies.
The true origins of these spreadsheets go back to 1978. A Harvard MBA
student disliked the tedium of using a calculator to tote up columns and
rows of interrelated numbers; it was boring even with a pocket calculator. A
change in just one number could throw off dozens of other entries, so
imagine the brain-numbing effect of making an error and then having to
recalculate an entire spreadsheet. Why not write a computer program to
alter all the other variables if one changed?
And so was born the electronic spreadsheet; it and word processing are
the single most popular uses of microcomputers—the real justifications for
their existence. A VisiCalc-type spreadsheet can add, subtract, multiply,
average, do partial sums, find minimums, maximums, simplify your life in a
number of ways.
A description of VisiCalc in CPA Micro Report ticks off an awesome
number of applications: “sales forecasts, profit and loss statements, rate-of-
return calculations, project scheduling, tax calculation, pricing strategies,
financial planning, loan amortization, league standings and report
generation.” An electronic spreadsheet can help do your checkbook; or it
can assist in the preparation of a small country’s budget—which, in fact,
has happened.

Some even say that spreadsheets are contributing to the paperwork
deluging American business. VisiCalc coauthor Dan Bricklin disagrees. “A
lot of calculations,” he said of the pre-VisiCalc days, “were being done on
the backs of envelopes or corners of envelopes or the corners of
newspapers. VisiCalc isn’t causing people to produce more numbers and
reports. Those numbers were always there, but they weren’t always being
identified.”[28]
“Multiplan is incredible,” Bowie said of his VisiCalc-style software. “I
have generated budgets to see if they’ll do all I want them to, to consider all
the what ifs.
“And it’s a big help in scheduling production. We have a factory
producing cabinets for our homes, and our scheduling system is critical,
since at most it can produce cabinets for only fifteen units a week.” The
cabinet plant manager, caught between the demands of Washington Homes’
northern and southern divisions, had scheduled production according to his
own whims.
“It was costing us a lot of money in missed settlements,” said Bowie,
“and cabinets were not delivered, or they were the wrong color and size.”
He was talking in late February, telling how, the other day, he had loaded in
thirty-five more cabinet orders and instantly learned “we were out to April
15 on cabinet deliveries. That’s the soonest we could get them based on the
plant’s production capabilities. I’m meeting with the manager this morning
to see if in the future he can up his output. I’ve found that everybody’s got
to live with lead times. Everybody’s got to give us the right lead time on
orders, which means we are now ordering cabinets for delivery at the end of
April and May, where we generally in the past would not have ordered May
delivery until April. If I miss five house deliveries in a month because of
cabinets not being there on time, then that’s ,000 to $5,000 in carrying
charges over the next three to five months.”
Similarly, Multiplan was probably saving Bowie several thousand dollars
more over the same period by “identifying houses not started because
building permits have not been issued. And it will help identify the reasons
why they haven’t been.
“To get a building permit, all sorts of things must fall into place. And
now we can look at any particular job at any particular time, and if we see it
isn’t started, find out why the permit hasn’t been issued.

“We can determine if we’re waiting for site plans or a plumbing permit or
electrical permit or whatever it happened to be and instantly target and
solve that problem.
“Before, the record keeping was ‘Go get a permit. Have you got it yet?’
There were no details, no backup. We relied on our field people to get the
permits, and they would get the permits in a way that was timely for them
and their production schemes but not in a way that was timely for us in
bottom-line deliveries. So we are now able to target all the permit process
and make it happen at our rate.” Not only was Bowie using Multiplan as a
spreadsheet to plug in all the what ifs; he was also using it as a data base,
even if it wasn’t as nimble in manipulating nonnumeric data as dBASE II
could be.
Whatever chore Bowie was using Multiplan for, he loved the “Help”
screens. He could turn them on to guide himself through the commands he
wasn’t familiar with; besides, all of Multiplan’s basic commands were
normally at the bottom of the screen, anyway.
Multiplan, by the time you’re reading this, may not be the best
spreadsheet on the market, at least not for you. But at one point CPA Micro
Report was pronouncing it the “new Empress of Spreadsheets” for
accountants using a wide range of computers. Multiplan even worked with
VisiCalc files so that users of the older program could easily convert.
“Multiplan,” said Micro Report, “... can sort a line-by-line record of
events by account number or name—a frequent requirement in CPA
applications.” Keepers of expense accounts, presumably, could cherish such
a capability. Also, Multiplan, as the newsletter pointed out, lets you name
your variables; you could refer more easily to the cells or the exact
locations in the columns and rows. Instead of saying cells “A26” or “R38P,”
you could refer to “Sales” and “Total Costs.”
With programs like Multiplan, software designers are more successfully
catering to the needs of businesspeople who want computers to adjust to
them rather than the other way around. That’s how it should be. Bowie is a
construction executive, not a computer expert, and Boland’s an accountant
rather than a hacker.
Bowie, however, plainly seemed more willing to live with the
complexities of existing software. Many in his place would have used a
consultant—and wisely, I think, for Washington Homes was a multimillion-
dollar operation—yet Bowie had the background and patience to

computerize just with guidance from a store. He might not have been a
computer expert. But he loved the new. He loved complexity if he could
logically unravel it. He didn’t mind mistakes. He felt in control because he
had backups on disk and on paper. The manuals didn’t scare him. Instead of
soaking up every word there, Bowie, like Seymour Rubinstein, had a gift
for knowing which page to flip to if he had trouble. Bowie was a born
micro user. However serious about his job, he might as well have been a
child relaxing after school with a few rounds of Pac-Man. He loved seeing
instant cause-and-effect relationships. He took as much delight in learning
where his division could be six months hence as a child might take in
winning an arcade game. He considered his computer “the greatest therapy
in the world,” an opportunity to “sit down and feel really good” in “a fairly
high tension business.”
Edward Boland, too, however, in a different, more structured way, was
curious about numbers and life, and in the end, I suspect, the two men’s
learning styles didn’t entirely explain their opinions of their programs.
Bolands’ general-ledger software just wasn’t right for his needs. It
straitjacketed him. Bowie’s programs, on the other hand, helped him do just
about anything he wanted.
“Anything,” incidentally, included advancing his career. When I next
caught up with him, in May 1984, he was president of another construction
firm and owned one-third of that company and was taking home a paycheck
thirty-five percent bigger. Bowie said his computer skills “had a great deal
to do with it. I had management tools that not very many other people had.”

Alan Scharf: Integrated Program, Including Graphics

Alan Scharf, a forty-three-year-old New York executive, also has a nice
touch with software—a good-enough one, in fact, to have helped win him a
job at a blue-chip firm at triple his old salary.
“It’s done wonders for my earning power,” he said from his offices at
Merrill Lynch Leasing, Inc., where he was a $75,000-a-year assistant vice-
president. “I got this job because I walked in and told them I could do a
better job on an Apple.
“I didn’t own one at home at the time. But you can be sure that I bought
one promptly and boned up on it for the next three weeks, and of course I’d
done a lot of research on the Apple before then to make sure I could deliver
on my promise.
“My previous company had refused to let me get one to improve
operations there and do estate taxes. I had to do them by hand on a
calculator. It took hours per client. And I got mad. Most people my age are
afraid of computers, but I’d worked with word processors. And what are
word processors but another kind of computer?”
So Scharf left his job as an estate tax planner with a staid old brokerage
firm and set up shop at Merrill Lynch’s division dealing with real estate and
equipment leasing.
It was a VisiCalc devotee’s dream job, one calling for quick, repetitive,
accurate math in deals as big as $150 million. Merrill Lynch Leasing made
bids to companies hungry for better cash flow. The leasing company (and
rivals) offered to buy their headquarters buildings or other real estate,
freeing the money for bigger factories or research and development. It was
a series of leaseback arrangements. Merrill Lynch organized syndicates for
the ultimate buyers—people or companies eager for tax shelters. And that
meant more than a little numbers crunching.
Imagine the variables. The deals had to be sexy enough to the selling
companies for Merrill Lynch to win the bids. At the same time, the tax
shelters couldn’t leak. The deals must provide the buyers with the write-offs
that the prospectuses from the leasing company promised. Ideally, too, they
would yield maximum tax advantages on minimum investments. And for

investments of different sizes and at different tax rates, just what would the
various benefits be?
When Scharf reported for work, he found that the real estate department
of the leasing company was on the verge of spending $200,000 a year
tapping into an outside firm’s computer to come up with the right numbers.
The big machine would have been able to do simple debt-amortization
calculations. Scharf could have told a company, for instance, how long it
would take to pay off a mortgage on a building for which Merrill Lynch
proposed a leaseback. But that was only a small part of what the job
needed. And what about the costs?
So Scharf instead used an Apple system costing less than $7,000, a one-
time investment. The Apple couldn’t do all the calculations needed, but it
could actually outperform the time-sharing system in some ways.
Consider simultaneous equations. The software on big machines—at
least by way of the terminals at Merrill Lynch Leasing—just didn’t include
them. But the Apple could simulate this capability. With the VisiCalc
spreadsheet it could juggle around dozens of interrelated statistics, using
nightmarishly elaborate algebra with Catch-22-like mathematical spirals. In
other words, you wanted to know the value of x, and it depended on the
value of y and z, and you couldn’t solve for y until you solved z, and you
couldn’t solve for z until you knew x. That’s how it worked, except, quite
possibly, Scharf and his staff would be wrestling with, say, a through k
instead of just x through z.
Struggling with these Catch-22s, the Apple was a slowpoke by computer
standards. It still took half an hour. That might seem like the Indy 500 to
someone accustomed to hand calculations. But Scharf must have felt the
same way I did about inferior word-processing software. However faster
than without a computer, it still limited your possibilities. You didn’t have
as much time to experiment with all your choices. And the more time
Scharf had, the more closely he could consider all the variables and the
more attractive could be Merrill Lynch’s leaseback bids. The Apple did its
job. “We used it to compete successfully for work with a number of well-
known clients,” Scharf said. “Anheuser Busch—we did their office building
in St. Louis. We worked with Beneficial Corporation. We’ve done a number
of K mart stores.”
Scharf, never smug, still tinkered with the Apple and its software. An
observant computer dealer noticed he would keep asking for larger RAM

boards to allow him to do bigger, fancier spreadsheets.
And so it was that the dealer nominated Scharf a tester for Lotus 1-2-3 in
late summer 1982. 1-2-3 was the new integrated software from Lotus
Development Corporation, a Massachusetts firm started by a former rock
disk jockey rich with $500,000 in royalties from programs sold to the
makers of VisiCalc.
1-2-3 combined a spreadsheet, graphics, and data base. You could, for
instance, pump figures from the spreadsheet program directly into the data
base with a few simple keystrokes. You didn’t have to go through unwieldy
computer rigamarole to transfer facts from one kind of electronic file to
another. More important, however, Lotus, at least for Scharf’s use, was a
more powerful numbers cruncher than the VisiCalc he ran on his Apple.
Lotus was for the 16-bit IBM PC. Sixteen-bit machines were speed demons
for numbers crunchers, especially with powerful programs like 1-2-3. An
Apple-VisiCalc duo handled worksheets with 254 rows and about 65
columns. But an IBM and 1-2-3 duo could take on 2,048 rows and 256
columns.
Scharf’s first test version of 1-2-3 cracked simultaneous equations in four
minutes, one-tenth the time that the Apple-VisiCalc combination took.
Income and cash-flow statements came out calculated to the nearest penny.

■ ■ ■

Alan Scharf’s Tips on Choosing the Right Spreadsheet
Not every spreadsheet user has needs as complex as those of
Alan Scharf, a whiz with Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony, but here are
traits he says you might look for:
1. A large number of rows and columns. A spreadsheet of 254 rows
and 65 columns doesn’t mean you can work with 254 rows and 65
columns containing a total of 16,510 cells. The actual number of
cells—the number of columns multiplied by rows—will be only
about a thousand. A 640K-RAM machine and an elaborate
spreadsheet would be much more appropriate for budget planners
in a large corporation with many products and divisions.
2. Speed. “Even with a simple spreadsheet,” says Scharf, “someone
might get annoyed if it seemed to drag.” In late 1984 his complex

calculations on an IBM PC were taking as much as four and one-
half minutes. And he said: “There are times when I just need the
answers faster.” The powerful IBM AT could run the present
version of Lotus 1-2-3 twice as fast. However, he was still looking
forward to the day when a version of Lotus 1-2-3 for the AT would
require even less time and address the full 3 megabytes of
memory (aided by a new operating system). Consult micro
magazines for the latest speed comparisons.
3. General simplicity and ease of use. In tricky places, does the
program offer “help” messages in plain English to guide you
through various procedures if you want? Ease of use will increase
as computer memories grow larger and leave more room for “help”
features.
4. Range of commands. Most spreadsheets nowadays let you easily
move or copy numbers. But there are less common but very useful
commands. Symphony, for instance, lets you flush out formulas
behind calculated cells so you can regain available memory space.
5. The ability to do what-if tables. The best spreadsheets won’t just
tell you what your profits would be if your costs increased by x
amount. They’ll also let you calculate for a whole range of numbers
around x, automatically creating a table.
6. Easy consolidation of figures from different spreadsheets. That’s
no small matter if you’re trying to come up with a profit and loss
statement for a twenty-division company. Lotus 1-2-3, unlike some
rivals, lets you consolidate an unlimited number of divisions.
7. Natural order of recalculation. Cells must influence the numbers
in other cells in a precise sequence if some calculations are to be
accurate. Natural order of recalculation helps you automatically
control that sequence.
8. A useful macro language. Macros are combinations of
commands that 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.

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]

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.
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:

1. Deciding whether to hire a computer consultant. How much in your time
and your people’s will it cost not to have one?

2. Hiring and using a consultant. It isn’t just a matter of asking, “Who?”
Ask, too, “Who cares?” Who cares about a consultant’s two decades with
IBM? What counts is how much he can do for you. Is the IBM experience
relevant?
3. Training employees. Don’t clutter your people’s minds with computerese
not related to their jobs. Use the five Ws and the H to strip the training to
the basics—which, by the way, almost surely won’t include BASIC.
4. Working with your company’s data-processing people. Know which
questions to ask to find out the computer crew’s true attitudes about
micros. And come up with the right answers of your own if the
mainframers feel threatened by your interest in do-it-yourself computing.
Good data-processing people, however, won’t be frightened—quite the
reverse.
The scary aspect of Frank Stewart’s consultant fiascoes is that he and his
people were hardly lost amid high tech.
“Some of us were inventors,” Stewart said, and his vice-president, Bob
Hillard, even had a smattering of the FORTRAN programming language.
Stewart’s firm didn’t rush blindly into computerization. Originally, it had
been hand culling articles from 140 periodicals and 16 major daily
newspapers. “We sat down,” Hillard recalled, “and worked out a
mathematical formula to give weight to a particular article by mention of
certain words, certain individuals, certain companies.” Existing data bases
like The Source and Dialog just wouldn’t do. You couldn’t easily use them
to search out the political patterns affecting the fortunes of Stewart’s clients.
Stewart spent $31,000 on a computer and soon was suffering defective
circuits and junky software. He paid a secretary to cram almost a million
words of newspaper articles into the machine’s hard-disk memory, but it
still couldn’t fetch facts as easily as he’d hoped. Then the data-base
program, the one he was using to store facts and juggle them around,
crashed—apparently overwhelmed by the volume of data. Micro data bases
at the time, the early 1980s, couldn’t easily handle big hunks of text.
Stewart couldn’t retrieve whole articles.
It was time for a consultant. A good consultant (the “Who”) theoretically
could write or install a new program (the “What”) in an effective way (the
“How”), justify his actions (the “Why”), and ideally do everything at a
reasonable price (the “How much”) before the data base grew too unwieldy

(the “When”). Stewart wanted him working on his own premises (the
“Where”) as much as possible so he could supervise him.
“Our first consultant lasted all of four days,” Stewart said. “He was
abrasive, nasty, and didn’t know what he was doing. One of our staffers was
so frustrated trying to work with him that she wept. We’d hired him because
he was a friend of a friend and said, ‘I’m a computer programmer. I can fix
it for you.’ We never quite could pin him down about his background. We
were so burned that for five or six months we put off hiring another
consultant.
“And when we did get one,” said Stewart, “we wanted a solid,
established firm.”
So he went to a government contractor headquartered in an imposing
building, the size of a small public library. The consultants even owned the
same-model computer that Stewart’s company did.
Unfortunately, however, they were using different software for much
different purposes. Stewart’s needs were new to them.
“Look at MDBS,” Hillard recalls telling the contractor. “It really looks
like a good package.”
But he says the consultants told him they hadn’t even heard of it.
That in itself might have been a tipoff that Stewart had hired the wrong
people for the job. MDBS stood for Micro Data Base Systems. Ads and
reviews about it had appeared in Byte and other prominent publications of
the micro world.
With the clock ticking away at up to $35 an hour, the consultants
searched for data-base software meeting Stewart’s detailed specifications.
“Three weeks later,” Hillard said, “they handed me a bill for $2,500 and
said, ‘The package you need to use is MDBS.’ I said, ‘Where is the work,
where are the hours in relationship to the $2,500 bill?’ It went around in
circles.” Stewart and Hillard must have remembered the old saying that a
consultant borrows your watch to tell you the time of day and then charges
you for it.
According to Stewart, in fact, the consultants based most of the report on
material his company had given them.
By think-tank standards in his area, Stewart may have gotten a bargain.
Dealing with consultants new to micro data bases, however, he was in effect
paying their tuition.

“The federal government must like them immensely,” Stewart said,
“because they do good, documented work in the fields they have expertise
in. But a small businessman had no business using them. After two and one-
half months we had nothing but recommendations on the data base—and a
stack of bills”—$2,500 high.
But there was hope. Stewart’s corporate benefactors were sticking with
him. If he could get his data base running, he could easily recoup his losses,
offering clients a treasure trove of information about government policy-
making affecting them. Although Stewart thought of himself as a truth
seeker, his vice-president was bluntly a money man. “We would have sold
our service for a million a year,” Hillard said, “and we would have netted
$600,000. We were using four people to feed the articles into the computer,
but that would have changed, because optical readers eventually could scan
magazine articles and newsprint.”
So now Hillard shopped around for a new savior to unravel the
complexities of the MDBS software that he had settled on.
He found three possibilities. One consultant, a micro expert, was snowed
under with work, and another man had only mainframe experience. So
Hillard and Stewart chose Fred Brown, a retired military officer who had
worked not only on big computers but also little Radio Shacks and
TeleVideos. In fact, Brown came recommended by the manager of a local
computer store. The manager leveled with Stewart. He said he and Brown
were together in a partnership developing software for lawyers’ offices.
Hillard asked only two people about Brown. And both references came
from the computer-store manager with the business relationship with the
consultant. Inquiring about Brown, however, Hillard asked some good
questions. Did Brown document the software properly? Did he, in other
words, tell how to use or change it? Did his software work? Did he meet
deadlines? Did he live up to all the specifications in his contracts? “I got
affirmative answers to most of these questions,” Hillard said. One reference
said a software project of Brown’s hadn’t come in on time but brushed off
the problem as a hardware one.
Unfortunately, Hillard didn’t ask all the right questions. Brown had never
before worked with the brand of computer that Stewart Research was using;
nor was he fully comfortable at the time with the exact kind of software
used at the company.

Brown, however, struck Hillard as “a very nice professional.” He wore
three-piece suits, lived in a $140,000 home with several computers in the
basement, and held a masters degree from an Ivy League school.
“No problem,” Brown told Hillard. “Listen, I charge——” He gave an
hourly figure to the nearest cent; $30.02, we’ll say.
“What?” asked Hillard. “Why 0.02 an hour?”
“I like to be fair about my salary, and that gives me $30,000 a year.”
“Okay,” said Hillard, “that’s cute.”
Brown wasn’t about to apply for welfare. On top of the $30,000 for
consulting part of the time, he was enjoying income from sales of computer
hardware. In short, he came across as successful and honest. And he may
have been. Just the same, client and consultant were clearly mismatched.
Their downfall was a familiar kind—software problems.
You could customize the MDBS program in FORTRAN or BASIC. The
earlier consultants, the ones with the large government contractor, had
suggested FORTRAN. Brown himself was more familiar with that than
with BASIC. And Stewart was convinced that FORTRAN would make the
best use of software already purchased. So Brown went ahead with it
despite three strikes against him:

1. The computer company’s FORTRAN, according to Stewart, was as badly
botched as its hardware.
2. FORTRAN wasn’t as good as BASIC for micro data bases that stashed
away English prose rather than mainly numbers. Another consultant was
amazed when I told him that Brown had used FORTRAN in a data base
storing newspaper stories. “You can use it if you like,” he said, “but
you’ll lose something. It’s like trying to translate Hemingway into pidgin
English.”
3. Brown was still basically a mainframer. And micro FORTRAN was
different from the kind used at large military installations. Writing
software for micros is like writing short stories instead of novels. You’ve
got to be more elegant and get to the point faster. A micro’s memory
simply lacks the capacity of a mainframe and brooks less sloppiness than
would a larger machine. Many great novelists could never write decent
short stories, and many first-class mainframers just couldn’t code cleverly
or deviously enough for micros—couldn’t electronically trick them into
thinking they were larger machines.

“What happened,” said Hillard, “is that we were paying for Brown’s
training on how to use FORTRAN on a micro. He spent forty or fifty hours
developing specifications for the data base and writing the code. This went
on and on. Brown kept running into all these problems, and he could have
cleared up some with just a quick call to the manufacturer.” Meanwhile, the
money clock was ticking.
Several months later, thousands of dollars richer from those $30.02-
hours, Brown threw up his hands. “This isn’t going to work in FORTRAN
at all,” he said. “Maybe we should do this in BASIC.”
“So,” Hillard told me, “all the work he’d done up to that point was out
the window.”
“And on top of that,” Stewart said, “we were anticipating our new
software package and didn’t care to feed the information twice into the
computer. So we built up a backlog of well over 10,000 articles waiting for
the software that never came.”
Brown’s clock ticked away for several thousand dollars more in time,
bringing the total billing to $8,630.81. Then it stopped. Stewart Research
had simply run out of money.
Stewart’s corporate sponsor could send no more. “Their pockets,” he
said, “just weren’t deep enough to subsidize both our own computer literacy
and that of our consultants.” When I talked to Stewart in mid-1983, his
computer was doing word processing and other minor chores. “But,” he
said, “it does hardly enough cross-referencing to be a major data bank.” His
research firm faced some $30,000 in debts, including much of the $2,500
bill from the consultants with the library-sized building; and he and his wife
were the only two employees left in Stewart R & D. He still hoped to get
the data base going, however. “We’re going to become computer
consultants in self-defense,” said Stewart. “I’ve done nothing but work on
this computer for a year.” It would be nice to be able to do the same, but
most of us lack the time or talent; the challenge is to find the right computer
consultant so you won’t end up feeling you must do the work on your own.
Not so coincidentally, Hillard himself actually did go on to become a
computer consultant part time. He wasn’t the smartest or the best
credentialed, but he had what many of the more established consultants
lacked—empathy and humility. Don’t shrug off those traits. The real
question, as one consultant pointed out to me, isn’t just whether someone is

competent; it’s whether he’s competent enough at the job he’s doing for
you. Never forget that when pondering the “Who?” and “What?”
Stewart and Hillard obviously aren’t the only people who didn’t ask the
right questions in time. A sail maker wasted $18,000 on a computer system
recommended by a consultant. The machine didn’t work right with the
hard-disk memory, and it lacked proper shielding against the 60-cycle hum
given off by power lines. By the time Hillard was on the scene, the
consultant had left town. He says the computer was such a disaster that “I
suggested to the client that he get a length of rope and use it as an anchor
because it was unfixable.” In another case, a truck-rental firm spent $30,000
for $15,000 of computer equipment. And then the consultant didn’t even
supply instructions to operate and modify the software. “As far as I know,”
said a more ethical expert, “he’s still a consultant. Computers are mystical,
and most people don’t know when they’ve got a good system or when
they’ve got a bad one.”
“The real problem,” Hillard correctly said of consultants, “is that the
microcomputer field has only been around since the mid-seventies and
things are moving so rapidly. It’s hard for anyone to keep up, consultant or
layman.”
There is, too, a nasty economic fact. A micro consultant can’t reach full
prosperity, in many instances, without having ties with stores or
manufacturers. Indeed, most micro consulting nowadays is done in effect by
sales reps recommending systems to their customers. How objective can
they be? Even conscientious consultants—independent or those with ties—
may still favor the computers and software with which they’re most
familiar. The man and the machine in effect become one package.
Another anticonsultant argument is that small computers may soon be
inexpensive and simple enough to make consultants much less necessary.
You don’t use a consultant to buy a $1,000 typewriter. And by the time you
read this, or a few years afterward, we’ll have good, complete word
processors selling for no more—with printers.
Yet another anticonsultant argument is that you may have computer-wise
friends in your own business or profession, smart people you trust. They
may actually anticipate some of your needs better than would a consultant.
Moreover, it’s been said that if you know enough to pick the right
consultant, then you really don’t need one.

I’m not sure. As one consultant pointed out, it’s like choosing doctors.
You can be good at choosing one without necessarily knowing brain
surgery.
I was a borderline case. I still might have bought a Kaypro without
Michael Canyes’s approval, since I knew another writer familiar with the
glories of the Osborne who appreciated the greater glories of the Kaypro.
On the other hand, with my consultant friend’s guidance, I could shop for
the lowest price rather than the most technical help from the dealer. And
Michael steered me away from the dot-matrix printer, which, with their
inferior print quality at the time, would have been bad news for me. I was
lucky. I had befriended Michael through an Osborne user group at a time
when he himself was looking for advice on writing, so he didn’t even
charge me. You may be similarly lucky if you have a skill a computer
consultant needs. But don’t count on it. So often, free consultants are worth
their charges.
Had I not been as fortunate and had I experienced difficulties, I would
have been willing to pay for advice. And mind you, my whole system costs
less than $3,000. “You don’t want to spend $10,000 on a computer system,”
Michael warns, “and find it doesn’t do what you want. You’d be better off
spending several hundred dollars or more to learn exactly what you want
and get some help installing it. Think of the business you’ll lose if you
install your computer and it doesn’t work as planned. It depends. You could
also spend a lot of time shopping and talking to people and not pay a
consultant. It depends what your time is worth. The average guy has one or
two uses for his computer in mind, and he doesn’t want to piddle around
with the complexities of the thing. He just wants to cut right down to the
core of it and get this job moving. If a consultant spends two or three hours
with someone discussing a micro, it may cost perhaps $75 or $100. But the
client might master in a day what might normally take a week or even
several.” The wrong consultant, however, may actually cost you more—in
money and time.
When shopping around for the right one, you’ll first want to consider a
what—what work you need him for. Forget about computers. Does the task
make sense commercially? Are you realistic about its costs? A former New
England consultant tells of a baseball enthusiast who wanted to recreate
some board games on the computer screen. It might have worked. But the
man didn’t just want a computerized arcade game here—rather, a

replication of ball parks, with their actual proportions. “He had a statistical
background,” recalled the ex-consultant, “and had done some statistical
consulting for a professional sports organization.” But there was a problem.
The man believed that the consultant could perform this miracle on an
Apple for less than $5,000. Actually, the program would have cost $50,000
to write—probably more than the man could quickly recoup through sales
of the program. The consultant turned down this mission impossible. But
the client let his enthusiasm for the project blot out his business sense and
in fact squandered $55,000 on another consultant, who, incidentally,
botched the job.
Now move on to the details of the work you want done. Do as with
software; get as clear an idea as you can of the paperwork you’re
computerizing. You may want your electronic files organized entirely
differently from your paper ones. Whatever the case, plan ahead. You don’t
want to—as somebody once put it—automate your confusion. And there’s
another reason for knowing your precise needs before calling a consultant.
Trying to jack up the bill, some experts can be brilliant at inventing new
problems to fit their prepackaged solutions. Or they may downplay your
real needs because the answers are not in their tool kits.
You’ll also want to decide if the consultant is just to give advice or more.
Don’t pay simply for advice, then expect him to haggle with equipment
suppliers and install the software.
And what about other services besides advice? Take the task of keying
paper records into your computer system; some consulting firms will line
up temporaries for the job. That way your normal people must worry only
about their regular work and learning the new computerized routine. Of
course, this data-entry work may itself be part of the training, and at least
if your people enter the material, they’ll more easily find it later on.
As you define the what, you also get into a when—your deadline for
computerization and how long the consultant or the firm is to remain on the
job. There is a happy medium. You want him around long enough, full time
or part time, to get the system up and running. But don’t count on making
him in effect an employee. Hire permanent people if that’s going to happen.
Joseph Auer, a $1,500-a-day computer-negotiations expert with blue-chip
clients like New York Life, tells what can happen when consultants stay too
long. A bank used a consulting firm for years. The outsiders became the
main people familiar with the electronic links between the automatic teller

machines and the big computer. Then the bank woke up. It realized that the
outsiders could cripple its operation. The consultants didn’t blackmail the
bank, but it was worried enough not to risk incurring their displeasure.
Rather than farming out the work to a facilities management firm as
planned, it extended the existing consultants’ contract, with the
understanding that the outsiders would make the bank’s own people self-
sufficient.
Next go on to the who question. A generalist who’s a good, quick learner
might be a better deal for you than an overpriced guru who limits himself to
one area. It’s like medicine. I’d much rather be cut up by a smart general
surgeon with a steady hand than by a mediocre cancer specialist. Of course,
for a complex job, you want the equivalent of a top cancer surgeon. At
Stewart, anyway, the right specialist might have “programmed” the
company to succeed.
Intertwined with the who are two how muches—the size of your company
and the task for which you need the consultant. Are you a small
businessman or a Fortune 500 executive? The consulting needs of the two
categories may overlap. The general rule, however, is that a large company
will feel more comfortable with a large consulting firm (GM, say, with
Arthur D. Little) and a small company will be better off with a small one. A
small businessman may enjoy more personal attention from a small
consultant. He knows the people he’s dealing with, and it’s harder for the
firm to pass the work on to a green employee—while charging the full
price. The smallness of the firm, of course, makes it that much more
important to check out references. Of course, sometimes the small guy may
fit the large company’s bill; Michael Canyes, for instance, has tutored
WordStar classes for the Federal Trade Commission—a good buy for the
taxpayers, considering his skill and low overhead. “The smaller consulting
firms,” he wisely says, “are likely to save a large business money when the
consultants are working within their limitations.”
Canyes, however, at the time I wrote this chapter, wasn’t the consultant to
install a $5 million micro network. He might be one day, but back then he
just didn’t have the resources to do the job justice. A Big Eight accounting
firm would have been better than Michael; in fact, an executive with a large
company mightn’t need an outside consultant of any kind—large or small.
His or her employer may boast a large microcomputer center and a helpful
data-processing department. But you never know. Sometimes, Data

Processing is either ignorant of micros or discourages their use. Ask some
test questions. Has anyone in Data Processing ever installed a micro for
business purposes? Do many in the department have micros at home? Are
they reading the micro magazines and newspapers—InfoWorld, say, rather
than just magazines about the big machines? If Data Processing isn’t
comfortable with micros, you’d do well turning to the outside.
One of the qualifications for the outsider, of course, might be his ability
to work harmoniously with Data Processing if you’re hoping to hook into
the mainframe. Then again, your micro might be a stand-alone, not
exchanging information with other computers, so that you needn’t worry
what Data Processing thinks. Even if you’re using a Data-Processing staffer
or other internal person, you still may want to find out his track record.
Don’t be a corporate chauvinist. Every company has its share of gobblers.
Turning to an outside consultant? Then, through computer stores, you
might try to track down a local users group for a brand of hardware or
software. Go to a meeting. Find out whom the members regard as an ace
consultant. In fact, try to go to several user groups—remember the
preference that Apple owners, say, may have in favor of an Apple solution
or that Kaypro owners may have in favor of a Kaypro one. Mere word of
mouth, though, is still no substitute for a thorough interview with the
consultant and reference checks. Certainly, too, you can’t use a consultant
just because he or she shows up in the directory of a consultants group.
Charles E. Harris, a lawyer who, with Joseph Auer, wrote Computer
Contract Negotiations, says, “I know of no organizational membership that
proves anything other than membership and the fact that the man’s paid his
dues.”
“The person to watch out for in particular is the guy who’s doing this part
time and he works on a mainframe or something like that,” warns Mark
Robinson, a California consultant. He’s been in the micro business for years
and handles dealer relations for Lexisoft, a software company—a micro
one, mind you. “Anybody who hasn’t made this his business full time for a
significant period of time,” he said of micro consulting, “is a great risk.”
Consultants can relax. Robinson said eighteen months could be
“significant.” I myself wouldn’t shrug off the part timers from Data-
Processing departments if they have a long list of pleased micro clients. But
as a generality Robinson’s observations seem valid. Not only is micro
software written differently from the mainframe kind; there’s also a

different mentality. Cloistered away in the computer rooms, some
mainframers may strive for technical perfection at the expense of economy.
“They may be right about things,” Robinson says, “but that’s not the point.
The point may be more like what Mr. Osborne prates about all the time—
mere adequacy. I’m thinking of posting an aphorism on the wall from The
Soul of a New Machine: not everything worth doing is worth doing well.”
The same wisdom might apply to consultants. You don’t need a $1,500-a-
day man to help you choose a good micro for word processing—not unless
you’re about to buy a few hundred. Opinions vary about pay. Some
observers of consultants say you get what you pay for. “There’s very little
relationship between pay and value except for one thing,” Robinson says.
“People who don’t charge enough eventually go out of business, or that
business. If they don’t charge enough, they’re not likely to have been
around long enough to have gotten experience for you.”
Then again, as Robinson points out, experience in the microcomputer
business rapidly decays in value, weakening the relationship between pay
and competence. Back in the late 1970s Bernard McGowan, a
Massachusetts ophthalmologist, bought an Apple and hired an expert at all
of $5 an hour. His consultant was a scruffy young man in an old jacket. And
this guru had himself owned an Apple only a day. But it didn’t matter. His
name was Mitch Kapor, and he was good, apparently, for he went on to
found Lotus Development Corporation, the company that developed the
best-selling 1-2-3 integrated program. Today McGowan is still using $5-an-
hour men at times. He told me, in fact, that one consultant, a teenager
digesting software manuals for him, doubled as a baby-sitter. No, this isn’t
an argument for merciless exploitation of child labor à la nineteenth-century
England. For a small businessman with a simple task, however, and no
pressing deadlines, a teenager might do well. Why must every sixteen-year-
old be flipping hamburgers around after school at McDonald’s?
But teenage computer geniuses are special cases. Don’t count on a $5-an-
hour consultant to write up a complex accounting program that you need
done within three months to avoid bankruptcy.
Moreover, if you’re a business of any size, you might end up spending
hundreds or even thousands of dollars just to audition consultants. That’s
right; you may pay them. Canyes will talk to people by phone if he thinks
they’re good prospects, but the moment he gets in the car, the meter starts
running. That’s basically in line with what Adam Green, a software training

expert, told me. Green has conducted seminars for big-name clients like
Price Waterhouse and Xerox, and earlier he worked as a programmer and
salesman, so he’s been around. “A good consultant in my view would come
out [in many cases] and spend a day or two looking at the operation and
then give back a written proposal saying how they could help the client,”
Green said. “And then they should charge the client about $250 for that.”
“If someone comes out and spends a day or two with you and writes
something up for free, obviously they don’t have anything better to do.
They’re not working. They’re amateurs. They don’t consider their time
worth anything.” Paying a consultant to write a proposal, you’ll learn (1) if
he can communicate in comprehensible English, (2) if he can think
logically, and (3) if he understands your business and its needs.
But maybe that’s a step or so ahead of where you now are in the game.
Having found a promising candidate, make certain you feel comfortable
with him or her. Trust your instincts. Beware of snake-oil artists who,
through greed or incompetence, may actually increase your time and
expense. People like Bob Hillard and Michael Canyes come across as
teacherlike in their eagerness to pass on their wisdom to the appreciative.
But not all consultants, in and out of computers, seem that way. A few
might not even give you a written report of their findings. Many intimidate
you through jargon, even through dress. Quite correctly, some young
business school hotshots have been depicted as punks in pin-striped suits.
“You have to know what your client wears and dress one level above him,”
said an ex-Bain and Company man. “If he wears a sport coat, you wear a
suit. If you’re meeting him in a midwestern cornfield and he’s wearing a T-
shirt, you wear a button-down. You might actually drive to his office in
beige pants, a jacket, and a tie. But you can look in through the window
when you get out of your car and then take off as much as you have to.”[31]
The consultant wasn’t in the computer trade, but he might as well have
been. One industry magazine began a “So You Want to be a Consultant”
article with a warning against polyester.
“Well,” I asked Mark Robinson, “what about dress? Can you trust a
consultant in a three-piece suit more than one who looks like a refugee from
a university computer center?”
“It’s really irrelevant,” he said, “I’d look more at things like Can the guy
focus on the relevant features of my business? Does he seem to understand
what my business is about? This is one of the things that probably isn’t even

related to the number of years in micros or computers or what not.”
Robinson suggests asking yourself, “Does he quickly grasp the nature of
my relationships with my suppliers, my clients, my promotion methods? Is
he focusing on the technical solutions rather than my needs first? Does he
even consider a question like whether I need a computer at all? Does he try
to look at the highest-priority needs that I have in terms of the effect on my
bottom line? Does he really have a grasp on why I might have a computer
—to move into new things and serve my customers better, to replace
existing functions, and so on? Does he know general things like that? If he
doesn’t have that sort of perspective, if he isn’t even able to back off as to
whether I should have a computer, I may be getting a slightly different type
of salesman, someone who is committed to a computer solution, for
instance, and isn’t really looking at it from my viewpoint. He is not totally
professional.” You might still use such a person, but you’d better consider
his limitations and biases.
I asked about “pure” consultants versus those selling software or
hardware.
“Most consultants,” said Robinson, “have found that small businessmen’s
budgets for pure consulting and their appreciation of it aren’t high enough
so they make enough money. So they’ve got to sell software and hardware.
And also purity means that a consultant is spread too thin. He’s not able to
specialize and know enough about a particular package to be competent in
it. So either he has a superficial view of these packages, or else he’s a
partisan.” While working as a full-time consultant, Robinson hoped to
maintain his purity. “I found myself dealing with a lot of invoices of fairly
small amounts,” he said, “and most of my support came from contract
programming.”
What with the line so thin between salesman and consultant, you should
politely but persistently ask about business connections that could sway
their judgment.
Obviously, too, you’ll want a consultant’s résumé if he or she has one. He
should. One way or another you’re after the normal personnel-office
answers—his schooling (anything that could help him understand your
business?), his previous jobs (one computer consultant ran a nightclub once
—perhaps not such a bad background for an expert dealing with small
businesses), maybe even if he has an arrest record (a perfectly suitable
question if he’s setting up an accounting system or doing security

consulting). Be polite but aggressive. By not shying away from the basics,
you’ll be reminding him who’s in charge—the client. Don’t forget the why.
Why is he in “consulting”? It isn’t a euphemism for unemployment,
presumably. Also, why is he working with micros rather than mainframes?
Attitude matters as much as brains and skill. Ideally, your consultant will be
comfortable with the flora and fauna outside the antiseptic computer rooms.
While he’s auditioning, see if that’s true of him.
How do you tell? Introduce him to your people, not just your executives.
Encourage them to ask questions. If the consultant condescends toward a
secretary or clerk now, he may very well do so toward you later. And if he
rubs your people the wrong way, they may resent him in the future and take
it out on the computerization project.
Well, there’s a caveat here. Maybe the specs for the job are so clear-cut
that your consultant can work in a little corner away from the rest of the
world. With personal computing, that’s not going to happen as much as
with mainframes.
In winding up the interview, ask about the future. Will the consultant be
around in the future to do work or answer questions? He won’t be? You still
might use him. But police him very carefully to make certain he’s following
standardized procedures that another consultant can pick up on. You don’t
want your business to go down the tubes when your software man goes off
to find his karma atop Mt. Fuji.
Satisfied? Then move on to references—which, if you’re a small, budget-
minded business, you might want checked before a full-fledged audition.
Remember Stewart’s ordeal. Ask for the names of people whom the
consultant served in tasks similar to the proposed one. Request ten names.
The consultant needn’t have done—in each case—jobs like the proposed
one. Moreover, you often don’t have to call more than five or six
references. But with ten names, at least you’ll know you’re far from the first
client. Don’t, incidentally, phone just the references at the top of the list;
outfox the consultant in your most constructive way.
You’ll want the references to tell you the usual—what the consultant
achieved within the time agreed. Would they use him or her again? What
kind of hardware, what software, did the consultant recommend? The same
kind for clients with different needs? Be on guard if he seems to have a one-
shoe-fits-all philosophy. Also, ask about the references themselves. See if
they have any connections with the consultant, social or business.

How many consultants should you try out before signing the contract?
That’s up to your needs and your budget. There’s no law saying you have to
go through all the screening steps here in every case. Why pay $250 to a
consultant to audition when that very likely will be the cost of the whole job
(assuming you’re lucky enough to find one willing to take on a project with
such a low budget)?
For all tasks, though, even small ones, you’d do well to bother with at
least one formality—a contract with your micro consultant.

■ ■ ■

A Sample Consultant’s Contract
(Featuring Some Plain English From a
Washington Lawyer)
No, you’re not going to pay a lawyer $50 to draw up a contract
for a consultant doing a $60 modification of WordStar.
But you can help protect yourself with your own version of the
sample contract below. It’s nothing more than a letter in simple
English. William Wewer, however, the Washington lawyer who
drafted it, says it probably would be just as binding legally as a
document filled with “whereases.”
Dear ——:
This will confirm our agreement that you will perform the following [software?]
services:
[Precisely list the services in numbered paragraphs.]
You have represented to me that you can complete this project by [date]. You will
charge me $—— per hour for your consulting time. Do not exceed $—— without my
written consent.
You agree that you are performing these services as an independent consultant and
are not my employee.
If you are willing to work under the terms of this letter agreement, please sign the
enclosed copy and return it by [date].
Under your signature, use this language:
I agree to and accept the terms of this agreement to [quick description of service
provided].
———- [consultant’s name], ———- [date of signing]

Remember, this sample is just a starter. See Backup VIII,
“Consultant Contracts: Some Who-How Questions”, for a list of some
of the points a contract might address. One of the more important
ones is ownership and control of software. If you want to own the
newly developed programs and keep them away from your
competitors, here’s what Wewer might insert after the paragraph
saying the consultant isn’t your employee:
I am paying you to do this work for me alone and require that you not retain any
copies of it or give any copies to anyone else or tell anyone else how to recreate
what you have done for me. We agree that the software you create for me will be
my trade secret.
“‘Trade secret’ is a key phrase to get in there,” Wewer says.
“Then it’s within common law.”
Again, your informal contract won’t give you iron-clad protection
—that could depend on the mood of a judge—but it’s better than
nothing. “It’s the handshake deals,” Wewer says, “that always fall
apart.”

■ ■ ■

“The real problem,” Adam Green says, “is that no one ever has to sign a
contract. People get concerned. They say, ‘Boy, lawyers cost a lot,’ and I
know the feeling.” Then Green brings up an exception to that opinion,
lawyers. “I know a lot of consultants who will never work for lawyers
because as far as lawyers are concerned the job is never complete. They
understand what it means to be complete.” Their contracts reflect this;
yours should, too. Have the consultant do the first draft of the contract,
perhaps; but don’t shy away from extensive changes if need be. “Hell,”
tell him, “that’s what your word processor’s for.” Back out of the deal if
he isn’t reasonable now. He might not be later on.
When hammering out a consulting contract, you should fret over three
variables emphasized by Joe Auer:
1. “How long is it going to take?
2. “How much money does it cost?
3. “What’s the quality of the work?

“If you tie down the money and the quality and not the time,” he
warns, “you give them a license to loaf. If you tie down the quality and
time and not the money, you give them a license to steal. If you tie down
the money and time but not the quality, you give them a license to cheat.”

Training:
How to Enjoy
the Mahony Advantage

Who-How counts just as much in training your people as in the
selection of consultants:

1. Who’s teaching? Can he or she communicate well with the students, and
how adaptable to computers are the people getting the instruction?
2. What task is being taught? A very teachable one?
3. Why is the material taught? To make your people computer literate in a
broad way? Just to help them do their present jobs better?
4. When do the students learn? On their time or yours? Will you reward
them in any way for their extra effort?
5. Where is the learning happening? Ideally, your students can take the
machines home if they want—one advantage of transportables like the
IBM portable and its work-alikes.
6. How do the students learn? Through instruction manuals, mainly, or
through early experience at the keyboard? Do they suffer through
irrelevant exercises, or do they start right away on assignments similar to
their jobs? In fact, do they start immediately on their normal work, as
some training experts recommend? Do the students work with teaching
disks? And are the disks interactive, as Adam Green, the training expert,
correctly recommends? Do the disks, in other words, require you to type
in a thoughtful response?
“How much?” also figures here. Consider the cost of a good training
program versus your losses from misused or underused people. In the future
you may want an office filled with people conversant with WordStar or
dBASE, but don’t shrug off valued employees who can’t even play an Atari
game. Tutor them if need be. Bend. You needn’t be sentimental, just
practical. Don’t waste the Mahony Advantage, as I’ll call it; don’t throw
away a mixture of background and experience that silicon won’t ever fully
replicate.
Unfortunately, Jim Mahony’s employer didn’t take full advantage of the
Mahony Advantage.

Mahony, a white-haired man with a ruddy face like Tip O’Neill’s, was a
popular local columnist at my old paper, the Journal, in Lorain, Ohio. He
barely survived computerization. In fact, he barely survived. He suffered a
heart attack that may or may not have been brought on by the added stress.
His ordeal is a preview of what some companies may expect as small
computers—or terminals like Mahony’s—become requirements instead of
options in many businesses. It is a fitting argument for tutoring or other
adjustments for key employees. Within the newspaper industry—more
computerized than most fields by now—you’ll find few Jim Mahonys
today. But many other businesses are now wasting the Mahony Advantage.
At the Journal, readership surveys showed Mahony’s column was one of
the main draws. He was a native of his steel town, a perfect counterpoint in
a newsroom dominated by young outsiders. He’d worked for the Journal—
whether as a newsboy or an editor—since he was ten. The only break was
time off for World War II service. Indisputably, on local matters, he was a
human data bank. “There’s nobody who knows this town and the people
and the relationships, the marriages, like Jim,” said Bill Scrivo, an ex-
managing editor. “You just can’t store this kind of material. He knew who
was a phony and who was likely to mislead you.” Jim doubled as the news
editor (on the Journal the news editor’s job was more of a copy-desk
function than an executive one in the fullest sense), and over the years he
may have saved the Journal thousands of dollars in lawyer’s bills from the
libel suits that never were filed. He knew, say, that the Phil Smith caught in
a gambling raid was not the prominent black minister with the same name.
If nothing else, his vast knowledge of Lorain, Ohio, and its people made the
paper more credible. And Mahony loved the traditional newsroom as much
as he did his city—the big, black wire-service tickers, the bulky
Remingtons and Underwoods.
“A ticker gives a newsroom that certain flavor,” he told me. “You hear a
bell, and that means an important story is about to be released and it puts
you on the alert, makes you news conscious.” And typewriters? “I figured
they were the backbone of newspapering all the way through.” Mahony
obliterated, however, at least two of them. He would strike the keys so hard
that the letters would fly off the arms. Appreciating the man more than the
machines, his colleagues cheerfully wheeled in replacements.
Dapper Dan, however—Mahony’s name for a young computer expert
with some flashy sports coats and a fondness for jargon—wasn’t so

accommodating.
“His word was God’s,” Mahony said, “and he pressured us. He felt that
the pupil should be stepped into a more advanced bracket. And evidently he
misjudged the person who was possibly of an older era and not familiar
with the computer field. He never appeared news interested. It appeared his
whole life was wrapped around computers.”
“The training consisted of sitting down two hours every other day in this
little room,” recalled Dick DiLuciano, the former editor handling state
news, “and then we’d be told that when you hit this button, this activates
this diode or that diode or whatever the term. And finally I decided they
were wasting their time telling what happens when we hit a button. We
didn’t have to know that. All we had to know was what buttons to hit to get
our story into the computer and get it typeset.” Mahony himself complains
that the paper didn’t start him out with real news stories on the terminal.
Instead, he did boring exercises similar to those in typing manuals. “It was
much like a batter in major league baseball taking batting practice,” he said.
“You just stayed there while they threw curve-balls at you more or less.”
“The only thing Jim really put into the computer on the job itself was
headlines and his column,” DiLuciano said, “but he really was getting
frustrated and distraught. And I bumped into him in the washroom one day,
and he was about to cry. He said, ‘Dick, I know I’m going to lose my job,
because I can’t learn how to work that damn computer.’” He almost did lose
it. Jim was out sick several months, and he had to leave his news editor’s
post. The Journal let him continue the “Mahony’s Memos” column but
assigned him to the “morgue,” the library, to file away old clips. The library
was in a room apart from the city desk. No longer was Mahony so handy to
editors wanting to know, say, if a home on East Twenty-eighth Street is on
the “East Side” of Lorain. (It isn’t—contrary to what a story said.) Were it
not for the mishandling of Jim Mahony’s training, he might still be
vigilantly editing.
What could have been done to keep Jim Mahony there? Jack LaVriha, a
cigar-chomping newspaperman of Mahony’s generation, had an idea. Why
couldn’t the paper have hired a tutor for Mahony—maybe a journalism
graduate familiar with computers who was waiting for a reporter’s job to
open up? The young grad could have entered Mahony’s stories on the
terminal, learning city-room ways while Jim gradually mastered computer
ones. Computers and older people can get along fine. Even without a tutor

LaVriha himself was one of Dapper Dan’s star pupils, and today, though
retired, he still drops by the newsroom to write press releases for
community groups on the computer.
Distilled, here are some lessons from the Journal’s experience with
computer training:
1. Even the best-intentioned companies may fail miserably in easing some
employees’ computerization traumas. The paper’s editor at the time was
Irving Leibowitz, a Lou Grant-like figure beloved by many in the
newsroom; I can recall Leibo once jumping up on the copy desk to lead a
“Happy Birthday” tribute to Jim Mahony and barely missing the cake;
that was Leibo. He died in 1979. Were he alive today, however, he would
probably be the first to admit that the paper mishandled Mahony during
the transition. Like many others, Leibo was in awe of Dapper Dan. And
so he’d suspended the skepticism that usually served him well on the job.
2. The traits which make somebody valuable to his company may be the
very ones complicating his transition to computerization. Jim Mahony
was the folksy, family-oriented man that his column suggested. Mahony
knew steelworkers as well as politicians and businessmen, and to
maintain that network of friends, even in a small town, takes time. Jim
didn’t like working late at the office, boning up on computers; he would
rather be with his family or some of the average people he wrote about.
3. At the same time you can’t stereotype anyone—by age, folksiness, or
otherwise—as absolutely doomed to fail at the computer keyboard. Just
look at old Jack LaVriha, himself a Lorain native and strong family man.
Jack took well to computerization and would give the editors cards with
numbers on them, saying, for instance, “Call up story number so-and-so if
you want to know about a hot veterans parade coming up.” Before
computerization he’d lobbied for his stories by shoving them in front of
the editors’ faces or leaving notes; the cards were his new way. Why did
Jack succeed where Jim didn’t? Hey, he thought of computerization, if
that’s what it is, I’m going to accept it. I do whatever stories they give
me, so why not this? His being a reporter, not a desk-bound editor with a
strict routine, may have helped.
4. An important part of training is simple salesmanship—persuading the
worker to adopt the right attitude. Mahony rightly or wrongly felt bullied.
He wanted to be wooed, not pressured.

5. Don’t make computerization seem more threatening than it has to be.
Journal managers bragged how they’d throw the typewriters out of the
newsroom—Mahony’s security blankets. Instead, the paper might have
kept a few there for tasks like note taking. As a matter of fact, that’s what
actually happened. Also, Mahony recalls that the paper computerized
without at first having a printer in the newsroom, meaning that staffers
had to trust everything to the computer memory. He would have felt more
comfortable in the beginning with paper backups. That’s a close one.
Learning the Kaypro, I myself progressed faster because I couldn’t use
my printer at night without disturbing the neighbors. I, however, was
learning voluntarily. Mahony was forced. Try to computerize with the old
system intact in the beginning—with paper records, in other words. Not
only will your Mahonys feel more comfortable; you’ll be better protected
when the computer glitches up. Sooner or later, they all do.
6. As early as possible start people on real projects. The first day at the
keyboard Jim Mahony might have been writing a column or part of one.
Adam Green, the software training expert, says to start off teaching your
new employees some computer basics. But then they should buckle down
to the practical from day one. Integrate WordStar, for instance, into your
employees’ work. Don’t say, “Okay, now you’re going to take a class in
WordStar.” Instead, have a sales rep use WordStar to write some letters to
customers or encourage an accountant to start using 1-2-3 as soon as
possible on a limited basis. This isn’t to say that a real project is the only
hook you can use. Green has been quite successful with Adventure-style
computer games that require people to learn to format their disks and
other basic micro skills. It’s a good introduction to micros for the Pac-
Man generation. That might not be right, however, for Mahony-vintage
people.
Above all, beware of the babble about “computer literacy” for everyone.
Follow John H. Bennett’s example. With a Harvard Ph.D. in mathematics
and a Phi Beta Kappa key, he’s hardly antilearning. And yet he skillfully
mapped out a micro program for executives who weren’t interested in all
the subtleties of bits and bytes.
Bennett is the top data-processing man at United Technologies
Corporation. United, a $14 billion conglomerate, produces everything from
helicopters to air conditioners and silicon chips. “We’re a high-tech
company,” Bennett said. “More and more of our products have

microprocessors in them.” Most of the senior executives, however, had
never used a personal computer before Bennett started a training program
for those baffled by tech talk. “It’s not a productivity program,” Bennett
said. “It’s an educational program.” With the $5 million program’s stress on
hands-on experience, however, those goals meshed nicely.
United homed in on the computer skills that seasoned executives could
use in their jobs and searched hard for the right people to teach them. “You
can get people to teach you to use an automated spreadsheet,” Bennett said,
“and of course there are at least a dozen vendors offering to teach people to
use a word processor, but there is no program that takes the standard tool kit
and offers to at least introduce you to every tool.” National Training
Systems, Inc., however, a California company, designed the course he
wanted. In 1983 and 1984, more than a thousand United executives were to
learn to use the IBM PC and the Context MBA program. Bennett had
settled on the IBM one Christmas vacation when he himself tested several
different brands. It was his own initiation to personal computing. He
surmised that plenty of software would be coming for the IBM, and in fact
Context MBA did appear in time with tools he wanted for United’s
executives; the integrated program included a spreadsheet, data base,
graphics, communications, and simple word processing.
United held the three-day course in a windowless conference room on the
second floor of the research center in East Hartford, Connecticut, just across
the river from corporate headquarters. Blowups of IBM computer
equipment lined a wall. It was as though United were doing all it could to
engender concentration. If an executive turned to gaze at a nonexistent
window, the sight of the photographs might gently nudge him back to work.
Up front was a projection screen and an easel bearing such “EXTRA
ACTIVITY” suggestions as “EXPERIMENT WITH VARIOUS
COMMANDS ON YOUR SPREADSHEET.” In a photo from United’s
public relations office, the carpeted room looked like a cross between a
college classroom and a ComputerLand store. Executives came from United
divisions across the country. With sixteen IBM computers and matching
printers, the training project couldn’t travel very far.
One of the students was himself a local of sorts, Robert J. Bertini, Jr.,
controller of the East Hartford research center. He was an MBA in his mid-
forties, and in some ways he typified many of the executives in the
program. “To a certain extent,” he said of his thoughts before he took the

course, “you’re afraid you’re going to screw up.” He had toyed with the
idea of buying an Apple or Commodore but “didn’t want to sit there and
read a book and hunt and peck at the keyboard.” Still, he was constructively
egotistical: if others could master computers, why not he? So he signed up.
On paper the program was completely voluntary. In practice, perhaps, what
with peer pressure, it was army voluntary. “We just didn’t feel the
management of a high-technology company could be competitive without
knowing what the computer can do for them,” Bennett had said in
announcing the program, and who wants to be known as noncompetitive?
Still, the company was bending over backward to make the training as
palatable as it could. Within minutes of the computer instructor’s first
“Good morning,” Bertini was learning how to load disks into the little IBM
machine and type out the commands of Context MBA. Mercifully, he
wasn’t wrestling with unneeded computerese. “Most manuals,” Bennett
correctly says, “are not written with executives in mind. Most are written
for people who know how to use computers. On page thirty-something of
the manual it eventually gets around to telling people how to start their
computers up.”
Just a week after Bertini finished the course, his own IBM PC arrived at
his office. Man and machine were still new to each other, and data-
processing people were ready to help overcome the normal start-up glitches,
but Bertini faced other problems. Would he have time during the normal
work day to perfect his computer skills? Nearly thirty people reported to
him, and now the machine, too, would be vying for his attention. He also
worried some about his image as he groped around on the computer. “Hell,”
he candidly said, “we all have our degrees of vanity.”
Once again, however, United had a solution, a routine one in the training
program. It allowed Bertini to take the IBM home. “Let’s face it,” he said,
“the course taught you the basics, how to get on the machine, how to do
some relatively simple, basic things with it. To learn other stuff that makes
it the tool it really is took eighty or ninety hours or whatever I spent with
the thing at home.” Even after Bertini mastered the IBM, he still used it at
home for chores like checkbook balancing—and for work, too; especially
work. “My wife,” he joked, “decided that the reason this thing was going to
be a big productivity improvement for the corporation was that I’d put in
that extra eight hours at home and give them a sixteen-hour day.” He also
found himself working later some days at the office.

But Bertini emerged a believer in both the training program and the
machine. As chief fiscal officer at the 1,200-employee research center, he
helped preside over much of United’s research and development budget—
then $800 million a year. His life was a series of what ifs. What about that
$4-million mainframe computer; should United buy or lease it? What about
taxes, depreciation, interest rates? What about a number of what abouts?
Traditionally, Bertini had waited around for answers from his staffers,
which could take hours or days; but now he had his own computer and
electronic spreadsheet and could consider more options faster. The IBM
was also handy for confidential tasks like salary analyses. “As far as merit
increases for my people were concerned,” said Bertini, “I had access to it,
and they didn’t. And that’s the way I wanted it to be.” He also wrote letters
and memos on the computer. “Would you believe, twenty years ago in
college I took a typing course?” he said. When Bertini wrote to Harry Gray
—United’s chairman—the center controller’s secretary redid the letters on a
typewriter. But the little dot-matrix printer worked well for memos zipped
out to Bertini’s staffers. The communications part of Context MBA was also
a joy, for Bertini could send electronic mail and tap United’s mainframe for
facts that previously had been filtered through subordinates. Some staffers
resented his new ability to bypass them. It was a reversal of normal roles.
The boss had a personal computer before they did and was now better
plugged in to United’s information network. “As far as I’m concerned,”
Bertini said, defending his new system, “the boss’s job is to second-guess
you.” But the worried might find some solace: Bertini was planning to bring
in a second IBM for the people below.

Training (Continued):
The Dahlonega Answer

For a bucket of fried chicken, Hugh Hunt, a son of H. L. Hunt, the late
oilman, gave me some lessons on how to run my Kaypro.
An Anderson Jacobson salesman had offered my name to Hunt after he
couldn’t get his Kaypros working quite right with his AJ printers and the
Select word-processing program. I passed on the number of someone who
might actually solve the problem.
Hunt, having tinkered with computers for several years, gave me some
quick tutoring on my Kaypro.
“Well,” I said, “I’m still not really familiar with the basics of CP/M.”
“Come on over,” he told this stranger, who was wise enough to own the
same brands of computer and printer as he did.
“No consultant’s fee?” I joked.
“Bring along some fried chicken,” he said.
Hunt’s home sat on a hill in horse country just outside Washington. He
called it Dahlonega, after a town in the Georgia mountains where he had
once lived and where miners had extracted gold before the Civil War. In his
basement, in plain, fluorescent-lit rooms, were the offices of his land-
development company. Hunt showed me how he had rigged up a roll of
Teletype paper with a clothes hanger so he wouldn’t have to buy a tractor
feed for one of his daisy-wheel printers. A tall, heavy-set man nearing fifty,
he wore casual clothes and looked like old pictures of his father in middle
age. In the beginning, however, I could only guess who he might be. Even if
he had been Hugh Doe, I still would have been interested in his style of
training the people who operated his Apple, his several Kaypros, and a pair
of Osbornes. His techniques were wrong for many corporate situations.
They would have been a disaster for Jim Mahony, the old newspaperman,
who was so heavy-handed that he ruined at least two typewriters. But they
were just right for Hunt and his people—and perhaps for many other small
businessmen who like to be surrounded by employees comfortable with
high tech.
Hunt didn’t give his staffers extra-long, step-by-step guidance. Instead,
he:

1. Hired people who were fast learners at the keyboard.
2. Helped them with some learning aids like color-coded keys showing
kinds of WordStar commands.
3. Motivated them by explaining how their new computer skills would
make them happier—and richer, since he paid them more, once their
productivity increased.
Esther King, his middle-aged office manager, a bright, down-to-earth
high school graduate, actually may have been as responsible for his training
methods as he was. She tried to hire only people who’d benefit from some
quick lessons followed by intensive self-instruction. “Sometimes I’ll have
them sit down at the computer,” she said of her employment interviews,
“and I just turn it on and tell them to type. A lot of people, they’re afraid
they’re going to hurt it. And you’re not going to hurt it. You can’t hurt it. So
you mess up, and you get the wrong thing, and it says you made a ‘fatal
error.’ So you just start over, and that’s the only way you’re going to learn
—is sit down and not be afraid of it.”
Jeanette Counsellor, at the time an employee of Hunt’s, didn’t just type
on computers. She also knew how to juggle around thousands of dollars on
electronic spreadsheets. And King herself boasted the ability to use
computers to help project building costs, a useful skill since Hunt at the
time was finishing construction of a water-theme park in North Carolina.
What’s more, on the Apple, King helped Hunt do company tax work.
By telephone—I talked to Hunt and his people several times—I asked
point-blank why he’d been so successful in getting staffers running on
computers.
“I told them,” he said, “how it would be useful for the rest of their careers
to be able to say, ‘I’ve worked with a computer and I’ve word processed.’”
His people didn’t mess with BASIC, just skills directly useful in their work.
“I showed them,” said Hunt, “how computers could save them a lot of time
and trouble in the amount of rewrites I do. I put it to them as a challenge.”
“I was ready to learn,” said Counsellor, who had taken a data-processing
course at a community college but had never before used a computer. “I
was looking for a job that would train me to do this sort of thing.”
Although your people may need more guidance than Hunt’s staffers in
learning computer skills, you can take heart in the results of a poll reported
in InfoWorld. Of 500 personnel managers and over 500 clerical employees,
87 percent said “on-the-job training to learn new technologies” is important.

Micros and the Data-Processing
Department
Bertini and the employees in Hunt’s office were lucky—the powers-that-
be were encouraging the introduction and use of micros.
Within American corporations, however, many data-processing
departments have looked askance at small computers.
They’ve seen them as a threat to their power. So American executives
have bought millions of dollars of “typewriters” and “adding machines”
from computer stores, hoping to fool Data Processing (DP) and
bookkeepers. One man lost his job after Data Processing wouldn’t let
executives buy micros and he falsified an expense voucher to smuggle in an
Apple. Dishonest? Yes. But a micro martyr, too.
This atmosphere may be changing, of course. As early as 1983
Computerworld reported that of 220 data-processing managers replying to a
poll, 62 percent said they would encourage the use of personal computers.
Beware of the De Mille Syndrome, however. It’s the fondness of many
data-processing managers for what one consultant calls a “Cecil B. De
Mille production” with “a cast of thousands, millions of dollars and years in
the making.”[32]
The poor, ignorant people outside Data Processing, meanwhile, can’t
enjoy all the micros or advice they need. “Last year,” went a plaintive letter
to a computer columnist, “we purchased a microcomputer and VisiCorp’s
VisiCalc software for the company accounting office. The micro was idle
for about six months until someone decided to figure out how to use it.
Since then, half a dozen people in our office and at least as many in other
offices keep the system tied up.” But the firm’s computer people wouldn’t
budget more machines even though the $5,000 micro in the accounting
office had “paid for itself many times over.” The excuse from the computer
pooh-bahs was this: several accounting systems were on the way that would
do the job, and why allow micros to proliferate? “Money,” said the letter to
the columnist, “has never been a question.”[33] Power, apparently, was. In
that sense also, many data-processing biggies are like De Mille.
“Programmers in general are pretty control oriented, pretty methodical in
nature,” said Adam Green, “and usually the most methodical, the most

control-oriented person becomes the head of DP.”
“If they like you, they’ll help you; if they don’t, they won’t,” said my
friend Michael Canyes, who himself served time in data processing in
government and private industry.
And it isn’t just the De Mille desire for control that has dashed many an
executive’s hopes for an office micro. It’s also their sheer ignorance at
times.
“Some data-processing managers started out ten or fifteen years ago
when the field was growing,” Canyes said, “and stayed with their
companies while more able people moved to others. They just were in the
right revolving door at the right time. Many don’t know enough to get a job
elsewhere. And they don’t understand the capabilities of micros and are
afraid of them.”
At United, Bennett’s executive micro course was geared toward the
nontechnical, and yet he commendably wanted his top data-processing
people included, too.
“Many of them,” he said, “hadn’t touched a computer console or terminal
for ten years and were quite surprised as to what a modern microcomputer
can do.” They didn’t learn faster as a group, in fact, than did the other
United executives. “If they’ve never used a word processor,” Bennett said,
“why would they learn it faster than the guy next door?”

■ ■ ■

‘How
What do you do if you need Data Processing’s favor to buy a
micro or set up an office network of them? Bennett has the good
sense not to “tell somebody how they could do something in a
political environment that I’m not familiar with.” Here, however, is
my own reckless scenario for you. Do not sue if this advice makes
you a micro martyr:
1. Before approaching Data Processing, ask who-how questions
about the people there—questions similar to some you’d raise
about outside consultants. Find out who, formally and informally,
can help you the most.

2. Ask your informal Data-Processing contact about possible
technical problems. Tell him what you hope to do. If it won’t fly,
how can you modify it?
3. When you’re ready to deal with the Data-Processing manager,
tell him your exact computer goals. Easier word processing on
just one machine? A micro network tied into the mainframe?
Many executives correctly see big computers as massive
repositories for information to be analyzed on micros.
4. Make it clear you’re aware of your project’s complications.
Anticipate the manager’s own who-how-style questions,
especially the “How” and “How much?” Take on the issues
closest to the Data-Processing manager’s heart. Traditionally,
DP seeks to centralize facts so Sales won’t have one set of
numbers and Administration another set. Does your micro plan
tackle that problem? Also, what about the security issue? How
are you going to safeguard facts stored inside the micros? What
about maintenance? Who’s going to look after the computers—
your department or DP? How about training? Your baby or Data
Processing’s? Also, what will you do for ongoing technical
support?

■ ■ ■

Despite some DPers’ possible ignorance of micros, you’ll still come out
ahead with the computer room’s cooperation, especially if you want your
micros talking to the mainframe.
“The situation,” one expert told Computerworld in describing micro-
mainframe hookups, “is like connecting two telephones with a wire and
trying to get a Russian to communicate with an American. The
microcomputer users think they have finished the job, but they haven’t even
begun.”
So if you want your micro to get along with other computers, try to
coexist with the people who might help out.
Well, so much for relations with humans. Now, how do you survive the
computers themselves? How do you choose the best keyboards, screens,
etc., for you to live comfortably with your machine? How can people feel in

charge of their computers—guarding health, comfort, and productivity
against the HAL syndrome?

Backup:
◼ VIII, Consultant Contracts: Some Who-How Questions, page 339.

9 The Hal Syndrome

Raquel Welch, the movie star who pranced around in a fur bikini in a
caveman epic, reportedly planned to use a $10,000 computer to write a
fitness book. Her ballyhoo in late 1982 stressed that “the mind and body are
connected.” But for Time readers she may not have set the best example. A
color photo showed a tightly gowned Welch lazing on the floor near the
newly famous computer—it lacked a detachable keyboard.
And if you can’t separate your keyboard from the main part of your
machine? That might be bad news for both your mind and body. The best
distance between your eyes and the TV-like screen may clash with the right
separation between your torso and the keyboard. Your posture may suffer.
In fairness to Raquel—who declined an interview on the topic—she might
have felt perfectly comfortable using her computer. Perhaps she had the
proper eye-sight, the perfect body, for it. If she didn’t, however, Raquel may
have subjected herself to the Hal Syndrome—letting the computer bully her.
Hal, you’ll recall, killed all but one of his human masters. Raquel’s
computer didn’t murder her, but if she indeed toiled hard on it for her book,
it may have done a very nice job of killing her back.
The Hal Syndrome can manifest itself in other ways. Even the wrong
furniture, indeed especially the wrong furniture, can poison relations
between humans and machines.
What’s more, bad ergonomics—the jargon for the human-machine link
—actually can make you sick.
Raquel may like her work; but millions of clerical people don’t, and
aches from computers can add to their stress. They can help bring about
heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure, perhaps even raise yours by
raising your company’s health-insurance costs over the long run.
And they can lower your profits in other ways.
Working with bad furniture and lighting, computer operators in one study
made more errors and tapped out 25 percent fewer keystrokes than they did

under better conditions. Michael Smith, former chief of the Motivation and
Stress Research Section at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and
Health (NIOSH), says the NIOSH experiment lasted a week and was
closely controlled. A private ergonomics consultant found a 10-15 percent
difference in a study of good and bad furniture. Whatever the percentage,
however, ergonomics isn’t just a gimmick to sell new tables and chairs;
Smith says it especially can help narrow the gap between mediocre and
prize workers.
Not only does good ergonomics pay for itself in the long run; it may also
improve your labor relations.
It’s a perfect meeting ground for you and your employees. They want
good working conditions. You want good work. And everyone can win; for
with decent ergonomics, you’ll enjoy lower turnover. You may very well
lure good people away from competitors who run electronic sweatshops.
Sharp screens and silky keyboards won’t single-handedly stave off
unionization or endear you to ensconced unions, but they won’t hurt. A
smart, secure executive, in fact, may even turn union complaints to his
advantage. He’ll listen. He (or she) won’t spend $20,000 on new computers
or terminals that inflame people’s eyes and tempers.
In short, he’ll learn eleven steps to good ergonomics:

1. The canary-in-the-mine theory of labor relations. Ergonomics is people,
too, not just machines, and you’ll read here of better ways to work with
both.
2. Good job design.
3. “Terminal” happiness. Detachable keyboards are just a start, whether
you’re using a micro or a terminal hooked into a large computer. Micros
normally include keyboards, screens, and other major parts of terminals.
So “terminal” is what I’ll say most often in this chapter.
4. The right furniture.
5. The proper light, or as it’s been said, “Let there be less.”
6. Noise reduction.
7. Air conditioning, heating, and ventilation—basics neglected by a
surprising number of computer users.
8. Honest assurances to your people that you’re exposing them to the least
risk. Not all the extra stress in some computer work comes from the
equipment itself. Some is from fear of the machines.

9. A willingness to consider alternatives to the TV-like CRTs that computers
use to flash out words and numbers. Flat-screen computers—with thin
panels rather than bulky tubes—may eventually be easier on the eyes.
10. Sensible use of wrinkles like the mouse—the hand-sized gizmo you use
instead of the arrowlike keys to move the cursor on the screen. (See
Backup X, “Of Mice and Men—and Touch Pads, Touch Screens, Etc.”
Also see Backup IX, “Window Shopping.”)
11. A related ingredient, good software—the topic of earlier chapters.

The Canary in the Mine

“How,” I asked a consultant, “do you know if someone is trying to offer a
constructive suggestion about computerization or to get in the way?”
“Consider the source,” he said. “Is it coming from a researcher or a
union?”
To some extent the man was right. Some people, unionized or not, may
be no more than twentieth-century version of the Luddites, the English
workers who, during the 1800s, smashed the mechanical looms that were
taking away their livelihoods. Indeed, Dr. Michael Colligan, a NIOSH
psychologist, says, “Opposition to computers is usually kind of veiled or
disguised under more general complaints about eyestrain, headaches, and
physical discomforts often associated with video display terminals (VDTs).
[34]

“But,” Colligan warns, “if you talk with workers awhile, major concerns
begin to surface.” Legitimate concerns. Whether it’s individual workers or
unions, don’t tune out gripers. Listen to people like Joan.
Joan started out around 1980 as a model employee in a northeastern
office of a major insurance company, whose officials declined to be
interviewed. “I averaged ten hours a week overtime,” she said, “and I came
in when I had pneumonia and a fever of 102.” In a modest way, helping to
unravel the mysteries of the machines, she aided computerization. Later,
however, in a not-so-modest way, she aided something else: unionization.
By the time I reached her, she had quit her $10,000-a-year job to go into
business with her husband. For more than an hour she poured out her anger
against the terminals and the company that now used them.
“They affected my stomach quite a bit,” Joan said. “Most days I worked,
I would throw up in the ladies room. I didn’t throw up before I started
working on the computer, and I haven’t thrown up since I quit.
“The screens weren’t at all soft on the eyes, even with the glare screens
that snapped over the top. And they were nontiltable.”
She also complained that the screens were too low even for a five footer
like her.
“Could I have some books and put my system on top of them so the
screen will be in the middle of my eyes?” she recalls asking a supervisor.

“You get this constant tension in your back because you’re always hunched
over.”
“No,” she says the supervisor told her in effect, “that’s unacceptable,
totally.”
Why?
“Because,” came the reply, allegedly, “the office won’t look the same. It
won’t be level.”
Joan says management wouldn’t even let her work with the terminal in
the middle of her desk. “They wanted them all on the same side,” she
recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, I don’t work on that side of the desk, sport.’ It was
ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. Even a simple request like that was too
much.”
At least the chair was adjustable “I lowered it so I could get my eyes as
close to the middle of the screen as possible,” she says. “I was so low that if
I opened the middle drawer on my desk I’d bang myself.”
But it was the lights that most irked Joan. They were bright fluorescents,
fine for traditional paperwork but not for the computer era. Management,
pressed by employees, took out many of the tubes; and yet Joan says some
glare-ridden workers still wore sunglasses.
She also complains that the company wouldn’t even offer the operators
eye examinations, an irony, considering that she was processing health
claims.
Again, Joan was a union activist—as a result of her experiences—and
some managers may recoil from the very notion of clerks organizing, and
yet in her litany of complaints about working conditions, there was not one
with which most ergonomics professionals would quarrel. Had management
listened to her on those issues, in fact, it would have been doing itself a
favor. Forcing the workers to strain their necks, backs, and eyes is hardly
the road to higher productivity and profit. It would have cost several
thousand dollars at the very most to change the lighting. Corporate
bureaucracy may or may not have allowed the workers to be consulted in
selection of the terminals, but there is no reason—other than a misdirected
passion for discipline and order—why the company couldn’t have let Joan
change the level of her screen.
Joan’s experiences are a good argument for the Canary-in-the-Mine
Theory of Labor Relations. In the days before electronic gas detectors, coal
miners carried canaries into the pits. The birds’ lungs were more sensitive

than theirs to poisonous fumes. And watching the canaries, many a miner
saved himself and others.
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., used the canary-in-the-mine parallel to
describe artists and writers serving as an early-warning system to call
attention to social ills. And workers like Joan, “troublemakers,” are your
canaries. You may not agree with them, and you may aggressively fight
them, but before making up your mind, at least listen to them. They can
anticipate the concerns of less vocal workers scared of losing their jobs.
“Well,” you ask,“what about my authority as a manager? You knuckle
under to the troublemakers once, they’ll come at you again and again.”
Confident executives, however, will avoid this misplaced machismo. They
will assert their authority more productively, letting workers have a voice in
working conditions but, in return, demanding good, steady production,
which, after all, is the bottom line. When your stockholders receive
dividends, how many will think, What slobs—their VDTs don’t even line
up at the same level!
Ideally, of course, your people won’t have to prop up their machines at
all, because they’ll have helped you choose easily adjustable screens and
other equipment.
“When I help design new computer systems,” says Robert Waters, an
ergonomics specialist with a background in psychology, “I try to find out
who’ll be using them. Then, if possible, I’ll seek out their opinions.
“If you do that, people won’t feel so threatened. It will be their
equipment, too, not just the company’s. They won’t think, I don’t like it, it’s
bad for me.”
Richard Koffler, editor-publisher of the Ergonomics Newsletter, also
recommends giving the worker a voice in equipment selection: “If you can
do it, try it. They’ll tell themselves, ‘I wouldn’t want to look like a fool
because I chose something that wasn’t good.’”
In Washington, D.C., Richard G. Barry, now senior advisor for
management systems at the World Bank, has successfully let employees
help pick some of the computer gear the bank was using. Barry didn’t set
out to experiment. He just decided that giving the workers a strong voice
would be the most logical way.
It happened, among other places, in the offices of the Eastern African
region at the bank’s D.C. headquarters. “We had a few word-processing
machines,” Barry said, “and there were a few word-processing centers

around the bank where we could go if we wanted something done, but
essentially we were starting out from zero.”
The office included two hundred professionals and one hundred
secretaries and other clerical workers, and Barry’s task force represented
them in several ways. One was by job function; lending officers were there
as well as those overseeing the existing projects. People also came from
different parts of the office’s bureaucracy, from different countries, and,
obviously, from different job levels—everyone from secretaries to division
chiefs. Barry didn’t go out of his way to pamper clerical workers in
particular. He simply felt that like any other bank employees, they should
decide what tools they needed to get the job done.
Secretaries, far from being anticomputer, asked for equipment to reduce
repetitive typing. Managers sought fast word processing, in different
languages, which complicated keyboard requirements. The secretaries
themselves wanted terminals with whose keyboards and screens they’d be
happy. In a microcomputer installation without separate terminals, of
course, there may be less choice.
It took a year for the task force to line up the equipment, and wisely the
actual equipment shopping came last. Instead, the task force focused on
what characteristics it wanted the gear to have. Then it learned what was
available—how products compared to the ideal system within budget. As a
result, the Eastern African region ended up with good, sharp computer
screens, ergonomic furniture from the very start, and a lighting system fit
for computer work. And Barry says the teamwork helped promote ...

... Good Job Design

A friend of mine, a mid-level manager, was almost salivating over the
economies of computerized word processing.
“You know what I’d do?” he said of an office where he’d worked. “I’d
take out just about all the secretaries and dump them into a central office.
I’d reduce their salaries. They’d be doing less demanding work and should
be paid less.” He wasn’t an ogre. He was reflecting the thinking of a good
many modern managers. It makes sense, doesn’t it, turning offices into
factories, which, indeed, might run twenty-four hours a day, to make the
best use of equipment?
Well, not quite. In fact, not at all. Nor should you try obnoxious
gimmicks like computerized pacing.
They’re all threats to good job design, which is nothing more than
sensibly deciding what each job includes and how the employee does it.
Consider typing pools—er, centralized word-processing operations. If not
passé, they at least deserve to be; most, anyway. Employees’ salaries keep
rising, even with slowed-down inflation, while the price of computers is
falling. By the end of this decade an average worker’s salary may exceed
$20,000 annually. And yet micros and dedicated word processors will easily
cost less than several thousand dollars. Even now, for a typical business,
Barry says, centralized word processing simply doesn’t pay; it tears the
employee away from his or her boss and harms the managers’ own work.
Executives must vie with other offices of a company for the word
processors’ time. They can’t effortlessly set their own priorities. And quality
is more of a problem, too, because, as Barry notes, “someone in centralized
word processing won’t normally get hell for not catching an error. I expect
my secretary to challenge anything she’s not certain about. For instance, my
secretary will come in and say, ‘You left such-and-such person off the list of
people receiving the memo.’ Which matters. Often who a memo goes to
matters as much as what’s in the memo.”
And what about the question of knowing which calls to put through to the
boss? Around the time Barry and I talked, he was obsessed with a paper
projecting the World Bank’s office needs for the next twenty-five years. He

didn’t have to tell his secretary of the importance of any call about the
paper. She knew. For she’d been helping him put it together.
“It isn’t a question anymore of the efficient use of the machines,” Barry
says in recommending the traditional secretary over the pool arrangement.
“It’s effective use of the people. It’s like the phone. Even if people use the
phone just twice a day for business, we still give them their own. We don’t
put all the phones in one room, do we?”
You may disagree with Barry and still insist that central word processing
is the most efficient use of both equipment and people; and maybe your
company’s size, economics, or policy will allow nothing else. But if so, be
prepared for more job complaints. Shut off from the outside world, perhaps
in a windowless, poorly ventilated room, the pool members may feel like
Dickensian factory hands. And the claustrophobia may not just be physical.
With no one around but others in drudge jobs and their immediate
supervisors, the workers feel cut off from chances for advancement. They
become obsessed with their immediate surroundings and may be more apt
to notice shortcomings of their equipment. “You look at studies of typing
pools,” says Waters, “and you’ll find they may actually get in the way of
productivity. More workers hate their jobs, and they’re more likely to
dislike their equipment, feel backaches, other pains.” He says that sick
leave, deservedly or not, may increase.
A gray-haired word processor in Manhattan said she disliked even
“clusters,” which were smaller and presumably more pleasant than a giant
typing pool in a back room. She missed the “pretty cozy relationship” she
enjoyed as secretary to one executive.[35]
“He might send me uptown to return a blouse that didn’t fit his wife. So
he couldn’t very well tell me not to make personal calls. Not that I stayed
on the phone all day. My job was to get his work out, which included
staying late if I had to. He appreciated me. And I expected to stay with him
till he retired.”
Responding to consultants’ recommendations, however, her company one
day offered her three choices. She could work as a mere administrative
assistant, join a word-processing operation, or quit. So she forsook the
familiar typewriter for a Wang. “Ah,” she reflected, “when I think of those
years of correction tape, white-out, retyping!”
Then, continuing her remarks to writer Barbara Garson, she added: “I
want you to take this down: I love my Wang. It’s not the machine that gave

me the shaft.”
What, then, did?
“Straight typing, seven hours a day,” said the word processor. “That’s the
shaft.”
Like Barry, she criticized the quality of work from word-processing pools
—or the lack of it.
“The worst thing,” she said, “is when things come by me with wrong
spelling, wrong information. Sometimes I think I should correct it. I did at
first. But that’s not how they judge me.” It’s by the number of keystrokes.
“So why should I take time to correct their work? And why should I stay
two minutes past lunch if they’re timing me that way?”
Michael Smith, however, makes a good case for careful, sensitive
monitoring.
“Management would be foolish,” he said, “if they didn’t monitor
performance. It’s what you do with the monitoring that counts. If you use it
in a negative way, that hurts performance. It might improve it for a minute
or a half hour while you were watching them, but it might hurt in the long
run.” He recommends, instead, systems that give the workers themselves
“direct, immediate feedback. The faster the better.”
Joan’s old insurance company, shortly after she left in 1982, started a
monitoring system in offices across the country. Some of her ex-colleagues
found it more palatable than a simple keystroke count.
Every six months it adjusted their job levels and salaries. And production
—the number of health claims processed—was just 30 percent in the
formula. Accuracy was another 30. The remainder of the formula plugged
in attendance and supervisors’ observations on job knowledge and the
quality of correspondence. The employees weren’t just at the mercy of a
machine.
“It’s a more equitable system,” said a claims processor whose salary
leaped from $220 to more than $280 a week.
Still, the union claimed that most members weren’t so well disposed to
the new system. That may or may not have been true. Just the same, the
claims processor qualified her own enthusiasm. She wanted faster feedback
from the monitoring. “It would be constructive,” she said, “if we got it at
the end of the day or even weekly.”
The woman, too, hoped to know the exact math behind the salary system:
“I’ve asked my manager a number of times. She said, ‘You wouldn’t

understand it.’ I said, ‘Tell it to me, and I will understand it.‘”
Big questions persisted. Was the insurance company, for instance, really
crediting her extra for writing letters to doctors who haven’t submitted
diagnoses with claims? The company told her that it was—that it still paid
to handle such cases. But she wasn’t so sure. Management, she claimed, had
lied on other matters.
Another worker said the company did not audit enough forms to
discourage slipshod work from high producers.
Even in its first few weeks, with the normal start-up wrinkles, the system
did show some promise. Production was dramatically up. “If I was a
manager and my job was to get the maximum amount of work out of an
employee,” said a claims processor, a union member, “yeah—in that
position I’d use it.” But she worried, justifiably, about her own future.
“Maybe a person has been producing ninety claims a day. How much more
can they push them? They can’t push them past a hundred, so what else is
there for them to do?
“There aren’t many [promotion] opportunities here because supervisors
have been here for years and years,” she said. And she wondered: What
about turnover?
It was winter 1982. A depression or near depression was in full swing.
Would the system have worked well in normal times?
Moreover, how much of a trade-off existed between the claims
processors’ productivity and health? NIOSH studied 130 occupations in the
1970s and found that clerical workers were second highest in illnesses like
coronary heart disease. Also, many of the women in Joan’s former
insurance office had children and blue-collar husbands, and a Massachusetts
study showed that women in such families suffered nearly double the heart-
disease rate of their husbands. And in Joan’s office, did health insurance
claims—for her coworkers’ own ills—cancel out some of the productivity
increases? Moreover, how about the moral issue? Suppose the monitoring
system taxes the employees’ health for short-term gains; isn’t it almost the
same as if the company were belching carcinogens into the air?
If you’re working in a low-level clerical job without control over your
fate, you’re a good heart-attack candidate, according to R. A. Karasek, a
professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations
Research at Columbia University.[36] He cites studies showing that people in

“strain occupations” may show twice as much “definite and suspected
myocardial infarction and angina pectoris.”
Computerized pacing can increase the stress and health risks. Smith says
it’s rarely if ever the answer in white-collar work, not even mail sorting—
nothing “involving letters, letters, and so on. It doesn’t improve efficiency
because there are a lot of errors.” Pacing isn’t just monitoring, after all. The
work is electronically moving past the worker as if it’s on a factory
conveyer belt. Think of all the lemons Detroit put on the road in its
eagerness for new production records. “With older workers the error rate
isn’t as high,” Smith says of white-collar jobs paced by machines. “Maybe
it has to do with the nervousness of young people. Older workers always
report more job satisfaction. They become used to the drudgery. It’s a hell
of a way to put it, but that’s what happens.” Not that many older workers
love machine pacing, either.
So, in a large, factorylike office, what’s a happy compromise between lax
discipline and mechanized martinets?
You might try participatory monitoring.
Hear employees’ suggestions for a fair monitoring system. You needn’t
agree. Just listen. Your people may know of complications you wouldn’t
consider in arriving at your production goals; and you may also get a better
inkling of how long it will take for people and machines to adjust to each
other.
Also, setting goals, keep remembering that tasks vary. Don’t let your
monitoring system penalize people, for instance, who fill out forms more
complicated than other workers‘.
Keep your commitment to quality. Be willing to give employees some
time away from arduous work at the tube. It’s a good way to reduce
expensive errors. And tube breaks might not cost you that much in the end.
Can you, for instance, design your people’s jobs to use them fully while
limiting their time in front of the screens? Maybe you can’t. Perhaps, with
thorough computerization, there aren’t many off-line jobs left. But try.
Maybe, for instance, some data-entry clerks, showing high motivation, can
work part time in low-level telephone sales. The clerks won’t feel so
trapped; and you may discover some top-flight talent.
Ask your employees for their ideas. Who says every tube break
absolutely has to be a work break?

Plan, however, for breaks of one kind or another. NIOSH favors breaks
“of at least fifteen minutes every two hours” for moderately heavy terminal
work and the same breaks every hour for workers in the most demanding,
repetitive tasks. A British labor group even suggests structuring the
workday so that people spend no more than half of it at the terminal. You
might chafe under those restrictions—many American companies would—
but don’t scoff at your own people’s ideas on breaks as long as they do the
work.
Here again, think about the Canary-in-the-Mine Theory of Labor
Relations; do not tune out the complainers: do not misplace machismo.

Terminal Happiness

In the Dark Ages, the pre-VDT days of newspapering, I worked on a
rickety manual typewriter. How I envied Darlene at the desk behind me! I
was a reporter-feature writer, while she was stuck with grinding out TV
listings and obits; but Irving Leibowitz, the editor, had favored her with a
Selectric, and I demanded to know why.
“Well,” Leibo said, “she’s a neater typist.” It mattered. Darlene would
feed her Selectric copy to an optical character reader, which helped
convert the typing to newspaper print. “There’s another reason, too,” he
said.
“What?”
“Darlene has a lousier job than you do,” said Leibo, himself a manual
typewriter user, “and just as much typing to do. In fact, more.”
Budgeting for VDTs, you might keep Leibo’s wisdom in mind. He gave
out the best equipment not to his higher-ranking people but to those who
needed it the most.
I thought of Leibo and Darlene when I read of the Grid Compass
executive computer and its original $10,000 price. It might be a splendid
machine, but what a waste of money in many cases. The money instead
might go to buy the right screens and keyboards for subordinates. So often
the difference is just a few hundred dollars, if it exists at all. Don’t give
your employees a say in the selection of equipment and then restrict their
choices through unreasonable penny-pinching. If you can’t do it the right
way immediately, maybe you should wait before you computerize.
Mind you, no terminal or micro is going to be ergonomically perfect. “I’d
flunk them all,” said Waters, and he started with the DEC VT100 terminal
he was using on his job at the time. The display was plain, old white on
black, not the best ergonomically, and it was too dim for many offices.
Fortunately, the lighting in his room was subdued. The terminal, however,
had other shortcomings—for instance, the lack of simple knobs to adjust the
screen’s brightness and contrast. Waters instead had to control them with a
series of keystrokes that he was always forgetting. His loudest groans,
though, were over the numbers pad to the right of the keyboard. “I count 1-
2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9,” Waters said. “I don’t want anything where I count 7-8-9-

4-5-6-1-2-3.” That’s how his numbers pad was; that’s how my machine’s is;
that’s in fact how most computer pads are.
“Well,” I asked, “isn’t that just like a calculator’s?”
“But,” said Waters, “isn’t it a little confusing to switch back and forth
between that arrangement and the numbers of a telephone? Which are in the
normal numerical order.”[37]
You may disagree with Waters, but his message comes through. Even
ergonomics experts can’t always end up in front of the terminal of their
dreams. What you and your people want, however, is a sensible
compromise.
Ideally, rather than simply seeking the biggest discount through the most
massive purchase, you’ll remember that different people need different
terminals. You may in fact save money that way.
An executive who hates to type, for instance, and who doesn’t have to,
won’t need the same keyboard as a data-entry clerk. It still should be a good
board in case he changes his mind, but it needn’t be the most expensive.
With a World Bank-style selection committee, you’ll be more sensitive to
the needs of different offices, different levels of employee.
Encourage some committee members to spend at least two or three hours
with the equipment you’re planning to buy; they may change their minds
later—but that’s better than no tryout at all.
Testing my Kaypro at dealers, I wrote test letters, composed sample
articles, and tried as closely as I could to duplicate my routine.
Impressed by the low price of the Osborne 1, I gave the little keyboard
every benefit of the doubt. And yet, even after several hours, I simply could
not adjust. “Just a matter of operator retraining” was how one saleswoman
put it after I complained that I kept hitting the return when I wanted a quote
mark. And yet I wasn’t about to gamble $1,800 on a machine with a
keyboard I might forever hate. Ergonomically, I had an advantage: I was
buying just for myself. But a selection committee, made up of different
kinds of prospective users—clerks and executives alike—is the next best
thing to a lone customer shopping with only himself in mind.
Avoiding the HAL syndrome, your committee should consider, among
other things, the following:

THE SCREEN

For heavy-duty viewing, a terminal or computer should have at least a
nine-inch screen and ideally a twelve incher. I emphasize the words “heavy-
duty.” An executive using a terminal half an hour a week obviously has
needs different from a clerk doing tedious data-entry work most of the day.
Even the executive, however, should have a screen big enough for
unexpectedly long sessions in front of the tube. On the other hand, suppose
a bank teller must view just a few columns of numbers every now and then;
he may never need a screen bigger than a few inches. Too large a screen, in
fact, even in heavy-duty work, may expose one to glary reflections.
Size preferences can be quirky. I’ll make do for the moment with the
Kaypro’s nine inches, but I wouldn’t mind a bigger screen; another writer
once said he’d like to hook up the same model to a twenty-one-inch
monitor.
The next basic is the color. The two sexes have somewhat different tastes.
Men, says John van Raalte, an RCA scientist, are less sensitive to colors in
the reddish-orange range than are women. That doesn’t mean, however,
that, as a rule, women should automatically have reddish-orange monitors.
For men and women the optimum range of light sensitivity is usually amber
or green. Comfort is high in those ranges, too, at least for most people.[38]
Amber screens are popular in Europe, where one study showed a lower
error rate compared to green and other statistics said more users liked
amber.
American computer magazines have breathlessly praised amber. It’s as if
they were fashion publications thrilled by the latest from abroad. But some
U.S. experts question the controls in at least one proamber study—for
example, the number of volunteers, fewer than two dozen. And Bruce Rupp
of IBM points out that it’s harder to produce a steady, flickerless image with
amber than with green. What’s more, an executive with a company planning
to sell amber terminals said screens of that color burned out faster than did
green ones.
Meanwhile, NIOSH says dark characters against a stable white
background are especially promising; and Etienne Grandjean, a leading
ergonomist with many admirers in the labor movement here and in Europe,
agrees.
Perhaps there’s a less jarring transition when your eyes move between the
screen and the printed material you may be working with. It sounds logical
enough, and in fact that’s what the Macintosh and many other computers

use. That’s also the display style I saw in the Newspaper Guild offices in
Washington.
“Do you see any flicker?” asked David Eisen, the guild’s research
director, who, in the labor movement, is one of the best-informed people on
VDTs.
I studied the white background.
“The little lines,” I said, “seem to be rolling into each other.”[39]
The machine’s regular operator also saw the roll but said the screen was
comfortable, anyway.
The Guild machine, moreover, a Xerox 860, had the ability to revert to
white letters against a black background, which would have eliminated the
rolling. Would that all screens be as versatile, especially those used in many
tasks or by people with different tastes.
No matter what the task, however, don’t get caught up in terminal
fashion. Stress the basics. Are the characters, for instance, shaped well?
How big? At least .12 inch and preferably .16? Is the dot matrix at least
seven by nine? Harry Snyder at Virginia Polytechnic Institute found that
seven-by-nine matrixes produced “significantly fewer errors” than when
subjects worked with those that were five-by-seven. If you can’t find the
information in a machine’s literature, you might use a magnifying glass to
count the number of dots making up the maximum widths and heights of
the characters. Trying the large “N” and several more letters on my Kay
pro, I learned that dot matrix was a mere five by seven—the bare minimum
for light use; for a writer it could be better.
You might also back off twenty inches to see if the dots merge almost
completely into the letters and numbers. Eisen suggests looking for flaws
like “flicker, character blurring at the edges of the screen, and adequate
space between the characters and lines.”[40] Eisen obviously is looking at
VDTs from the viewpoint of the union members. But unionists’ desire for
comfort and ease of use often will overlap with employers’ desire for
maximum productivity. Woe unto the employer who doesn’t take advantage
of the overlap. In fact, Eisen’s observations here on keyboards and screens
are within the ergonomics mainstream and shouldn’t be dismissed because
of his affiliations.
“The two things you must remember,” sums up Waters, “are legibility
and comfort. You may think at first that a five-by-seven matrix is fine. But
after six months your eyes may say, ‘No, No!’—and you may get headaches

and feel you need new glasses. Actually, you simply may need a better
screen. You’ve just got to consider how often, long, and intensely you’ll be
looking at the tube.”
When shopping around, you also should ask, “How many letters and
numbers—how many columns—can fill the screen?”
For word processing you’ll normally want at least 80 columns across, the
standard. Some screens, like that of the Victor 9000 microcomputer, can
display 132, which can be just the ticket for spreadsheet aficionados with
the right software.
You’ll also want to know if you can highlight selected parts of the screen,
for instance, categories of information stashed away in the computer. You
might use reverse video—a light background and dark characters if your
normal background is dark—to keep track of columns showing names and
addresses. Not interested in phone numbers? Then those columns for the
moment would be the normal light-dark combination. In word processing,
reverse video could show you the blocks of texts that you planned to move
or erase or underline.
Two other amenities—more than amenities, in fact—would be easily
reachable and adjustable controls for changing brightness and contrast. The
Kaypro lacks a contrast control, much to my chagrin. At least I can adjust
brightness—a “must” normally and one still “mustier” for people using
antiglare filters, which reduce light from the screen.
Keep thinking what you or others will most use the computer for. Color
graphics? Fine. But your multicolor monitor won’t display characters as
sharply as a black-and-white or monochrome screen would, and the
screens might lose their crispness faster and add to the eyestrain of heavy
word processing. One-color screens, then, would be best for typical writers
and secretaries. On the other hand, if you’re an executive or clerk working
with many figures alongside each other, the color monitor might help you
and your eyes keep the numbers apart. Might. Some people may object to
color except for graphics.
Two kinds of color monitors are common. The composite monitor is
technically more like a home TV than the RGB or “red/green/blue” kind.
It’s cheaper. But colors blur into each other more than with the latter type.
Whatever monitor you buy, keep the screen clean.
And don’t be surprised if, in a year or so, the characters start looking a
little fuzzy. Harry Snyder, a leading expert on the ergonomics of monitors,

says the half-life of a tube in heavy use is normally about a year. Don’t stint
on replacements and jack up your people’s error rates.

THE KEYBOARD

Remember Raquel toiling at a keyboard attached to her computer?
Maybe she’s happy. She may have a well-built back, a graceful, flexible
neck, wrists that don’t quit, or simply a body compatible with her machine
and furniture. But I still question the attached board for most people.
Unless Raquel spent many hours on the machine before buying it, she
might not have known if she’d be comfortable.
The more time you spend at a keyboard, the more likely you‘ll end up
with the right one. Test keyboards thoroughly. If you‘re buying several
dozen, you or a staffer might spend a good three or four hours with the
machine you’re about to purchase. A difference of just 10 percent or so in
the number of keystrokes per hour per operator could mean thousands of
dollars annually to your business.
Even if you’re buying a machine just for your own use, you should still
put in a good half hour checking out the keyboard. That’s true with any
computer. But the odds are stacked against you if you buy one with an
attached board. In Norway, in effect, computer keyboards by law must be
detachable, and in Germany official standards require them in most cases
(an exception exists for, among other things, limited-use portables with
built-in screens and keyboards).[41] Increasingly, union people here are
raising the issue—and quite justifiably, considering the feeling of most
ergonomics experts. Detachable keyboards, in fact, were one of the issues
over which a California union struck the local Blue Cross-Blue Shield
organization.
“Well,” you ask, “what about keyboards on infrequently used machines?”
You might, however, end up using the keyboard more often than you
expected. So play it safe. Make all boards detachable. It won’t cost that
much more. Also, keep the cords at least four feet long. And unstrap the
keyboards from the VDTs in the first place—which sounds insultingly
elementary, except that I’ve heard of an absentminded company that, until a
labor dispute, had forgotten to do so.
Also, don’t let the best keyboards become status symbols in reverse. A
well-meaning but wrong executive on the West Coast brags he does not

have a terminal with even a good board. He’s a fast typist but thinks he
could spend his time better giving dictation. “An executive typing,” he says,
“is like hiring a brain surgeon to give out pills for a sore throat. If you’re
paying him $50,000 a year, why should he do a $20,000 job two hours a
day?”
Most executives would agree. But this is rapidly changing; more and
more executives are tapping out spreadsheets and eventually will do their
own word processing. They may bat out rough drafts on computers or word
processors, then have secretaries whip the documents into shape
electronically without having to retype all of them.
Besides, you can learn typing at any age. And you needn’t be an excellent
typist for computers to help you; indeed, with mistakes easier to zap, the
worst typists will profit the most. Take a Maryland architect-consultant
named Jess McIlvain. Before he got an IBM PC, he just couldn’t write or
type at length—worrying that the result “looked like the cat had walked
over it.” Two years later he was cranking out reports several hundred pages
long.[42]
The new breed of managers, of course, may feel at home on the keyboard
from day one. Some colleges even now require students to buy computers,
many of which they’ll almost certainly use for word processing. What’s
more, as you’ll read in Chapter 11, executive keyboards can ease the
transition in the future to telecommuting.
So don’t impose your own work habits on a junior executive with fast
fingers. Why shouldn’t he or she have a deluxe keyboard if it helps him
serve your company better? And you yourself shouldn’t feel awkward with
at least a good board for quick memos.
Mysteriously, IBM forsook the Selectric tradition in designing the
keyboard of its original Personal Computer, where the left shift key, oddly,
isn’t immediately next to the “Z.” The deviation left some computer
magazine editors flabbergasted. Companies even started making keyboards
for the PC—at several hundred dollars apiece—that retained the traditional
layout.
“They’re not like normal keys,” my consultant friend Michael Canyes
complained of the ones on the PC itself. “They click on and off like
switches.
“A good key,” he said, “gets stiffer as you press down. But the IBM’s are
either up or down.”

Some cynics have a theory. Maybe IBM didn’t want the PC to steal too
many customers away from the Displaywriter costing several thousand
dollars more. Yes, keyboards are a matter of taste, and unlike Michael, I can
stomach the switchlike tactile feedback. But the shift location is
inexcusable. IBM in effect admitted its goof; the IBM AT, a more powerful
cousin of the IBM PC and XT, appeared with a much-improved keyboard.
At least the original IBM PC’s keyboard surpassed that of the tiny, chiclet
keys on the first PCJrs. Reluctantly—after sales were flagging—IBM
replaced the chiclet-style boards with more conventional ones.
Pity us “users.” Even terminals intended for mainframes and minis can
be turkeys. I actually favor my Kaypro board over a terminal—from Digital
Equipment Corporation—which Waters once was using with a big mini at
work. Blame the old-style programmers who didn’t grow up with word
processing. “Most can’t type like a secretary,” says Canyes, “so the
manufacturers often skimp on the touch.”
And isn’t it strange? You can buy an electric typewriter with adjustable
touch for $200 but not get it in a computer costing fifty times as much.
I asked David Eisen why he hadn’t raised the touch issue. Wouldn’t bad
keyboard matches hurt productivity?
“That’s more the companies’ problem,” he said. “We’re more worried
about health.” He can’t recall a flood of complaints from Guild members
about keyboards with the wrong touch.
Union people, however, have talked about another change, flat
keyboards, now popular in Europe. The tops of U.S. boards commonly slant
at fifteen degrees. And Waters tells of an experiment where, given the
ability to change the angle, most participants settled for the fifteen-degree
one. A caveat, however, is in order. Maybe the people ultimately would
have done better with a flat board and plenty of practice on it. Perhaps you
want an adjustable board. But for me, anyway, it won’t matter as much as
touch.
Another issue is the QWERTY keyboard versus the more modern
layouts.
“QWERTY” means the first six letters found on the boards of nearly all
American computers and typewriters. It’s a nineteenth-century legacy—a
bad one. The early typewriters couldn’t keep up with the nimbler typists, so
the machines’ designers thwarted the humans. QWERTY isn’t alphabetical,
it doesn’t bring together commonly used letters like “t,” “h,” and “e,” nor

does it use finger muscles properly. The Dvorak board and other latecomers
should work better. In practice, though, they might confuse typists, so here’s
a solution. Let us old-fashioned people QWERTY away. But think about
buying machines you can switch over for people trained on more efficient
layouts. A program like Smartkey—which electronically changes the
keyboard—might be the answer if you also relabel keys on machines used
by Dvorak typists. The Apple II(c) even has a switch on the top of the
machine to go from QWERTY to Dvorak. Some say the Dvorak
improvement is dramatic. Waters isn’t so sure. He says some studies have
indicated that the Dvorak board offers as little as a 5 percent increase in
speed and little reduction of errors. “So in the end,” says Waters, “most
people in the industry have decided not to tinker with the key arrangement.”
No matter how they’re arranged, your keys shouldn’t be shiny; a matte
surface is good. So are neutral colors rather than black and white, except,
says Eisen, for function keys. My Kaypro sins. Its keys, like those on
Digital Equipment’s VT100, are a gleaming black, which, however, doesn’t
matter that much to me, since I can control my lighting and normally don’t
look down at the board when I’m typing. (Some other Kaypros have black
matte keys.)
Function keys—the ones that let the operator delete a word or add a
paragraph with a single touch—should ideally be a different color from the
main keyboard’s. The same for number pads. The function keys if possible
should have labels indicating their purpose. If not, a chart near the function
keys might show, for instance, that “P1” “Deletes Word.”
Some people, however, say that function keys really slow you down, that
they make you take your fingers off the main keyboard. I basically agree.
The same would hold true for the use of Macintosh-style mice.

SPECIAL ERGONOMIC FEATURES

A dream VDT tilts. It swivels. It can move up and down on a pedestal. It
helps you avoid back strain, stiff necks, glare, and headaches. It adjusts, so
you don’t have to. A good VDT can help compensate somewhat if you lack
...

Good Furniture

“People will adapt very nicely to automation,” an IBM official once said,
“if their arms are broken, and we’re in the twisting stage now.”
That was in 1975. Since then, however, in a literal way, some computer
makers have been gentler with people’s arms—and wrists and backs.
A variety of good computer furniture exists now, some in walnut, some in
formica. With all the trimmings, you can vary:

1. The heights of the keyboard and of the computer or terminal.
2. How far the keyboard platform protrudes from the platform on which the
computer rests.
3. The tilt of the computer—a useful glare-reducing feature.
4. The angle at which the screen faces you. You can swivel away to your
heart’s content to suit your posture or cut back on glare.
5. The height of your chair. You don’t of course need high-tech furniture to
do that—just common sense. For a computer operator, says David Eisen
of the Newspaper Guild, a straight-back chair can become “a ticket to the
orthopedic ward.”

You might also shop for a palm rest and, if you’re short, a leg rest.
An easellike copy holder could help as well.
And so can enough desk surface, shelves, or file cabinets for your
paperwork. Why buy a detachable keyboard if you can’t move it around
because your desk is too cluttered?
Jon Ryburg, an ergonomics expert with the Facility Management
Institute, a Michigan think tank owned by Herman Miller furniture, says
computer gear may take up as much as 40 percent of a desktop. And yet
does the space requirement for paperwork decline by that percentage?
Hardly. So unless you enjoy seeing chairs used as desks, you’d better plan
your furniture well.
Not that all improvisation is bad, especially if you’re a professional or
small businessman working at home. My Kaypro, for instance, rests atop an
old carton from a toy store, and I’ve bought some little gray legs, the color
of the case, to tilt the screen back.

That takes care of my ergonomics. Of course, my requirements in this
case aren’t the same as those of a company with dozens of VDT users.
Joan’s old supervisor at the insurance company might scowl at this
haywire, but so far I’m comfortable. I would be much less casual about
buying furniture for others. For example, I’d make certain that the chairs
and tables would be not just adjustable but easily so—and understandably
so. Even an IBM salesman couldn’t puzzle out all the ways to adjust the
ergonomic furniture on which a Displaywriter sat. Despite such a flaw,
however, special computer furniture isn’t just a frill. An ergonomic desk
and chair might cost several hundred dollars more than an ordinary set—
even a lesser-known brand may—but your furniture could be good for a
decade. And just a 5 percent increase in a cleric’s productivity may pay
back the extra investment in less than two years.
At the least, buy an adjustable chair and, ideally, a table of variable
height. “A very short woman,” argues Bob Waters, “may sit with her eyes
almost a foot closer to the floor than a six-foot-two-inch man’s.” The home-
row keys on the keyboard—the row including the letters A, S, D, and so on
—could be twenty-nine or thirty inches above the floor in a typical case.[43]
Other measurements? Upper screen-eye distance: 17¼ to 19¾ inches.
Center of the screen: 10-20 degrees below the horizontal plane of the
operator’s eyes. Angle between upper and lower arms: between 80 and 120
degrees. Wrist angle: 10 degrees or less. The keyboard is at or below elbow
height, and the table allows enough room for your legs.
Your goal, of course, isn’t to make anyone fit the charts showing average
distances. It’s just to keep people productive and comfortable.
Above all, when shopping around to do this, be skeptical. “A lot of so-
called ergonomic things,” says Waters, “aren’t ergonomic at all.” He
grimaces when he sees $300 wooden tables with fixed-level platforms for
computer monitors. They’re an expensive way to strain your neck. “The
normal line of sight for human beings is fifteen degrees below horizontal,”
Waters says. “People normally look slightly down even when they hold
their heads up.” Needless to say, you and your neck will come out ahead if,
using an old Apple II, you don’t set the monitor atop disk drives resting on
the computer. Ignore the ads showing this compact pile. Their purpose is to
sell computers, not save necks.

Lighting

Bright fluorescents are to computer users’ eyes what a drip, drip, drip, is
to the foreheads of Chinese water-torture victims.
They’re rude, persistent distractions.
And as with the water torture, the fluorescents’ victims may be captives
of sorts. How many people can dictate the lighting in their companies’
offices? Many. But not all. So the letters and numbers on their screens, the
facts they need to do their jobs, may compete with the glare beamed off the
glass.
What’s more, the culprit needn’t be just the fluorescents that light so
many American offices.
“The window with sunshine streaming in may still be a psychologically
gratifying link with the outside world,” says Eisen, “but it spells plain
eyestrain and perhaps headache for every VDT operator within range of the
glare.” Even brightly painted walls can sin here.
So can glossy paper. In fact, any paper is bad in one over-powering way.
The proper lighting level for paperwork is much higher than for computer
work. And yet most computer operators have yet to see the much-touted
paperless office. How do you keep eyes comfortable with both paper and
computer screens?
Here are some possible solutions to the lighting problem:

1. Removing half the tubes from existing fluorescent fixtures. You’ll want,
however, to make certain that some areas of the room aren’t still overlit
while others are light starved. Be skeptical. This is the miser’s solution. If
you can get away with it, fine. But don’t count on it. Remember, the
women at the insurance company in New York say they still suffered
glare afterward.
2. Parabolic fluorescent fixtures with baffles to keep the light out of the
places where it can cause glare.
3. Parawedge louvers, which, according to Eisen, “have been particularly
effective on a number of newspapers.” Small plastic cells turn light
downward, so that, ideally, you can barely notice it at desks just a few
feet from the one you’re illuminating. “Light should be cut off,” Eisen

suggests, “outside a line emanating at a forty-five-degree angle from the
fixture.”
4. Desk and floor lamps. You might buy rheostats you can plug in between
them and the outlet to adjust the light level. And be careful otherwise.
Shield your lamps so they don’t glare off nearby computer screens.
Properly used, however, they could be a godsend for people doing both
computer work and paperwork.
5. Indirect lighting. The disadvantage is the expense. You may have to
repaint walls and ceilings and pay for a consultant to select the right
tones. Moreover, indirect lighting may be hard to install in rooms with
ceilings lower than nine feet. Used well, however, this is one of the best
solutions.

As a general rule, think about a lighting level between 300 and 500 lux—
between 32 and 53 footcandles. A lux tells how much light is hitting a
certain area, and 9.5 lux would equal 1 footcandle. For rough measurements
you might borrow a good lightmeter from a photographer. Don’t aim
directly at the light. Sample, instead, desk and computer surfaces, among
others, though not the screens themselves. For more detailed measurements
and advice, hire a consultant or call your state labor department. Make
certain you‘re in touch with the consulting rather than the enforcement
branch. Yes, any contact with officialdom has its risks. But they’re low
here. And you’re strengthening your hand in labor relations by documenting
your concern for your workers’ eyes.
In fact, before you place your order for lighting, ask if your supplier can
run a test in your office. Or can you at least visit offices using the product?
Also, all along, worry about glare as well as lighting levels. You might
try the mirror test suggested by a veteran ergonomics expert. Place a mirror
over the face of a computer screen. Then you can see where the glare is
coming from—which window, which lamp; for all you know, the source
could be a brightly colored painting or a glassed-in print.
Try to rid your office of glare instead of using a filter. “I believe in
avoiding a broken arm rather than putting a splint on it afterward,” says
Harry Snyder. If you need a filter, however, here are possibilities:

1. Coatings or etching applied during manufacture of the video displays.
They needn’t harm the viewing quality noticeably.

2. Coatings put on after manufacture. Generally, but not always, they don’t
work out.
3. “Colored plastic panels and etched faceplates,” which, says Eisen, “have
such damaging effect on brightness and clarity of the characters that they
should be avoided.”
4. Micromesh filters, favored by German ergonomists. Eisen says U.S.
opinion of them “is mixed. They do a good job of reducing reflections,
but the mesh makes for a restricted viewing angle, absorbs some of the
light from the display, and scatters some of the rest, degrading the
image.”
5. Polarizing filters. They may reduce brightness and shorten tube life, since
you must crank up the tube to compensate; at $100 or more, they are
more expensive than the other add-ons. But they give you a better image
than other filters. The contrast especially can be impressive.

Noise Reduction

Don’t just buy the fastest, the cheapest, printer. Look for one with good
manners toward the humans nearby—a quiet printer.
A daisy wheel can be a real offender. What more can you expect of a
machine with a metal hammer constantly striking away? And dot-matrix
printers often make a higher-pitched sound that mercilessly cuts through
walls.
So ask your printer supplier for noise figures if you think this will be a
problem. Military standards say that for work needing heavy concentration
—in areas like libraries and conference rooms—the sound level must be no
more than 45 decibels on the dB(A) scale, which allows for sensitivity of
the ear at various sound pitches. Otherwise, aim for a level less than 65
decibels. You may be able to rent the necessary meter from a scientific
instrument store. Measure the sound from the distance someone’s head
would be when he was working. Here again, you might ask the supplier for
a look-see at an existing installation.
Put your printers if necessary inside padded wooden boxes; carpet; drape
walls; install sound-muffling panels on ceilings and walls, perhaps.
The less echoey and factorylike your office is, the more productive it will
be.

Air Conditioning, Heat, And Ventilation

Around the first week of January 1983, when Time honored the computer
as the “Machine of the Year,” a Commerce Department computer
ungratefully stopped working and delayed the release of an important
government report.
The reported cause was nothing more than a dehumidifier motor out of
whack; perhaps the room got too moist for the computer sensor.
If so, I wasn’t surprised. Computers and related machinery can
sometimes be quirky about their surroundings. My old Anderson Jacobson
daisywheel printer, later sold, wouldn’t run unless the room temperature
was above fifty degrees. Since I was comfortable at seventy degrees, I
obliged the AJ.
In our attentiveness to machinery, however, let’s not forget the people
nearby.
“You can see the heat wafting out the backs of our VDTs,” said a woman
with the northeastern insurance office—and yet the firm didn’t turn up the
air conditioning. “What might happen,” said Waters about a hot insurance
office, “is the [overheated computers] may go down and they’ll pay out
extra money, anyway.”
Look inside a VDT and you’ll very likely find an orange glow in the neck
of the tube. The heat there may be no more than a light bulb’s, but on a hot
day, with more than one machine in the same room, you’ll want your air
conditioning to be up to the job.
At the same time, having a room too cool—even in just a few places—
can harm productivity. An employee in the insurance office said her
coworkers, when not using the terminals, sometimes wore gloves.
As for bad ventilation, it, too, can jinx production and add to sick leave,
and in recent years, especially, it’s been a problem, as companies tightened
up their buildings to save energy. People in high-paced jobs or those
requiring concentration may suffer the most.

Healthy Honesty

When Laura Moore was pregnant, she neither smoked nor drank—not
even coffee.
She did, however, operate a computer terminal for a telephone company
in Renton, Washington, near Seattle, and she was one of three VDT
operators there with problem pregnancies within a year and one-half.[44]
Laura Moore, after nineteen hours of labor, gave birth to a son with a
birth defect called spina bifida. “We didn’t see it at first,” she said. “We saw
a larger head and a foot that was a little odd and distorted. But when the
nurse picked him up, then we saw this huge opening in his back, which is a
spina bifida.” Laura was “devastated. Just devastated. We—I went through
a severe depression afterward.”
Moore is just one of many people worried about VDTs. In Massachusetts
a pregnant journalist, fearing radiation, wore a leaded apron. (A leaded
apron’s weight on the mother might itself harm an unborn child.) At the
New York Times two young editors developed cataracts and filed for
workers compensation, blaming their computer screens.
“We’ve heard of cases of everything from bad dreams of computers
chasing people to psychic distress where people have attacks of
depression,” says Michael Smith, the ex-NIOSH man. “But it can’t be
linked specifically to the VDT.” And yet NIOSH as of this writing was
continuing safety studies. “We might find that it has nothing to do with the
video tubes,” Smith says of problem pregnancies among terminal operators.
“It could be part of the circuitry.... It may be from job stress.” Meanwhile,
proven problems—like eyestrain—bedevil men and women on the tube.
When 1,236 secretaries and word processing-operators replied to a survey
done for a major disk-maker, almost 70 percent worried about potential
health complication. Some 63 percent told of eyestrain, and 36 percent
reported backaches. Almost 80 percent wanted better lighting and more
time to rest their eyes.
So, regardless of how your equipment supplier vouches for your
computers’ safety, keep two facts in mind:

1. There is a possibility, extra-slim, but still there, that low-frequency
radiation from computers can seriously threaten the health of workers like
Laura Moore and their unborn children.
2. More minor physical and mental problems from computers definitely do
exist. You and your people, however, can either overcome them or at least
live with them. Don’t shrug the problems off. If you do, you’ll only ruin
your credibility when you and your employees discuss radiation and other
possible hazards.
Most people, however, accept the inevitability of computerization.
Employees usually know you need your machines to keep up with your
competitors. So do unions. They have computers of their own. The major
labor-management issues aren’t over whether to computerize: they’re over
how to be safe and humane about it.
And often, by agreeing to requests like those for eye examinations, you’ll
be helping your company along with the workers.
Here is a summary of expert thinking about actual and possible health
threats of computers:

RADIATION

Could low-frequency radiation from VDTs indeed endanger the unborn?
Or might it cause cataracts? And what about x-rays?
A computer user sits much closer to the screen than most TV-watchers
do; might this increase the danger? After all, a typical computer, like a TV,
uses a cathode ray tube with a high-voltage charge. An electron gun fires
these subatomic particles toward the phosphor coating on your screen.
Toward you, in other words. Wouldn’t x-rays created by this process be
dangerous?
Well, throw away your $50 lead-impregnated acrylic shield! Experts feel
that x-ray are a nonissue here.
The x-rays aren’t strong enough; besides, there’s too much leaded glass
in the computer screen itself for you to suffer harm. I’d worry more about
the chemicals in my typewriter cleaning fluid than about x-rays from my
green screen.
Then again, some respected scientists wonder about low-frequency
radiation given off by computer monitors. Until researchers can absolve

computers of blame in cases like Laura Moore’s, the VDT safety issue will
remain legitimate.
“The wild cards in the VDT debate are the eleven clusters of problem
pregnancies and miscarriages among women who work on or nearby
VDTs,” says Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News and publisher of the
sister publication VDT News.[45] Some computer industry spokesmen and
federal officials think the clusters show up by chance. Slesin, however,
while noting that the “normal” miscarriage rate in the U.S. is almost 20
percent, says: “The incidence of birth defects is harder to account for.” And
he says similar clusters haven’t popped up among women tapping away on
typewriters.
These clusters—found in widely scattered offices in the U.S. and Canada
—may result from causes other than radiation. Some VDT operators feel
less in control of their jobs than do traditional typists; and a remote
possibility exists that this additional stress could take its toll on the unborn
children. Slesin says fear of VDTs may itself increase the stress—a Catch-
22 if ever one existed.
Seeking a definitive answer on the birth-defect and miscarriage
questions, NIOSH in 1984 was planning a study of about 5,000 pregnancies
in a two-year period. Perhaps one-half of the women would use terminals.
And the study would tell if they had more miscarriages and children with
birth defects than did the other mothers. It would not pinpoint the cause,
however—justification for further study.
A possible culprit here is very low frequency (VLF) radiation from the
flyback transformer.
The transformer whips the cathode ray tube’s electron beams from one
side to the other of the phosphor-coated screen, then back again. Typically a
flyback transformer gives off radiation pulses at the rate of about 16,000
cycles a second, far below the AM radio broadcast band—hence, the term
VLF. Could pulses at this frequency have biological effects?
We don’t know about VLF. But a Spanish scientist named Jose Delgado
says even very weak pulses of extremely low-frequency radiation (ELF),
the term for below 300 cycles a second, have damaged chick embryos.
Some authorities question the “Delgado effect”; still, scientists in both the
U.S. and Europe are undertaking similar experiments. Trying to gauge the
possible risks from ELF, researchers may face certain technical
complexities. Some scientists talk about “windows” of power and

frequency. Just a slightly lower or higher frequency, for instance, might
mean the difference between safety and danger for expectant mothers.
Like it or not, the jury is still out on the low frequency issue, and some
companies may want to protect themselves legally—just in case—by
transferring pregnant women from VDTs. Ideally you’d coordinate this
policy with those regarding maternity leaves and other health benefits; then
a woman would feel free to tell you immediately about her pregnancy
instead of disguising it for as long as possible.
Even if radio frequency radiation is a culprit, there is some hope. Slesin
notes that the flyback transformer is on the side or back of a computer
monitor rather than in the front near the operator. That isn’t the best news
for someone sitting near the flyback transformer of a coworker’s machine,
but perhaps the VLF threat isn’t so great to someone without any other
VDTs nearby. “With the right office layout,” says Mark Pinsky, editor of
VDT News, “you might be able to greatly reduce exposure to VLFs fields.
And obviously the risk to home computer users might be less without
another machine around.”
Although VDTs have yet to be proven free of radiation risks, please note
that groups like 9 to 5 and the Newspaper Guild have been using at least a
few computers in their offices for several years. Don’t lie to your people
that there’s nothing to worry about; do point out that the risks are low
enough to justify computerization’s benefits.
“Can computer screens cause cataracts?” some employees might also
ask.
Probably not. A NIOSH study at the Baltimore Sun found no greater
number of cataracts among VDT users than nonusers (although the
researchers noted that the employees on VDTs averaged less than four years
at the tube—perhaps not long enough to suffer the cataracts).
To be sure, strong microwave radiation indeed can lead to cataracts. But
VDTs don’t give off microwaves, and no one has suggested that ELF and
VLF are responsible for cataracts. Maybe there are other causes.
Regardless, a certain percentage of people, some in their 30s or even late
20s, will always develop cataracts—whether or not they work in front of a
tube.

BACK AND MUSCULAR PROBLEMS

They are common—because, as mentioned earlier, some terminals force
you to choose between the best hand-keyboard distance and the optimal
eye-screen one.
And for the most part, the pains are avoidable.
Etienne Grandjean tells of a study in which 11 percent of fifty-three
people on data-entry terminals suffered neck problems; 15 percent, shoulder
troubles; 15 percent, problems in their right arms; and 6 percent, problems
in their right hands. The study also included fifty-five people in traditional
office work. No more than 1 percent suffered neck, shoulder, or right arm
pains, and none had problems with the right hand. Olov Ostberg and Ewa
Gunnarsson, two other European ergonomics experts, likewise documented
the frequent muscular pains from computer-related jobs. They found that
almost two-thirds of some fairly young clerks with a Scandinavian airline
reported such problems. In the United States, NIOSH, in its 1981 report,
also said terminal users endured more muscular and skeletal pain.
The outrage is that it’s unnecessary, almost always, now that ergonomic
furniture and detachable keyboards are on the market.
Don’t blame your people for their pain. Buy truly ergonomic products.
And don’t just buy for male executives or female typists, especially in
this age when more women are working.

PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLAINTS

NIOSH’s 1981 report observed that VDT operators showed dramatically
more anxiety and depression than people not on the tubes. The researchers
qualified their finding, however. They noted that many terminal operators
were in jobs more routine than those of the non-VDT people, increasing
psychological problems.
Could the machines themselves, however, have made some work more
routine?
For me computers mean less typing and more writing. For a data-entry
clerk, however, they may mean becoming part of what Grandjean calls “a
man-machine-system.” Not all workers object. Some, as Grandjean says,
“are proud to be included in the new work of modern technology.” But most
people would still favor the human touch, with or without a computer. “The
computer,” it’s been said, “is the ultimate unsupportive boss.” A Cleveland
office worker observed that another woman was “fast as the wind” on a

computer keyboard after ten years at it. “But,” said the worker, “it’s really
affected her personality. I used to wonder if something was wrong—she had
no exuberance. Once she said to me, ‘Rose, as soon as I sit down at that
machine in the morning, I feel I’m going to cry.’”[46]
“You know,” said a worker at an accounting firm, “when the boss brings
new clients through the office to show them around, he’ll point right to me
working at the word processor and say, ‘Here we have our wonderful new
LEXITRON,’ and then move right on. He doesn’t bother to introduce me—
just the machine!” Mightn’t he also have bragged about the operator? Can
you dismiss her as a whiner? Is it any surprise that on most days the woman
and two colleagues suffered headaches, shaky hands, jittery stomachs? “The
place looks gorgeous,” said a worker, “and that’s where the management’s
priorities lie. They’re not really as interested in efficiency as they are in
using people up and pushing them out the back door.”
According to Grandjean, psychological reactions to computers will differ
depending on:
▪ The type of work.
▪ The way the job is organized.
▪ The way it is introduced.
▪ Various personal attitudes.

To his list I would add “Surroundings.” A newspaper installed dark blue
panels, six feet high, around some VDT operators. The dark blue may have
cut down the glare, but at a cost. “All we see is the walls around us,”
lamented one, “and sometimes the supervisor. The isolation is terrible.”
Some employees might welcome isolation at times, especially a chance to
work at home; but here management seems to have unwittingly created
high-tech solitary cells.

EYESTRAIN

“I wore glasses before I came in,” said a claims processor with the
northeastern insurance office mentioned earlier, “and now I need a stronger
prescription. And I can’t even read a book anymore. Before I used to enjoy
reading,” she told me, “but now I can barely glance at newspapers.”
Many computer-ergonomics experts would scoff at the idea that the
woman’s work is blinding her. No one has convincingly shown that the
terminals cause a permanent deterioration in eyesight. There is, however,
some uncertainty. “We don’t know,” said my ophthalmologist when I asked
during an eye examination about long-term effects—and also when he
prescribed new glasses.
Most ergonomics experts would be more reassuring. They would say, for
instance, that, first, people’s eyes weaken naturally as they age, and you
can’t automatically blame the terminals. Second, terminals place more
demands on your eyes than reading does. VDTs, however, don’t
permanently harm eyes, according to a twelve-member panel of the
prestigious National Research Council (NRC) which is connected with the
National Academies of Science and Engineering. The NRC study, released
in 1983, said no evidence existed that VDTs could cause “anatomical or
physiological damage ... to the visual system.” The panel felt that the VDT
controversy should be a productivity issue rather than a health one. At the
very least, however, it’s a comfort one. Harry Snyder, the Virginia
Polytechnic Institute expert, in 1983 said that three-fifths of VDTs then on
sale were not even reasonably comfortable. Just consider, if nothing else,
the resultant productivity losses!
Even if the computer isn’t permanently blinding the northeastern claims
processor, it’s in a sense shortening her life. She has less time for the
reading she loves. Presumably, she would agree with the findings of a
NIOSH-sponsored study of San Francisco clerical workers. Ninety-one
percent of the ones on terminals reportedly complained of eyestrain, while
only 60 percent of the nonterminal users did.
How to reply to such complaints? Follow the lighting and glare
suggestions outlined earlier and consider rest breaks or alternating VDT and
non-VDT tasks. And educate your workers—ideally before you hire them.

Let them know you’re doing all you can to reduce the risks. “I have a
selfish interest in this, too, you know,” you can tell them once they’re
working for you. “The lousier your eyes get, the more errors you’ll make.
Which hurts me.”
Then hand them cards with a good ophthalmologist’s name on it—or
perhaps several possibilities—and say: “Make an appointment. We’ll pay
for it.” Why should a company invest thousands or millions of dollars in
computer maintenance without worrying about other work tools—
employees’ eyes? Have new employees’ eyes checked in these NIOSH-
approved ways, among others, during thorough examinations:

1. Refraction
2. Accommodation
3. Acuity
4. Color vision function
5. Degree of opacity of the lens
6. The possibility of a detached retina

Yearly, the doctor should test for refraction, acuity, and accommodation.
Make sure your health insurance covers bifocals and other glasses that
your employees wouldn’t need except for your CRT.

CRTs: Should They Go Down the Tube?

Yes. Not immediately. But sooner or later. CRTs are harder on the eye
than the better flat screens will eventually be, and although scientists
haven’t proved that CRTs are a radiation threat, the small possibility
remains.
These bulky antiques, however, have been to the computer establishment
what gas guzzlers were to Detroit. The CRT isn’t the most promising kind
of computer screen—just the most entrenched.[47]
Admittedly, CRTs have improved to the point where some pocket-sized
TVs can use them. But in compactness and low-power consumption, CRTs
will never rival the flat-screen displays.
“People will begin using flat-screen portables as regular desktops,” a
New York researcher correctly says.[48] Flat-screen computers may not be as
viewable now as the best CRT displays, but this may quickly change.
What’s more, flat-screen machines don’t hog desks as the Kaypro II-style
portables can. After all, the flat screens are essentially—flat. They don’t
need hefty transformers, moreover, and don’t burn out like old vacuum
tubes. CRTs are vacuum tubes. Low voltage is still another plus of most flat
screens. Not that CRTs are normally a shock hazard, but you’ll presumably
feel safer if you didn’t sit near a 20,000-volt gizmo flinging electrons
around inside some glass.
Also, as David LaGrande, an official with the Communications Workers
of America notes, flat screens may “eliminate the radiation danger, reduce
the risks for pregnant women.” And unless you spray a flat display with
radioactive material, it just won’t give you cancer.
Again, no one’s proved that CRTs will turn people’s bodies into tumor
farms. But why gamble? Your caution won’t hurt labor relations.
Flat screens, also, don’t flicker tiresomely as many CRTs do, and
someday they may boast more fully formed images than those from the
CRTs. So you might make fewer errors reading material from the screen.
The word “might” is important. Many liquid-crystal displays—LCDs,
like the wristwatch kind—showed much cruder images in 1984 than did
typical CRTs. The broken-up letters might bother you just like those from
the cheap dot-matrix printers.

Also, some LCDs offered horrid contrast between the screen background
and your typing.
That was as of late 1984. Even cheap LCDs in the future could do away
with the breakup and contrast problems. Already the Japanese are selling
color TVs with LCDs.
Perfected, LCDs could make computerized offices brighter and cheerier.
They don’t glow. Rather, they reflect light, just like paper, so you needn’t
darken the office. In fact, light helps.[49]
And if LCDs don’t fully pan out? There’s yet another choice—
electropheretic screens, which may offer decent contrast and even beat
CRTs’ sharpness. Here’s the theory. A magnetic charge pushes tiny particles
to the surface of the screens, and patterns of particles form images.
These gizmos will tax your battery less than some other flat-screen
displays do. And listen to this: when you turn an electropheretic off, it
remembers. The images on your screen don’t vanish.
Now, combine that wrinkle with memory chips that use next to no power
and can be running all the time. And what do you have? A computer that
will automatically shut off without harm if you didn’t tap a key after a
certain stretch of time. Just like a calculator. So—battery makers, beware!
There are still other alternatives to CRTs. One is the electroluminescent
screen—used on the Grid Compass portable—which glows and is sharper
than the LCD. Electroluminescents in 1984, however, were far too
expensive for the average computer buyer; the Grid was selling for $4,250,
and much of that was the cost of the display. A second failing of
electroluminescent screens is that they’re electricity hungry. You can’t
operate them with miniature batteries.
Another LCD alternative is the plasma panel, which glows with a gas
mixture consisting mainly of neon. Plasmas don’t flicker. The characters are
sharp; the contrast, excellent. But backup circuitry has been expensive; and
even small plasmas, with the accompanying electronics, cost several
thousand dollars in 1984—a far cry from a $150 CRT monitor.
To sum up, the main advantages of flat screens are their lightness, low
power consumption in most cases, safety, lack of flicker, and very likely a
better view in the long run. As of late 1984 the trade-offs (at least in the
case of LCDs) were:

▪ The broken-up, somewhat fuzzy letters and the low contrast between them
and the background.
▪ The need to have the display at just the right angle from you to get the
sharpest picture. This could get in the way if you were moving the LCD
to reduce glare.
▪ The comparatively slow speed with which letters or numbers appeared on
an LCD after you’ve typed.
▪ The general lack of full-sized 24-line screens with 80 columns. The Data
General portable debuted with 24 lines and a screen measuring 11 inches
diagonally—a welcome exception, even if the quality of the characters
still wasn’t good enough for heavy use.

Since many flat screens were on portables, there were other ergonomic
problems not related to the display technology per se. In late 1984, most
flat-screen portables lacked detachable keyboards. But the limitations of
LCDs were the main problems.
A reporter friend, banging out stories for his paper at times in the field,
told me he’s survived the 40-column, 8-line screen of the Radio Shack
Model 100 very well. But I’m not surprised. He’s also brooked that clunky
Select software, which gets in the way of corrections and insertions. Gene,
you see, apparently knows what he’s going to write—he needn’t watch the
screen as much. I wish I were as decisive. At any rate, what was right for
Gene wouldn’t necessarily be right for a clerk who’ll be at the keyboard
seven or eight hours a day.
No matter what hardware and software you end up with, don’t lose sight
of three goals, among others:

1. Getting the most work out of your people
2. Keeping them happy
3. Guarding your electronic files

Sometimes, alas, the easiest-to-use computers may be the ones most
vulnerable to computer crime and loss of important information—the
subjects of the next chapter.

Backups:

◼ IX, Window Shopping, page 343.
◼ X, Of Mice and Men—and Touch Pads, Touch Screens Etc., page 346.

10 Jewels that Blip

The words have a nasty metallic ring, as if to suggest helmeted
policemen with black jackets and billy clubs. Watch out: the “data security”
troopers are at the front door.
But a small business on the East Coast nowadays wishes it had enjoyed
more “data security.”
A fire melted its computer disks into plastic globs. The firm just missed
bankruptcy after losing several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of
information—everything from accounts receivable to tax records.
Scrambling to recover, salesmen leaned on customers for copies of old bills.
Arson? Maybe. A disgruntled worker may have short-circuited some
tangled wiring. Proof never came.
Either way, however, the incident was a powerful argument for “data
security”—the right kind.
It’s nothing more than trying to make sure that your computer and its
information are safe. This isn’t to advocate overkill. Don’t overprotect
nonsecrets or facts that you can easily duplicate; for instance, instead of
buying costly fireproof cabinets, you might simply keep backup disks at
another location—perhaps a more secure approach, anyway.
Why, however, do I say “trying” to make your computer and its
information “safe”? An ex-hacker, Ian (“Captain Zap”) Murphy, now a
computer security consultant, wisely observes: “You’re safe from average
crooks—they don’t envision a nice, mild-mannered human being working
at anything more than a souped-up typewriter. But you can never, never be
able to 100 percent secure a computer system. Even the most trusted user
could say, ‘F— the damn payroll,’ and destroy your records.”
But in the best of all worlds, your electronic files are safe, accurate, and
if need be, tamperproof and confidential. The equipment is sound. And so
are you and others working with it. You’ve shown good judgment. You’re
ideally safe not only from crooks but also your own blunders. You know

you often can’t keep paper copies of all your electronic jewels, your
treasured business files, at least not without giving up the conveniences of
computerization. You have faith, then, that your green screen, at your
command, will display the right blips. I’m stretching the meaning of the
word “blips” to emphasize the transitory nature of what you see on the
screen. Without your stashing it away on a disk or otherwise—and without
your making an electronic backup—it may be lost forever.
The unlucky owner of the East Coast company will never see his blips
again because he violated a major precept of data security. He stored his
original disks and his copies in the same room—the one with the fire.
“The remark at all times in cases like this is ‘Why didn’t the dealer tell
me?‘” says Harold Joseph Highland, a top computer crime consultant and
author of Protect Your Microcomputer System (John Wiley & Sons, 1984).
A store can only sell you a computer, not common sense. Nor can this
chapter impart it to you. It can, however, pound away at the elements of
data security—people, policies, hardware, and software. They go together,
these four. And so do the criminal and noncriminal parts of data security. If
you’ve lost control of your computer files and don’t know what’s normal,
you’ll hardly notice the abnormal. You’ll never thwart a computerized
embezzler, for instance, with a gun. You will with good software. Buy it and
errors in your electronic files may leap out at you. May. Remember
Canyes’s Law of Computing: “Sooner or later you’ll feel like killing
yourself.”
In other places I’ve written about good software and other mundane ways
to make yourself less suicidal. And here, too, you’ll read of everyday
calamities like coffee spilled on floppy disks. But this is also the fun
chapter, the one with the stories about errant whiz kids and a computer
crook who supposedly stole $8 million and got away with it.
Each of their sins met Harold Joseph Highland’s definition of a
computer-related crime. They were “committed using a computer as a tool.”
“In other words,” explains Highland, who has taught computer science at
the State University of New York, “you use the computer to get to financial
records. Or to get to software if you’re illegally copying software.”
Estimates of the size of the threat have ranged from the double-digit
millions up to over $5 billion a year. This uncertainty has sparked a feud
between the icebergers and some computer makers.

Highland is an iceberger. He says that reported computer-related crimes
are “just the tip of the iceberg,” that the annual loot is at least $750 million
and more likely reaches the billions. Another expert wrote a crime article
livened up with a drawing of the Titanic. Meanwhile, the Computer and
Business Equipment Manufacturers Association pooh-poohs all but the
more conservative estimates. “Computer crime is not now, never has been,
and never will be out of control,” an association official once said, “unless
security is completely ignored. And that is not going to happen.”
“If that’s your opinion, sir,” counters Captain Zap, the computer felon
now working as a security consultant, “why are fourteen-year-olds getting
on defense networks? And what about adult criminals doing their thing on
banks?”
Also, how about computer crimes against small business?
“No one’s going to find out why Joe Blow goes out of business,” says
Ken Churbuck, a New Hampshire lawyer and former computer engineer,
who believes that electronic crime may be the downfall of many more small
businessmen than supposed. “You think Joe Blow can afford an
investigation? You think anyone else wants to autopsy the corpse?”
Large business or small, however, don’t swear off computers and buy
quill pens for your accountants. You may or may not get robbed
electronically, but you’ll very possibly lose money if you cheat yourself of
the benefits of computerization.
Although computer crooks may be difficult quarry at times, at least you
can console yourself that they’re normally not geniuses.
Consider a story from Highland. The law caught up with one crook—
presumably more knowledgeable about computers than banks—after he
asked a teller to cash seven identically dated checks made out to him. The
embezzler had simply learned how to take advantage of a feature in the
check-printing program. It allowed checks to be reprinted in the event of
mistakes; only his stupidity offset this programming error.
“You don’t have to be knowledgeable,” Highland says. “You can be an
absolute idiot and try a computer-related crime.”
Some of the victims, alas, show their own streaks of naïveté. One small
business lost thousands of dollars to a bookkeeper who funneled it to
relatives’ firms via phony invoices. Such crimes happen with or without
computers. But the company begged for trouble here by retaining an
accountant old-fashioned enough to have felt at home alongside Scrooge

and Cratchitt. Computers baffled him but not the embezzler, who knew of
this vulnerability.
Executives at big corporations needn’t be smug about such grass-roots
examples.
Many large companies, for instance, have reduced the crooks’ risks in
computerized crime by auditing samples instead of everything—pulling one
hundred checks, perhaps, out of a batch of four thousand. The young man
trying to cash his seven duplicates worked for a large West Coast firm given
to quick and dirty sampling; just tote up the odds of catching him through
an audit if he’d been smart enough to go to different banks. Ideally, at least,
your system should flag quirks like the seven checks.
You can also complicate life for computer crooks by studying classic
cases of the past.
Mostly the criminals sinned with or against large computers. And yet
eternal truths linger on even in the micro-mini age. In fact, some mainframe
cases may mean even more to the desktop crowd today, with so many small
computers hooked up as terminals on large systems. You might also say
giant machines are acquiring plenty of pygmy siblings—joined Siamese
style with them at the brains. And the big and small machines aren’t just
wired together by phone or otherwise. Increasingly, mainframes are sending
electronic copies to micros outside data-processing departments. What’s
more, in power and capabilities, the pygmies are matching some big IBMs
and Univacs of yore.
So whether you’re using a $1,000 Apple or a $100,000 mini, you’ll come
out ahead knowing about the Golden Oldies of computer crime.
Computer consultants, especially Donn Parker, a prominent expert with
the SRI think tank in Menlo Park, California, have labeled various offenses.
[50]

Data Diddling

When a time-keeping clerk hoodwinked a railroad, he committed the
most tried-and-tested computer crime: data diddling.
That’s just jargon for fiddling with data before or during entry into the
machine.
The culprit’s duties included filling out time forms for three hundred
employees, and he learned that someone had shown a fit of
absentmindedness in setting up a computer system storing pay and hour
records. The railroad put workers’ names as well as their identification
numbers into the computer. But the machine used only the numbers to track
down names and addresses to print on checks. Manually processing the
forms, however, humans normally ignored the computer numbers. They
actually had the gall to think of the workers just by their names.
Wheels turned in the clerk’s head. Why not sneak in overtime pay by
using other people’s names on the paper forms but his own number for the
myopic computer? And so his income increased by several thousand dollars
each year.[51]
The clerk’s end came only when an auditor by chance looked over W-2
forms and asked why the railroad had been so generous toward the man.
Confronted, the clerk confessed. There’s a moral here: if you have a
timekeeping and payroll system, don’t rely on ID numbers alone. Attach to
them the first few letters of workers’ names. Also, include a cross-
comparison of names and numbers in your auditing procedure.
Today scattered terminals—or micros or minis used as them—make data
diddling as tempting as ever. A police officer in an eastern city told me
criminals had walked into the offices of used-car lots, sneaked in a few
minutes on terminals there, and altered financial records in a credit bureau’s
computer.
Forget about the mystique of computer crime. People have been diddling
credit bureau files for years by changing or deleting paper records.
Machines and lack of paper records in some cases just make their work
easier and faster.

The Trojan Horse

A comely woman at a New England firm was the victim of what might
loosely be called a computerized sex crime.
“She would be doing her electronic paperwork,” Tracy Kidder said in
Soul of a New Machine, “when suddenly everything would go haywire, all
her labor would be spoiled, and on the screen of her cathode-ray tube would
appear cold, lascivious suggestions.” Someone had electronically wheeled
in a Trojan horse—hidden unauthorized instructions in the computer’s
program.
The “sex crime” kept up daily for several weeks, leading an executive to
observe that the villain must have “the mentality of an assassin.” It was
unfair. Young computer whizzes at the company played horse pranks on
each other all the time. But this victim couldn’t strike back. Gallantly, the
woman’s bosses set electronic traps to learn from which terminal the
masher was mashing. The villain, though, was too nimble. “At one time,”
said Kidder, “he made his escape by bringing to an abrupt halt the entire
system on which most of the engineer departments relied.” Finally, one of
the woman’s protectors chatted casually with a suspect about the
computer’s wondrous vulnerabilities to pranks. The obscenities and glitches
stopped.
This Trojan horse was just a prankster’s, but the company may have
squandered thousands of dollars in human and computer time to kill it off.
Consider, too, the company—Data General, the mini maker that Kidder
admired.
Imagine a serious saboteur wheeling his horse into the computer of a
company without the same knowhow.
It happens. Donn Parker says Trojan horse tricks are “the most common
method in computer-based frauds and sabotage.” A horse, in fact, may have
shown up in the first federally prosecuted computer crime in Minneapolis in
the 1960s. A programmer told an IBM 1404 to drop an unflattering series of
bytes about his personal checking account—overdrawn.
Trojan horses are more of a mainframe and mini problem than a micro
one. Normally, professional programmers don’t run desktop computers.

But as computer literacy spreads, this might not matter so much, and
besides, unsecured micros make such easy nuts to crack. “They’re peanuts,”
Highland says, “not butternuts.” Most micro systems today lack electronic
console logs—requiring operator ID numbers—that some bigger computers
have to tell who did what on the machines. In other words, there’s no audit
trail. John Lewis, an FBI agent teaching a course on computer crime, told
me, “I can write a perfectly error-free payroll program on a micro, load it in
from a disk, and run it. But I modify one or two lines in there, saying,
‘When you find John Lewis’s name, add $1,000 to net pay.’” You can even
have the program zap the evidence immediately after the crime.
Significantly, too, you can reprogram a micro in a fraction of the time you’d
need on a mainframe.
And in the future the micros, while retaining their ease of programming,
will develop more electronic nooks and crannies in which to hide horses.
And what about the micros already hooked in at times with the big
computers or using down-loaded data from them? If a saboteur or con man
is giving fits to the giant machines, then the pygmy machines may suffer
along.

The Salami Trick

You just can’t make sense of your savings account statement. No matter
what you do, it’s a nickel off. You don’t, however, pursue the matter—not
over five cents.
All over your city your fellow depositors are thinking similarly.
A computer crook, meanwhile, is growing rich.
The nickels, dimes, whatever, add up. He works at the bank and has
programmed its computer to round interest downward, for instance, rather
than upward. The sliced-off money goes into a dummy account. From
hundreds of cheated customers, maybe thousands, he’s amassing enough
over the years for a new Buick. He may even have told the computer to
steal prudently and not clip anyone more than twice a year.
It’s the old salami trick, an MO of countless embezzlers inside and
outside the computer world—ranging from pudgy, fat-bottomed drones to
glamour figures in Hollywood and on Wall Street.
An amusing salami tale comes from Thomas Whiteside’s brilliant New
Yorker series on computerized crime. The name “Zwanda” did the crook in.
Programming for a mail-order sales company, he rounded down sales-
commission accounts and diverted the loot to a dummy account for a
“Zwanda.” The “Z” name made sense. The computer worked alphabetically,
and he could more easily guide the money to the end account.
“The system,” Whiteside says, “worked perfectly for three years, and
then it failed—not because of a logical error on the culprit’s part but
because the company, as a public-relations exercise, decided to single out
the holders of the first and last sales-commission accounts on its
alphabetical list for ceremonial treatment.
“Thus, Zwanda was unmasked, and his creator fired.”
Could Zwandas show up in your company’s microcomputer—not just
mainframes? Perhaps. It’s no less likely than the micro case mentioned
earlier in which the bookkeeper was paying bogus bills from his relatives’
firms.
Of course, in the case of a micro, the trouble probably will be not in the
way the program is written but in how it’s set. Most micros, after all, use
off-the-shelf software.

Superzapping

It’s named after the “superzap” program used on some large IBM
computers.
“Superzap” is known among the pros as a break-glass program, the kind
you use in emergencies to change or divulge the computer’s contents. It can
bypass all security controls. You can also think of superzapping another
way. The computer is a high-rise building, and this program is a master key
to all the apartments or offices inside. Pity the building manager if a thief
can counterfeit the key.
Donn Parker, the source of those comparisons, says a New Jersey bank
lost $128,000 to superzaps.
The crook was none other than the bank’s manager of computer
operations. He first superzapped legitimately to change errors in accounts as
his superiors asked. The main program wasn’t working—hence, the
superzapping. The bank was upgrading its computer system, the glitches
kept piling up, and the operations manager zapped again and again,
discovering the joys of ignoring the normal controls. The usual electronic
logs and journals just didn’t show his actions.
So, he decided, why not zap away the barriers to shifting the money to
the accounts of three friends?
The bank learned of the crime only after a customer saw that his own
money wasn’t adding up right.
Superzaps like this, of course, are simply special breeds of Trojan horses,
just as the salami tricks can be. Like the horses, the zaps aren’t so much a
micro crime now. They’re more of a mini and mainframe one, but watch out
for the future when garden-variety crooks are more learned and micros are
more like the bigger computers.

The Trap-Door Trick

A trap door—or back door—normally is just a shortcut into the
program, bypassing the normal security systems, meant as a debugging aid.
Once the writers have a program up and running, they should get rid of the
door. Large programs are so complicated that programmers sometimes
leave the doors in as an emergency way for them to get back in if the main
passwords are lost or the computer “hangs up.” David Lightman, the
teenage hacker in the movie WarGames, used the trap-door ploy to
penetrate a Defense Department computer and almost caused a nuclear
Armageddon.
In a real-life example mentioned by Parker, some automobile engineers
in Detroit called up a computer service bureau in Florida, found a trap door,
and could “search uninhibitedly” for privileged passwords.
“They discovered the password of the president of the time-sharing
company and were able to obtain copies of trade-secret computer programs
that they proceeded to use free of charge.”
The electronic thievery didn’t stop until the company found out
accidentally. And it never learned how many other crooks were rummaging
around inside the computer.
Once again, this form of crime isn’t so much a worry for the desktop set
as for those using bigger machines. At least for now.

The Logic Bomb

Heard the old joke about the Washington speech writer at odds with his
boss? It’s a favorite story among journalists and other wordsmiths.
The aide was tired of drudge work for a dumb, lazy but electable
congressman who didn’t even read the immortal prose ahead of time.
One day the politician, a square-jawed, movie-actorish man, was
mellifluously speaking on the House floor. As usual, he was fresh to the
material. But his rendition overwhelmed everyone, from the pols to the
pages, to the tourists in the galleries. He knew he was on his way to the
White House.
With actorlike polish he intonated through the third page, including the
last sentence:
“And now, let the words ring out, loud and clear, to all corners of the
earth—to our friends, to our foes, across every ocean, every mountain. You
purblind piece of excrement, I quit, and you’re on your own.”
The fourth page, of course, was blank.
Malicious programmers must nod and wink when they hear the story.
For the speech writer had just the right kind of temperament to hide a
logic bomb—a computer glitch that explodes, so to speak, only under
certain conditions.
The conditions in the Washington joke were clear. The congressman
mustn’t read the speech to himself beforehand—something inevitable. He
was dependably lazy. Nor must he understand the speech; no problem,
certainly, for he was dumb about everything all the time. Above all,
however, if this bomb were to “kill,” he must be embarrassable. And that’s
why the bomb in a sense just maimed him—because, like most politicians,
he never blushed.
In a real-life story told by Parker, a payroll programmer hid a bomb to
erase the entire personnel file if he ever got fired—that is, if his own name
ever vanished from it.

Simulation and Modeling

A crooked accountant embezzled a million dollars using simulation.
On his own computer he set up a mock version of the victim company’s
accounting and general ledger. Then he could figure out how his thefts
would show up on the company’s electronic books—and how to cover up
the crime.

Scavenging

A Texan ripped off oil companies through computerized scavenging.
He used a computer time-sharing service bureau, the same one as the oil
companies. This thief read scratch tapes—temporary storage tapes without
the safeguards protecting the main ones—by phone off the service’s
computer. He was stealing secret seismic information to sell to the oilmen’s
competitors.
Finally, however, the service bureau caught on.
A worker there had grown curious. Why did a red “read” light glow at
bizarre times? How come the customer was prowling through the tapes
before entering his own data? Parker says a “simple investigation” ended
the electronic scam.
Scavenging can be physical, too—nothing more complicated than
rummaging through old trash barrels for printouts.

Data Leakage

“Hidden in the central processors of many computers used in the Vietnam
War,” Parker says, “were miniature radio transmitters capable of
broadcasting the contents of the computers to a remote receiver.
“They were discovered when the computers were returned to the United
States from Vietnam.”
It was a data-leakage problem—defined by Parker and other pros as the
removal of data or copies of it from a computer or a computer center.
Culprits can even smuggle out secrets by hiding them in apparently routine
reports. “Data leakage,” he says, “might be conducted through use of Trojan
horse, logic bomb, and scavenging methods.”
You don’t have to be in the Vietcong or KGB, of course, to spy on a
computer by radio. Today a smart snoop can walk casually into your
computer area and leave behind a miniature transmitter—perhaps hooked
up to the maze of wires that snake under the floor of many modern offices.
“I could then find out everything that you were sending for a year,” says
Harold Joseph Highland, “which is the life of the unit I could transmit with.
I could buy it for
9.50 from any of the large supply houses. There’s one more expensive
that will transmit up to five miles away. With the forty-buck one I can park
across from the building and keep a tape recorder going.”

Wiretapping

Some say it’s rare in the computer world. The thinking goes, There are
easier ways to steal. Why tap when so often you can just call up your
victim’s computer and be greeted with a friendly electronic whine?
But don’t count on wiretapping not existing.
Your local radio store carries cheap equipment usable for tappers.
And electronic banking and new computer services will grow, making
wiretapping more tempting. A security consultant, J. Michael Nye, opened
an unlocked closet of the second floor of an office building in Hagerstown,
Maryland, and pointed to the telephone wires inside. “See these?” he asked
me. “They’re hooked up to a bank’s computer. If you wanted to change the
amount of money in a deposit, you could attach a portable computer and no
one might be the wiser.”
The wiretapping threat may increase because of the break-up of the Bell
system—as more and more repair people parade in and out of wire closets.
You might be able to get around the threat, or at least reduce it, by
electronically scrambling the messages you transmit over the phone wires.
For the moment, don’t let fear of wiretapping obsess you unless, say,
you’re routinely transferring millions of dollars via computer.

Piggybacking and Impersonation

It’s bone cold outside, the stranger looks harmless, and you let him in as
you unlock the doors of your apartment building one night. The next day all
the old ladies in the lobby are talking about a burglary.
You fret. Rightly. You may have let a criminal succeed in piggybacking
his way behind you into the building.
It’s happening, too, in computer rooms, which crooks use similar tricks to
enter.
That’s physical piggybacking. The electronic kind, rare, can happen this
way. You punch in a password or key on your terminal and hook up with the
computer, unaware that the piggybacker has a hidden terminal connected to
the same phone line. Perhaps you haven’t signed off properly. The computer
keeps the connection going, and the piggybacker “rides” on.
Impersonation is what it sounds like, and it can be physical or
electronic.
Leslie D. Ball, a Massachusetts consultant and college professor, once
illustrated computers’ vulnerabilities to such tricks. “Why is it more
difficult to rob a bank of $2,500 than to steal millions from its computer?”
he asked, and quickly answered the question.[52]
“During a security consulting project at an Atlantic City hotel,” Ball said,
“I spent the evening with an associate in the casino. At about eleven p.m.
we headed for our rooms, but the elevator stopped where the computer
center was located, and we decided to look around. The door marked
‘Computer Center—No Admittance’ was locked but had a bell beside it. A
computer operator opened the door when we rang, letting us in without a
word. For the next ten minutes we wandered through the center without
speaking to the operators on duty.” In effect, by acting as if they belonged
in the room, Ball and the associate were impersonating authorized people.
“Finally,” he recalled, “we said, ‘Thank you’ and left. They were lucky we
were not disgruntled heavy losers!”
A real impersonator, an ex-college professor named Stanley Mark Rifkin,
passed himself off as a bank branch manager to steal $10.2 million. He
bought diamonds in Switzerland. The law caught up with him only because,
like many bright, cocky computer crooks, he bragged. That wasn’t all.

“While awaiting trial,” Ball says, “he attempted a fifty-million-dollar
transaction from another bank. When apprehended, Rifkin told a reporter
that he thought he finally had all the bugs worked out.”
Rifkin was just another example of an ordinary man using legally
acquired skills to commit an illegal act.
However smart, and despite his background as a computer science
professor-consultant, he was hardly a genius. “Master criminal?” asked H.
Michael Snell, a publisher who’d dealt with him.[53] “I could sooner imagine
a smoking gun in the hands of Winnie the Pooh. In fact, Stan resembled
Pooh Bear: short, stocky, paunchy from too much good food and wine, a
deeply receding hairline above an intelligent, sloping forehead. Quiet,
unassuming, not the kind of guy who’d stand out at a cocktail party.” Rifkin
was good at puzzles, at problem solving, but as Snell and others agree,
that’s true of all talented programmers. You could say the same, too, of first-
rate accountants and engineers. Rifkin’s case made me think of Hannah
Arendt’s phrase about Adolph Eichmann, applied not to the Nazis but to
garden-variety crooks within the computer field: “the banality of evil.”
Rifkin’s take happened to be larger than most. But his mind-set was the
same.
Snell said, “He shared the dreams of many academics who feel blocked
from great success and wealth, and he loved ‘get-rich-quick’ stories, such as
a friend who struck gold in California real estate or the Silicon Valley’s
overnight millionaires.”
Greed, however, isn’t the only motive. “People who like computers are
games people,” John Lewis, the FBI agent, told me, “and they like
challenges. It’s ‘me against the machine.’ You give them a computer and
say you can do anything but that, and that’s the first thing they’re going to
do. You go back to the Book of Genesis in the Bible where God said, ‘You
can do anything in the Garden of Eden but eat from that tree,’ and what’s
the first thing people did?” We were in a windowless, fluorescent-lit room
at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where Lewis lectured on
computer crime. He looked at a fellow instructor, a tall, alert man who
started out in the bureau not as an agent but as a programmer. “I’ve seen
Ken get ahold of material. Like this one program that said it couldn’t be
copied. Now he didn’t care what the program did. The first thing he did was
copy it. Because they said he couldn’t do it. And he did it.”

I thought of John and Ken three weeks later when I picked up a copy of
Technology Illustrated magazine.
A stranger in Quantico, Virginia, it seemed, was dialing up the electronic
bulletin boards on which computer pranksters sometimes left messages. The
bulletin boards were a form of electronic mail. Callers could write out their
thoughts for friends or anyone checking up on the highest-numbered
entries. The mysterious computer dialer from Quantico, however, would
just read, never send. Aware of the FBI Academy’s location, one of the
pranksters posted a friendly suggestion on a board.
He invited the Quantico caller to subscribe to the TAP newsletter—said
to be “to phone phreaks what the Wall Street Journal is to stockbrokers.”
TAP stands for a group named the Technology Assistance Program, a
successor to Youth International Party Line (YIPL), whose own radical
pedigree goes back to Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies. “Al Bell” and Hoffman
started YIPL. It was a high-tech display of Hoffman’s Steal This Book
philosophy, there being, however, a serious problem, one shared by society
at large. The technocrats usurped the politicians.
They were, reportedly, “more interested in blue boxing Ma Bell than in
pushing politics.” Cheshire Catalyst, who was editing the TAP newsletter
when I talked to him, said, “You don’t have to be a phone phreak to read us
—but it helps.”
Lindsay L. Baird, Jr., a tough, no-nonsense consultant with famous
corporate clients, told me TAP was a serious threat. “They’re now using
micro systems to test the 800 numbers methodically to see which ones have
computers on them,” he said of some TAP people. The corporate computers
whine their strange mating call no matter who dials up, saying
electronically, “I am here, I am a computer, I am ready.” You might say
they’re like an unlocked, unattended BMW left with the motor running in
New York City. And Baird claimed, rightly or not, that TAP has some
political zealots mixed in with the technocrats and that they could indulge
in large-scale computer zapping over the next few years.
The TAPpers’ side was this: they illegally logged on to networks like
Telenet and the feds’ because they couldn’t stand seeing expensive
computer time go unused. “Nobody wants to pool it as a computer utility
and make it available to everyone because it would probably not make a
profit,” groused “A. Ben Dump” in the newsletter. Cheshire portrayed TAP
to High Technology as basically just pranksters, at least in his case. “Good

grief!” Cheshire once ghost-wired to a Telex machine; “I seem to have
reached Adelaide, Australia. This is just a computer hacker in the United
States out for a good time.” The TAPpers said they were against the Bell
bureaucracy, not America at large, and, in fact, censored an article
submitted to their newsletter telling how to build an H-bomb. “Among
other things,” Cheshire worried, “anyone using that technology is going to
take out the phone network.” I still wondered. Would TAP have printed the
article if a way existed to H-bomb the countryside without toppling any
microwave towers?

■ ■ ■

Hacking: An Addiction to Be “Squelched”?
With WarGames-style break-ins in mind, someone once called
hacking an addiction to be squelched.
That’s wrong. Hacking is more an addiction to be tamed.
The term “hacking,” perhaps born at M.I.T., just means someone
who hacks away at computer problems until he solves them. Many
hackers for some reason or another love Chinese food. Sooner or
later a computer-crime expert will link computer addiction to ODing
on monosodium glutamate.
Cheshire Catalyst is a prototypical hacker in many ways. He’s a
thin, bearded man in his twenties, extrapolite, who, when I saw
him, was in Washington for an aeronautics and space gathering
and wore a Space Shuttle tie and an Apple pin. His nickname
indeed came from the grinning, vanishing cat in Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland. Proudly he told me how his clock ran
counterclockwise. Cheshire said he hoped someday to meet
another backward-clock buff, Grace Hopper, a distinguished
military officer who helped give the world the COBOL computer
language.
Cheshire might find even more of a soulmate in Steve Wozniak,
the Apple cofounder, who is perhaps one of the world’s leading
hackers—in addition to having been a phone phreak in his time.
“Woz” and a friend snooped on computers across America. The
friend was John Drapper, a bearded, somewhat maniacal-looking

man who earned the nickname Cap’n Crunch because he used
prize whistles from cereal boxes to steal free long-distance calls by
way of a tone at exactly the right frequency. Later, Crunch wrote
the EasyWriter word-processing program used on the Apple and
later the IBM PC.
On balance Cheshire thinks that hackers do more good than
harm. “Let’s say you have money in a bank,” he says. “Wouldn’t
you rather that a hacker get into its computer than a criminal did?
He could warn the bank. If I had money at a bank, I’d feel safer
with hackers checking out security.”
Well, it depends. Some hackers are nothing more than electronic
vandals. Some are a privacy threat; they’re doing the equivalent of
spying on mail and tapping phones.
Still, talented hackers may become real assets to corporations.
They’ll care infinitely more about your computer system—and all its
quirks—than will programmers working nine to five for the money
alone. Just a little oversimplistically it’s been said that you can
befriend a hacker merely by supplying a computer with enough
RAM, encouragement, a long leash, and lots of chow mein.

■ ■ ■

The TAPpers, depending on your viewpoint, came across in Technology as
reassuringly or distressingly middle class. Cheshire at the time of the article
was teaching computer skills at a large corporation. “VAX-man”[54] worked
as a computer programmer, “The Librarian” as a systems analyst, and
another was, of all things, a middle manager for a defense contractor;
indeed, every member reportedly boasted a technical background. Most, I
suspect, perhaps nearly all, didn’t see themselves as criminals.
“We’re just an information service for the people,” said one.
Well, okay. Maybe it’s good that if G-men want to bone up on the latest
electronic tricks, they need only log on to hackers’ bulletin boards and read
the TAP newsletter. Still, how many crooks have the same idea?
TAP’s another indication that for the criminally greedy the “data cookie
jar,” as it’s been called, is out there.
Lindsay Baird scoffs at computer trade associations’ efforts to play down
the problem. And he fires back with statistics of his own. “I’ve worked on

thirty-five or forty cases,” he says, “and only one was reported to
authorities.” The loot ranged from $40,000 to $29 million. And Baird,
dismayed that some computer criminals’ sentences are more shoplifterlike
than adequate, jokes, “My wife tells me I ought to commit a crime.”
“The security problems with computing systems in the 1960s was like a
balloon deflated,” he says, “and you could hold it in your hand. But now it’s
like a huge balloon inflated. Or a big bowl of Jell-O.
“You just can’t handle it now, and the manufacturers have got to be
concerned.”
Of course you should remember that most corporate data are far from
sensitive, that only the most self-important executive would view
everything as a national-security secret. Also, Baird is hardly hurting his
bank account in sounding the computer-crime alarm. Still, he’s basically
right in saying that computer buyers with sexy data of interest to thieves
now may have three choices:

1. Burden programmers and others with electronic versions of heavy
padlocks.
2. Keep their computer systems easy to use—and vulnerable. (“Then you’re
going to get raped.”)
3. Compromise. (“You get half raped.”)

Baird doesn’t blame just the manufacturers for some computers’ sievelike
leaks. “Business isn’t willing to pay the price to secure systems,” he says—
a complaint echoed in effect by the Computer and Business Equipment
Manufacturers Association (CBEMA). It acknowledges the present clash
between security and ease of use of computer systems. “If a computer could
be designed with various levels of security as options, computer security
might well be a marketable commodity,” said a statement from CBEMA to
a trade magazine. In recent years there has been much more research in this
area, and when 32-bit micros become the norm, it will be much easier to
beef up security.
When crimes do happen on existing systems, they’re often covered up by
top executives panicky over going to court or jail.
How’d you like to be the chairman of a corporation faced with an ugly
data-security scandal—and the possibility of a stockholders suit? You
needn’t be in the scandal personally. Your stockholders could charge you

with malfeasance, if not misfeasance, for letting it happen. So could the
Securities and Exchange Commission and other feds. When companies
hush up computer crimes, it’s not necessarily for high-minded reasons such
as protecting assets by playing down vulnerability to electronic crime.
Consider Baird’s experiences.
Called to a New England firm to do routine theft prevention, Baird
merrily put himself on the payroll—not to steal but to demonstrate system
weaknesses.
“I also,” he says, “nicked the vice-president for participating in a
$400,000-a-year kickback.”
At another company, an accounting firm did the books at year’s end and
had to make an adjustment of $1.2 million. “Then,” said Baird, “we went in
some more and really did a number on that company. And we came up with
$4.5 million in proven losses. And it all had to do with their computer
system.”
But, you’re wondering, how about that crook who stole $8 million and
got away with it?
The story—perhaps apocryphal but told in the sedate Smithsonian
magazine—is that bank officials confronted the thief in a restaurant over
breakfast.
He coolly confessed. If they tried to jail him, why he’d blow the whistle
on the bank’s vulnerable computer system. And it would cost more than $8
million to fix.
So the bank officials just asked him to step down quietly.
Leaving the table, the crook smiled.
“I’ll keep the eight million,” he said, “but I’ll pick up the tab for
breakfast.”
Definitely, then, Donn Parker was on target when he once called
computer security “first and last a people problem.”

People and Policies: Working with the Right Ones

Honest, loyal employees are more important than the latest security
gizmos. Use common sense. Beware of the $26,000-a-year programmer
who suddenly acquires a posh home and a sports-car collection. Don’t pry.
But don’t shut your eyes, either.
Start with a sensible hiring policy. Decide on the questions you want to
ask applicants and their references—about the prospective employees’
backgrounds and characters. Then bounce them off your legal department.
The rule of thumb is that you won’t get in trouble if the questions are
related to the job. IBM has said it doesn’t even ask applicants about their
ages or marital statuses. If there aren’t legal obstacles, you might invest $25
in a credit-bureau check of a keypunch clerk but perhaps several hundred
dollars for a top programmer. Keep in mind the notorious lack of reliability
of many reporting services. Check for criminal records when hiring for
responsible positions. A Maryland hospital didn’t. It hired a convicted
embezzler, a computer operator who later diddled $40,000 out of the
system.
Granted, there are occasions when you might knowingly hire an ex-con
to give him a chance. But ask the normal questions. What’s he done to
justify your trust since his sentencing? What are your risks? How much
could he steal, and how?
Whomever you hire—ex-cons, Harvard grads, or combinations of the
two—know how to respond to the common criminal motives.
Jay BloomBecker, a top computer crime expert, sums up one of the main
motives by quoting the title of a collection of Doonesbury comic strips: But
the Trust Fund Was Just Sitting There.
Reduce the temptation. Let your people know there’ll be surprise audits
—and mandatory vacations. A thief busy slicing salami might be loath to
take too much time off, lest his or her replacement catch on to what’s
happening. Likewise, consider rotating duties every few months and also
divvying them. People who write checks with computers, for example,
ideally won’t be the ones approving them; in a small business, of course,
this might not be possible.

The old need-to-know policy, of which the military is so fond, may also
increase the criminals’ risks—by increasing the need for collusion. This,
too, isn’t always possible, and it could boomerang. If employees aren’t
supposed to know what their colleagues are doing, maybe a thief would
actually have less chance of being noticed.
Also, tell people that stealing—even small amounts from a large
company—will hurt. If you can’t prove how it will hurt the corporation
noticeably, then you’d better make a good case that it will hurt them.
Pretend you’re a department store warning the nimble fingered: “All will be
prosecuted.” Well, within bounds. You needn’t fire and prosecute a thirty-
year man because he once used a company micro to calculate his average
golf score.
But do remind your employees of the applicable theft-of-service laws,
larceny ones, and others.
Not that electronic theft is your only problem. Whiteside tells of a
computer-ridden North Carolinian, working for an insurance firm, who
reportedly shot a handgun several times at the hated machine. And Harold
Joseph Highland offers another cautionary tale. Executives at an East Coast
firm fired a crabby woman, then returned the next Monday to find its
floppies sliced apart with a paper cutter. They never proved her guilt.
Regardless, someone moved the blade up and down, costing the company
several hundred thousand dollars in time reentering the paper versions of
the records into the computer. And that doesn’t even include the orders
canceled by customers angry over the delay. In yet another story, a
disgruntled worker short-circuited a terminal by urinating on it.
“Hire well,” says Jack Bologna, an expert on the “people” side of
computer security, summing up ways to avoid such traumas. “Pay fairly,
praise people for good work, give them opportunities for advancement, and
make them feel comfortable talking over their problems.”
Remember that the line can fuzz between outright sabotage and simple
sloppiness induced by poor morale.
If there’s a disaster and you’re not sure if it’s accidental or deliberate,
however, don’t be too quick to point your finger. You may find it chopped
off with a lawsuit filed by your suspect, perhaps for less than $1,000, while
your firm must spend several times that to defend itself. Unjustified
accusations, also, hurt morale and may even add to security problems.
And if you do prove theft or sabotage?

Act. Don’t cover up. Rather, cover yourself—legally. Tell your boss what
happened. If you’re mum and someone else reports the crime, your superior
may consider you among the guilty. Also, don’t discount the possibility that
your boss may himself be either guilty or a part of a cover-up because he
fears a stockholders’ suit. You may have no choice but to report him to his
boss. Press for an independent audit committee if you’re powerful enough
and if the size of the crime justifies one.
Should you fire someone for a computer-related offense, do it artfully.
“If they’re in a critical job position, help them clean out their desk,
collect their ID card and any office keys, and walk them to the door or to
the personnel department,” says Timothy A. Schabeck, who edits Corporate
and Computer Fraud Digest with Jack Bologna. The FBI’s Lewis says as
much.
If you do prefer instant firing, follow Schabeck’s advice to provide
counseling and severance pay. And soften the blow, too, by warning
everyone, when hired, that your axes are quick and sharp.
Mightn’t instant firing, however, be brutal, anyway? Well, it depends on
the amount of damage that a discharged employee could inflict and on how
vindictive you perceive him to be. Ideally, you could minimize the damage
by having backup disks or tapes out of the your victim’s reach. Also
consider how successfully you can keep the fired employee from returning
to your computer—by ruse or otherwise? Is your office absolutely
physically secured? Can you trust guards or janitors working weekends not
to admit a familiar face?
It’s all a part of bridging the gap between policy and practices.
Don’t just wait until a crime to make your staff security conscious.
Too often, warns James A. Schweitzer, a Xerox security expert, people
protect information only if it’s on paper. He says, “There have been a
number of cases where tapes and disks have mysteriously disappeared from
places like desktops.” If need be, designate an employee to make sure
others have locked up right by the end of the day. In less than a minute,
using a floppy disk, a thief may duplicate hundreds of times as much
material as he could on a paper copier.
Worry, too, about your people’s use of modems—the gizmos that
transform your computers digital output into a whiny sound for the phone
lines.

Don’t let them routinely keep sensitive material on disks that will play
back to savvy criminals who happen to dial in.
This especially applies to Winchesters. They’re the oxide-coated
aluminum disks that remain in the machine housing them, and they stash
away many times the amount of information on most plastic floppies. Now
imagine the delights awaiting a thief or snoop. Via your auto-answer
modem he could rifle thousands of pages of Winchestered documents. Such
electronic robberies needn’t happen, but until businesses get burned this
way, they will. So if you’re sharing an electronic spreadsheet or mailing list
with your branch office, do so if possible at a prearranged time during
business hours when you know who’s calling. Tell your people to do the
same.
You’ll also need a privacy policy—internal and external. Do you, for
instance, want salary information on a Winchester disk that any of your
company’s computer-users could read? And how about employees’ health
records? Good data security should protect your people as well as your
company. So limit your computerized records to the essential and tell your
executives not to use their home computers to bypass privacy laws.
Worry, too, about an external-privacy policy. Are you respecting the
rights of your customers, including those, who, by computer, may be
transmitting to your company their electronic jewels?
It isn’t just decency you want; it’s also good protection against suits,
whether from people or client companies.
Here again, set a firm policy against your people misusing their personal
micros. Alan F. Westin, a Columbia University professor of public law and
government, correctly warned in Popular Computing, “A financial officer
of a bank might store information about the life-style, habits, sexual
preferences and other personal behavior of large individual borrowers or
key corporate executives.” The banker might do this behind customers’
backs to help decide who was “stable” enough for loans.
You’ll also need a policy covering employees who use your computers
for, say, maintaining their church’s bingo books. Why not let them? It isn’t
the worst public relations. Some companies even allow their employees to
play games after hours, tapping into company systems from home, and you,
too, might experiment with this, provided it won’t add to your data-security
problems. Better a fringe benefit than a crime.

On the other hand, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Can you
estimate how much this extracurricular use of your machines costs in wear
and tear—in, eventually, replacement costs? Feel your employees out on
this one if you’re running a small business or hold sway over a large one.
Would they rather enjoy computer privileges or better health insurance?
You might offer cafeteria-style fringe benefits, with computer use as one of
the options. Employees not selecting this choice might have to agree to it,
anyway, if you discovered them using a company computer for personal
purposes. This problem, of course, may lessen as the prices of small
computers plummet and their capabilities grow.
Whatever the form of potential crime—theft or otherwise—keep
remembering one of the basics of data security: It should cost neither more
money nor morale than justified.

Hardware and Software

Now for advice on finding the most crookproof computers and programs.
Buy a micro with 16- or 32-bit word lengths and RAMs of 256K or more.
Those specifications will let you use more elaborate codes to protect
information. What’s more, they might be less cumbersome than codes on an
8-bit machine. Look, too, for electronic design that lets your computer
establish privilege levels—reachable through passwords. That way, Sally,
the new secretary, can start out getting into the computer only for word
processing. Helen, the payroll clerk, can have access to confidential salary
information but not a top-secret budget that doesn’t give her the raise she’s
been pestering you about. Questions exist about the effectiveness of
passwords and codes, at least when the thieves or snoops may be
sophisticated, but that’s another story. Most experts will tell you that
anything that can be coded can be cracked. The trick is to make it not worth
the criminals’ time and resources. Of course, the best safeguard is still the
simplest: locking up the disks and computer after you or your people are
through.
New minis, by the time you’re reading this, may all be 64 bit or higher.
They adapt to codes—and fancy electronic logs showing the kind of work
done on them—more easily than do micros. And they might justify other
costly security measures. Suppose, for instance, you want to follow the
many government agencies’ examples and pen in the tiny radio waves that
computers emit so that eavesdroppers can’t pick them up with sensitive
receivers. A micro fortified this way might cost perhaps $10,000. “What’s
the sense of doing that for what’s essentially a throwaway computer?” asks
Harold Joseph Highland. The “throwaway,” be assured, is an exaggeration,
but his point comes through.
Of course, don’t forget the disadvantages of minis.
Most machines at the mini level or above need professional
programmers, and that’s bad news if you’re trying to stay in complete
charge of your business.
Also, minis, because of their expense, normally won’t pay for themselves
unless they have at least several terminals.

And the more terminals you have, the more “doors” through which
crooks can “walk.”
Still, you normally shouldn’t let security alone determine if you end up
with a micro or with a mini. Remember the warning earlier in this chapter
that security costs shouldn’t overwhelm you. How often, for instance, is
your information so sensitive that you’re worried about criminals lurking in
the bushes with the elaborate equipment needed to make sense of the tiny
waves your computer emits? Your data might not even justify use of codes.
I myself haven’t the slightest need for codes, user-privilege levels,
anything other than locking up my disks, since I’m essentially a small
businessman who is the sole operator of a micro.
Even the FBI doesn’t really worry about security on some computers. At
the time I visited the agency’s academy in Virginia, several little Radio
Shack models were purring away there—the same kind you’d buy off the
shelf. The micros’ software had passwords, but some agents could bypass
them, anyway, which wouldn’t be necessary, of course, since, in this case,
the FBI wants the machines to be used.
Before saddling yourself with fancy electronic precautions, do see if a
security service, a good, heavy safe, a locked room, or a burglar alarm
would work instead. And what about simply carrying home some duplicates
of your most important floppies? That possibility will become increasingly
attractive as the disks’ storage capacity increases. This isn’t to say, however,
that you should store Exxon’s major corporate secrets in a dirty unlocked
drawer next to old underwear. But a small businessman might consider
taking his backup disks home.
If you buy a safe for your office’s disks or tapes, think about fire
protection. Check with your fire department. What makes of safes could be
in the middle of the flames without the disks suffering temperatures of more
than 115 degrees Fahrenheit?
Investigating locks and burglar alarms, you’ll learn that your computer
may be able to protect itself. How? Some gadgets can let only card-carrying
employees—your people with magnetic cards—enter a room. And they can
tie into the computer to save you money. The same applies to burglar
alarms. Of course, you might want nothing fancier than a strong lock
bolting your computer to a heavy table. Don’t spend more than the data are
worth to replace.

You might also consider a guard service. The problem is that salaries add
up even for quick nighttime checks.
After a few months or a year, you may be well on your way to having
shelled out the cost of an elaborate electronic security system. Guards
normally would be more appropriate for users of large minis and
mainframes than for desktop types.
One advantage of physical security—most any kind—is that it can
protect the computer equipment itself, not just your electronic files.
You’ve undoubtedly read of theft of computer chips from Silicon Valley
firms. Now be prepared for reports of widespread computer theft,
eventually, as the market grows for both legally bought and fenced
merchandise. With computers shrinking in size, they may well be an even
hotter item for fences than stolen Selectrics. Even Apples several years ago
were too intimidating to a burglar, like the one who stole the silverware of
an acquaintance of mine but passed over his computer. Be assured, though,
that crooks are increasingly computer literate. There’s even talk of the mob
moving into computer crime, raiding government files, and, presumably,
engaging in less challenging illegalities, like setting up computer-fencing
rings.
With computer crooks in the future being smarter and more organized,
you should think hard before depending on simply passwords or codes to
protect you.
First, assume that at least some people may try to unravel your puzzles. A
whole generation of prodigies right now is practicing by copying the
supposedly uncopyable computer games on disks. In effect, notes
Churbuck, the New Hampshire lawyer, each disk provides two puzzles. One
is the original game. The other is the puzzle of figuring out how to make
illicit copies. And at the University of Western Ontario, Prof. John Carroll
surveyed students in two advanced computer courses and found that one-
third had sought free, illegal computer time. It’s been pointed out that the
very best, the very brightest, students have too many legitimate
opportunities—on large systems—to worry about pillaging small
computers. And that may be true. But by the late 1980s or early 1990s,
some journeyman criminals may develop among the second-raters.
Second, don’t shrug off a warning from R. E. (Bob) Kukrall, author of
the handbook Computer Auditing, Security and Controls: “Cracking a
computer system’s defenses may be about as difficult as doing a hard

Sunday crossword puzzle.” He says that thieves managed in minutes to call
up computer files that were protected by a five-digit code number. They just
programmed the computer itself to try each of 100,000 combinations.
“In effect the speed and capabilities of the computer were used to violate
its own security,” Kukrall said in TeleSystems Journal.

■ ■ ■

How the National Enquirer Gets Some Security along with
Bargain Communications
Some National Enquirer reporters send in stories via computers,
but there’s little danger of rival tabloids spying on the computer
collecting the articles.
The reason? There’s no receiving computer, actually—just an
auto-answer modem rigged up to a dot-matrix that spews out
paper copies at several hundred words a minute.
The modem and printer can’t send messages or relay stories
elsewhere. But who needs that—not when some computer-smart
National Star reporter might give his eye teeth to find out what the
competition is up to?
To be sure, the scheme has some problems:

● The Enquirer can’t transfer the reporters’ stories to a computer
there for editing, since they are on plain old paper but not in an
electronic format. Editors, however, heavily rewrite the original
stories. Capturing reporters’ key-strokes for the typesetter
wouldn’t help as much as at an ordinary newspaper.
● Theoretically someone could still steal the hard copy (just as
he or she could sneak off with a floppy disk).
● The system isn’t secure against telephone tappers who could
translate the modem whines.
Still, the system is dirt-cheap. If knowledgeable, you could
probably replicate it for less than $500 for the printer and
modem. And you could send to it with just a $400 lap-sized
portable.

Beyond that, the Enquirer’s arrangement may be safer than
leaving an unprotected computer on the phone to collect
unencrypted files.

■ ■ ■

Then there’s the Dalton school case in New York City in which the four
culprits, age thirteen, violated silicon sanctity hundreds of miles away. The
feds caught up with them before they could steal Pepsi Cola, by coaxing an
order out of a warehouse. But another computer didn’t fare so well. The
thirteen-year-olds destroyed more than one-fifth of the 50 million bits in the
machine’s memory, inspiring a magazine writer to call them “electronic
Huns.”
More recently, the 414 Gang out of Milwaukee—named after their
telephone area code—broke into computers across the country. These half-
dozen or so high school students, tapping on home micros, broke into more
than sixty computers and among other things they:

▪ Hooked up with a VAX 11/780 at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New
York. Eighty hospitals across the U.S. were using the computer to help
treat hundreds of radiotherapy patients.[55]
▪ Broke into an unclassified computer at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory.
▪ Penetrated a Security Pacific Bank computer in Los Angeles. That may
not have been so much a challenge. The account name and password both
were “SYSTEM”—a word that many computer manufacturers routinely
put in new machines and that their customers often forget to take out.
“TEST,” “DEMO,” and “MAINTENANCE” are other old standbys.
If teenagers can wreak Attilan havoc and snoop on a bank computer, then
think of adults.
So use passwords and codes, knowing their vulnerabilities. Try, anyway,
to give computer crackers a good challenge by avoiding use of obvious
passwords like street names or those of wives or children. Consider a two-
level password; also, maybe one with two words of pure gibberish; that’s
what CompuServe does. And, obviously, purge the computer of standard
passwords in the “SYSTEM” vein.
If your system permits dialing in through a modem, see if it can limit the
number of tries that people can make before the modem hangs up the

phone. Your dial-up computer should send its name until the caller has
given the right ID. Be careful of overly helpful prompts that lead callers on
to the next step. “A prompt saying, ‘Hi! This is the Last National Bank
Disbursement Department,’ sort of gives the game away, doesn’t it?” says a
Creative Computing article laying out precautions. Also, change passwords
regularly. And if an employee’s leaving? Change the access codes.
Here’s what I’d ponder if shopping for a password or encryption system:

1. How hard, exactly, would it be to puzzle out? Just how many
combinations would a computer cracker have to try? Could he easily do
this through his own machine—or yours? You might want to consult a
cryptography expert to learn how much of a challenge this particular
program would be. You’d be surprised. You may see the manufacturer’s
claims instantly deflated.
2. How compatible is the program with your computer? If security is so
important, choose the protective software first, then the hardware—
assuming, of course, that it will run your applications programs.
3. Is the security program easy to use? If it’s too hard, it’ll be self-defeating.
“Ease of use” would include how much time the security software adds to
your normal tasks.
4. Are you certain the program won’t jeopardize the accuracy and
completeness of your files by making you more accident-prone?
5. Should you expand your system, will the security software be able to
grow along?
6. Do you want a public key encryption system? It works this way. You
pass out a code that people can use in sending messages to you. Only you
have the means to unscramble them, though.
7. Will your code be based on the Data Encryption Standard (DES),
published by the U.S. government and repeatedly tested by the National
Security Agency (NSA) and the National Bureau of Standards? To this
day the rumors persist that NSA has built in a trap door to snoop on DES-
style codes. True? I don’t know. Captain Zap says, “I don’t trust it. I don’t
think NSA would have approved it if they couldn’t crack it.” NSA-
approved codes are overkill in all but the most sensitive systems.

Telenet has a special interest in encryption software. It is the network into
which thousands of computer users dial to reach other machines and

services like The Source.
In 1984 Telenet claimed to be the first public network offering encryption
software—a package for the IBM and clones that uses the public-key
method and sells for somewhere under $600.
“You have a directory that has all the public keys in it,” said Claudia
Houston, Telenet public affairs manager, explaining the Phasor software’s
operation. “You look up the guy’s key that you want to send a message to.
You punch that key and your message gets encrypted.”
For a two-page message, a Telenet man says that might take thirty
seconds. Then you’re ready to send over the phone lines. Even if someone
wiretaps you, theoretically, he won’t be able to puzzle out your secrets.
MCI Mail also offers encryption—through a customized version of a
popular communication program—and other electronic networks will
undoubtedly follow suit.
“Black boxes,” or hardware that scrambles messages, might likewise
help; the topic is too complex for me to cover here in the detail it deserves.
This equipment usually costs well into the thousands. One security expert,
J. Michael Nye, even puts out a consumer’s guide to black boxes.[56] A good
black box could be just a special modem with scrambling circuits built in.
“If no one else produces a good, low-cost modem with encryption,” says
Nye, “I might start doing it myself.”

■ ■ ■

Captain Zap’s Wisdom on Protecting Your Dial-up
Computer
The Captain and friends stole—via computer connections—over
$100,000 in goods and $212,000 in services, including a $13,000
Hewlett-Packard minicomputer. He received a $1,000 fine and two
and one-half years’ probation, with fifteen hours a week community
service.
Far from being 100-percent antiestablishment, however, Zap is a
Philadelphia Republican fond of wing tips. (“They show good
breeding.”) And a computer security consultant, a client, praises
him as “a damn good technician.” A computer-crime expert named
Jay BloomBecker isn’t so keen on the use of e×-criminals in

security: “There are a lot of people just as bright who have stayed
within the law.” Regardless, Zap has some good tips for security-
minded computer users, especially those with dial-up machines.
Among them:

▪ Don’t think of computers as gods. “Remember, there’s just
another human at the other end.”
▪ Spread out your computer numbers; you might even use different
telephone exchanges. Don’t have numbers adjacent to each
other—like 555-1212 next to 555-1213. If you do, your
computers will be easier targets for hackers with WarGames-
style dialing programs that scan local exchanges for computer
numbers.

That’s good advice from Zap. In the same vein, even if you have
just one micro, you might consider trying to get a phone number in
an exchange miles from your actual location. You might even want
to use a tie line to another city. It all depends on whether you think
the costs would justify the added protection; for many businesses
they wouldn’t.
Also, you might keep your modem number secret from people
who don’t need to know. A Hollywood director, fearful that
computer-smart science-fiction fans might tap into his dial-up
machine, used such a precaution. Only he and his regular callers
knew the number. His super-secretive approach obviously wouldn’t
have worked in a typical business, especially one with many phone
lines coming in. Also, nothing’s foolproof; suppose an electronic
snoop unlocks your building’s wire closet.

▪ If possible, use modems faster than 1,200 baud. Then, says Zap,
“most hackers’ modems can’t keep up.” Most small computers’
modems transmit at 300 baud, about 300 letters or numbers a
second.
▪ Remember that hackers can be ingenious. “Don’t be smug just
because you have a dial-back modem. That’s a device that
makes callers tap out a special code, and then it rings them back
at their authorized location. You can get around it by tying into

the central office and setting up a three-way call—without
anyone hearing you. I know hackers can set up three-way calls.
I’ve done it myself.”
▪ Protective devices, however, are better than nothing at all.
“Despite their limitations, I’d still install a call-back arrangement
or a device that asked you for a code—or maybe a combination
of the two. A combination usually would be much better.”
▪ Don’t get hung up on protecting your dial-up computer with just
hardware or just software—use both. “Black boxes can help
keep the wrong people from breaking in. But you also need good
security software to control how deeply even authorized people
can get into your computer. You want some people—like
customers—to have only partial access to the goodies inside
your system.”
▪ Watch what you throw away. “Some hackers can log onto your
dial-up computer after first poking through your trash—for
printouts with passwords and similar material.” Another hacker
jokingly refers to “The Dempster Dumpster Library.”

■ ■ ■

Don’t lose track of security threats around your office itself while worrying
about modems and encryption. Would you believe that you can’t absolutely
erase an electronic file—say, a letter or report on your disk—just by
following the directions in your software? A snoop might recover the
information with a special program like Disk Doctor. Luckily, however, you
can zap a sensitive file by magnetically “writing” over its part of the disk.
Say you want to wipe out a letter 500 words long, File A. Well, do the
following:

1. See if your disk has a file at least 500 or 600 words long. If so, make a
copy. If not, type out a file that long. I’ll call this new file “B.”
2. “Write” File B’s contents under A’s name. “Overwrite” in other words.
3. Erase A.

To really erase an entire disk? Well, don’t depend on your computer’s
“copy” program or “format” program. Instead, just sweep a magnet over it
—within a quarter inch or so.[57]

So much for the James Bond kind of data security. Now on to coffee
spilled on floppy disks.
Whether it’s coffee or Coke, unless you’re careful, you’re possibly going
to be your own biggest data-security threat. Just ask people like Betty
Cappucci, a quality-control manager with the Dennison Kybe Corporation
in Kopkinton, Massachusetts. “Most of the time,” she says of returned
disks, “it isn’t the disk—it’s spit or fingerprints. All you have to do is look
at offices with people eating their lunch near their computers.”
“We see disks coming back with cigarette ashes and coffee stains,” said
Jack Fitzgerald, who at the time was a field engineer with another disk
maker.
And it isn’t just the very smallest computer users who abuse their disks.
“The big problem in computer facilities,” he says, “often is cleanliness. I’ve
been to a large investment firm in New York City and seen apple cores on
the floor, Big Mac containers near the disks. And yet they were complaining
of data-loss problems.
“This was a major investment firm with all sorts of ads on news
programs and football games about how carefully they protected your
money,” says Fitzgerald. “No investor lost money in this case because the
firm at least had backup disks. But the company itself lost thousands of
dollars of processing time—money they could have spent helping their
investors earn more.”
A programmer with a Florida accounting firm, however, didn’t even have
a backup when his disk crashed on a large computer.
“He was actually crying on the phone,” Fitzgerald recalls. “He had lost
two disks. And he was willing to pay $20,000 to get data off them. His job
was on the line.
“I’ve had disk crashes myself,” Fitzgerald says, discussing his off-hours
work on his micro. “I was developing a small game similar to Space
Invaders. I lost power on my computer and about three hours of work. I
ignored one of my basic rules, which is to back up about every 20 lines—
make a copy on a second disk.” Captain Zap’s rule is, “Every fifteen
minutes, save on both disks.” That’s extreme. Like all forms of security,
apply this in relation to the trouble it would take to recover a loss.
Even Paul Lutus, famous in the industry for his work developing Apple
software, has a scary crash story.[58]

He’d toiled to develop a new program, of which he took two copies to the
company. An electronic glitch cost him one of the copies. The sun melted
the other. It seems that Steve Jobs, an Apple cofounder, had put the disk
under the windshield of his car. “I ended up very carefully prying apart the
case of Jobs’s copy and switching the floppy disk inside to another case so
we could recover the programs,” Lutus says. “I haven’t always been so
lucky.... For me the biggest drawback to personal computing is the quality
of the mass storage. I dislike floppy disks intensely.”
Here’s how you can help your floppies and data survive threats more
immediate—sloppiness and stupidity:

1. Zealously enforce a no-drinking, no-eating policy around disks, at least if
trouble develops.
2. Remember the Rothman Dirt Domino Theory. Dirt, dust, and grease
often can sneak up on your floppies indirectly, in stages. You start with
clean hands. Then, however, they fall domino style when you touch a
dirty table or one with your office mate’s submarine-sandwich drippings.
You return to your own desk briefly before you yourself leave for lunch.
You don’t work with floppies then, and you wash your hands after eating,
but during your brief stop at your desk before lunch, you’ve already left a
trace of grease behind, anyway. Your disk box picks it up when you set it
on the wrong spot on the desk. Then, working with the floppies, you lay
one atop the box. Now the disk itself fails. Alas, most disk failures aren’t
gradual like a recording that gets progressively noisier until you can’t
stand to listen to it anymore—they tend to be sudden and total.
3. Realize that floppies don’t always mix well with office materials that
correct errors the old-fashioned way—erasers, for instance, white-out
fluid, or that unavoidably flaky correction tape.
4. Know about other natural enemies of floppies or at least of the data on
them. Beware of airport metal detectors. A disk maker says this isn’t a
problem; but don’t gamble, since a magnetic detector, misadjusted, might
still mush your data. Beware, too, of telephones atop disks: the magnets
in them are powerful.
5. Don’t even let your floppies rest against your computer’s screen, which,
like a television’s, can be full of static electricity, attracting dust.
6. Remember that the more information you can pack on a floppy, the more
vulnerable it may be to damage from dirt, fingerprints, magnetic fields,

and other causes.
7. Clean your disk heads. Don’t use rubbing alcohol. “Try something like a
Freon-based material with 91 percent pure alcohol,” Fitzgerald says.
“You can get it at some computer stores.” Or, after every twenty hours of
operation, use a cleaning diskette, three of which typically come in a $15
package. Each disk, says Fitzgerald, will last about thirty cleanings.
8. Have head alignment checked, to reduce disk errors. With heads out of
whack, your machine may be the only one that can read your disks—not
even identical machines. A crude way of assuring proper alignments, in
fact, might be to see if other machines can read disks written on your
micro.
9. Buy quality disks. Of course, the more you spend on disks, the more
expensive your backups become—discouraging you from making them.
Find a balance between cost and convenience that suits your security
needs.

Timing—that’s the secret to saving your electronic diamonds or
rhinestones on your floppies, whatever the quality.
In the past, working just with paper, timing meant to me nothing more
than the Rothman Chronological Method. The newer the document on my
desk, the closer it would be to the top of the file. It wasn’t the most efficient
way. But I rarely lost material, just temporarily misplaced it.
Computerizing, however, I worried.
“Floppies are treacherous,” my friend Michael Canyes said like a John
Bircher discussing commies. “They always trick you when you least expect
it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “The way you’re encouraging me to computerize, I’m
beginning to think you actually want to sabotage me. Help me lose my
manuscripts and all that.”
“Just back up your copy page or so,” Michael said.
“Isn’t that a lot of trouble?”
“Maybe twenty seconds. Then you’re protected if the power fails. Or
maybe your computer. You can’t afford to have your material stored just in
on your chip. It’s just temporary. You cut off the current a fraction of a
second, it’ll forget everything. You’ve got to get your stuff on the disk
ASAP.”

All right, I supposed my creative juices wouldn’t dry up during the half
minute the disk drive was whirring.
“The ‘Save’ command on WordStar is KS,” Michael said. “Just hold
down the ‘Control’ button on your computer while you’re doing that. Then
you’ll hear a whir and the disk drive clicking away.” Somehow my Kaypro
was coming across as an animal to be fed during training; the clicking could
be the sound of a dog chomping up candied biscuits after a successful
lesson.
“You’re also going to make backup disks,” Michael said. “Sort of like
electronic carbon paper.”
“I don’t have time,” I said.
“You’ll find time. You can do it in just a minute or so. You can even use a
scratch disk to be safe.”
“What’s a scratch disk?”
“Suppose the power failed or something went wrong with your machine
while you were making your copy,” Michael said. “Then you could be up
the creek without a paddle. You might lose both the original and the copy.”
“So?”
“That’s why you have a scratch disk. You copy on it first. If something
goes haywire, then you’re still safe. Because, during your last work session,
you made a backup.”
“Theoretically,” I said.
“And if something goes wrong while you’re recording on your
permanent backup disk, then you can just work from the scratch disk. It’s
just what it sounds, sort of a scratch pad.”
“Oh, I’ll use paper, thank you,” I persisted. “The best backup yet. It’ll be
years before it falls apart. And who knows? Maybe by then the Library of
Congress will be preserving my manuscripts.”
Michael withheld a guffaw.
“Well, I can type a mean streak on my Selectric,” I said. “I can get my
stuff back into the computer in no time.”
Always the patient teacher, Michael didn’t argue.
Presumably, however, another writer nowadays would have agreed with
Michael immediately. His editors had been looking forward to having the
printer set type from the disk he’d submit with the paper version of his
manuscript—a crowded floppy storing every single byte from his toil. Then
the editors could bring the book out six or eight weeks faster, with the disk

in the printer’s hands. But in this unlucky man’s case the disk never reached
the printer’s hungry computer—he hadn’t, alas, made an electronic copy. A
case of hubris if ever there was one.
You might avoid such traumas by following the Rothman Chronological
Method II (RCM II), a lazy man’s form of data security for those with fast
printers:

1. Every five minutes or so, type out the “KS” or an equivalent and dump
your work of the moment into the disk—for, ideally, permanent
preservation.
2. Every half an hour make a printout of your recent work. With a fast
printer, that’ll still be faster than messing around with an electronic copy
at this point. Remember, you still have the backup disk from your last
work session. So even if the original fails, you’ll need to reenter just the
newest material.
3. Every day make your backup floppy. You might forget about the scratch
disk and make two copies.

What about working with hard disks? Well, Winchesters are more
dependable than floppies. On the other hand, they commonly store many
times more material than do the soft disks—meaning perhaps a fiftyfold
increase in your agony if one fails.
“Always try to use an uninterruptible power supply with your
Winchester,” warns Fitzgerald, whose former company produces hard disks
as well as floppies. Some manufacturers say their hard disks don’t need this
protection. But, in general, it’s a good idea; here’s why.
Normally, the head picking up the magnetic patterns is only ten or twenty
thousandths of an inch from the oxide-coated disk. The disk is aluminum—
and shear-prone in the event of a crash. Instead of the typical soft whirl,
you’ll hear an ear-piercing squeal like a car brake out of adjustment, except
that the aftermath will be more costly. Repairs may run into the hundreds of
dollars, not to mention the loss of data.
Not every power failure will produce a disk crash. But why gamble with
your Winchester and its data?
An uninterruptible power supply will protect them by pumping out juice
long enough for you to know something is amiss and shut the disk down. It
sells for several hundred dollars, commonly, and is normally worth it.

“Also,” says Fitzgerald, “be sure the drive is grounded and shielded as
the manufacturer recommends. If not, power surges could cause it to lose
track of its data.”
He suggests one more precaution. Since the disk and the head are so
close, why not warn furniture bangers? This could change. Hard disks are
shock mounted in some portables nowadays, so that the equipment isn’t
quite that delicate. But I’d still try not to be too klutzy around it—and to be
careful in other respects.
You can back up a Winchester in one of several ways:

1. Dumping to floppies. It’s cheap but slow. Then again, you can speed up
the process by updating only the files you’ve been working on. You just
“write” over them.
2. Transferring the Winchester’s contents to a special tape drive large
enough to hold them. This method is fast but may cost you a good $1,500.
3. Dumping to an ordinary videocassette recorder. Although slow, it’s okay
up to around 100 megabytes or so, and you can set the VCR timer to
“watch television” off the Winchester at night when you’re not using it.

“Interesting,” you say, “but how about the lap-sized portable I’m
considering? How do I protect the information inside that?” The best way,
of course, is not to lose the memory and the rest of the portable; as a well-
practiced raincoat forgetter, I’ll never be the ideal owner of a lap-sized
portable.
Common sense, too, suggests that you not store a lap-size portable inside
a car with the sun blazing down—bad news for heat-sensitive chips and
other parts.
If your portable uses a bubble memory, your data-security problems are
milder in some respects than with other kinds. The bubbles are tiny
magnetized areas inside a small metal container. Magnetized “north,” a
bubble might mean a bit specifying “one.” Magnetized “south,” it could
mean zero. (You’ll recall that bits form a byte standing for a letter or
number.) Magnetic bubble memories aren’t that much faster than disks, but
they keep remembering forever—unlike the CMOS (Complementary Metal
Oxide Semiconductor) RAMs used in many portables.
An RAM will develop amnesia if your power fails, and a CMOS RAM is
no different. It’s just that the CMOS keeps the power requirements extralow

so small batteries can dribble out the needed juice after you’ve “officially”
switched your machine off. This “hibernation” may last weeks or months.
(Check your instruction manual.) You’re in great shape, however, only as
long as your batteries are; the Eveready commercials may talk of nine lives,
but your data may have only one. Someday your care may count more than
ever. Low-cost CMOS RAMs may eventually store thousands of pages on
one chip; and power failure might not be the only risk.
Imagine. You can tap out a chapter of your 1,000-page great American
novel some bitter winter night, lazing on the rug by your fireplace. Your
lover is stroking your back and—ZAP! Since CMOS RAMs are such low-
voltages devices, think what thousands of volts from static can do.
Here’s one solution to the portables’ static problems. Before computing,
you might discharge yourself on a nearby vent or anything else that’s
grounded. You can also spray your home and office rugs with Static Guard
or its equivalent. And you also can use a static mat—cheap at your local
computer store—if the zaps persist.
What about a plane thirty thousand feet up? Then you might try
discharging yourself against a metal ashtray before using your portable. If
it’s all plastic, with no metal parts, by the way, your risks are much less than
otherwise. But they’re still there.
Whatever style portable you’re using, remember the importance of
backups—however inconvenient or costly. Through a cable called a null
modem, you can pipe valuable reports from your portable to a larger
computer a few feet away. You may want to do this, anyhow. Your lap-sized
computer simply may run out of storage room much more quickly than a
bigger machine and may lack floppy disks to spread those bits and bytes
around. So make sure your portable software lets you zip material back and
forth between machines.
“And in the field? What backup technique, then?”
Well, you’re often stuck with slow, tape-style storage. And mini-disk
drives may be expensive and take up room if they’re not already in your
portable.
But why not see if your company will let you send valuable reports over
the phone for temporary storage in its big computer? You can also stash
them away inside a desktop computer hooked up to the portable the same
way. And there’s yet another answer. Rent electronic storage space on a
commercial computer network like The Source of CompuServe.