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]
Footnote 22:
_InfoWorld_, May 14, 1984, is the source of Rubinstein’s quotes about the heart attack, not going “on some wild spending spree,” and his life not changing.
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]
Footnote 23:
_InfoWorld_, May 14, 1984, is the source of Rubinstein’s “bullshit” quote.
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.
Footnote 24:
The $1.5 billion estimate is from Chris Christiansen of the Yankee Group.
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]
Footnote 25:
The account of Select’s capital shortage and the metamorphosis into Quadsoft comes from _InfoWorld_, August 13, 1984. The merger information is from _InfoWorld_, October 8, 1984.
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.”
Footnote 26:
Dean’s _Byte_ article appeared December 1983, p. 161.
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.
Footnote 27:
Jerry Pournelle’s rebuttal to Dean and others of the “user friendly” school appeared in _Popular Computing_, May 1984, p. 81.
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]
Footnote 28:
The Bricklin quote comes from Steve Ditlea’s excellent article in _Popular Computing_, September 1982, page 48, which helped me appreciate VisiCalc’s many uses.
“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.
[Illustration:
Would you feel like rat in a maze if you had a map like this to guide you to Apple executive Joe Shelton’s house? Indeed you would. Lest anyone mistake Joe for Customer Support, the map doesn’t contain his actual address. ]
Of course there’ll always be resistance to graphics from some hard-core bureaucrats in and out of government.
“The Macintosh,” gripes one, “takes us back to the time people were drawing pictures on cave walls.”
He’ll tolerate _some_ graphics but loves to read and write twenty-page memos.
And if I were an executive, I myself would growl if my people insisted on Macs just so they could use Old English characters for routine paperwork. In fact, for that, I’d rather work with a Kaypro or a mouseless IBM PC.
“For the world of letters and numbers a computer without a mouse would be better,” says James Fallows, the _Atlantic Monthly_’s Washington editor, who tried a Mac for several weeks but happily returned to a machine with WordStar. He and I are baffled. We can’t understand the Mac’s lack of cursor keys. Why couldn’t Apple have kindly let Mac users move the cursor conventionally on the screen if they wanted? Omitting the cursor keys was IBM-style arrogance, no ifs or buts. Even if cursor keys become available on a numbers pad, it won’t be the same as having them in a convenient location on the main keyboard.
But graphics? That’s where the Mac and similar machines may pay off for people with overscheduled art departments or an honest willingness to experiment:
● A California designer can draw a hot-water system for an outdoor car wash in just four hours, thanks to his Mac; once it took him days.
● A Washington state man uses his Macintosh to design optimal orchard layouts.
● Another user lays out the Yellow Pages with his Macintosh, while still another employs one to plan paintings.[29]
Footnote 29:
The car wash, orchard, Yellow Pages, and painting examples come from _USA Today_, May 3, 1984.
Advertising agencies, especially, may benefit from computer graphics even if the Mac-priced technology still has some flaws. Take one example. Just after a Colorado agency bought a Mac, a bank wanted an ad saying that it gave personal service—that its customers were more than computer numbers. But how to get the idea on paper?
“I suggested that the bank use a computer for the ad,” said Rebecca Glesener, assistant art director of Heisley Design and Advertising, a twenty-five-person agency in Colorado Springs. The bank agreed.
Using a Macintosh, a Heisley artist drew a man and woman with masses of numbers on their faces.
“If your bank sees you this way,” the ad said, “come see us.”
Western National Banks loved the results. And when I talked to Glesener, her agency was about to unleash another Mac-drawn ad—the machine’s “self-portrait”—for an Apple dealer.
“We have several clients in the computer business,” Glesener said, “and we thought we should be aware of computers.”
Of course you don’t start instantly doing first-class graphics work on Mac-like machines. Take the man drawing the Western ad. He had “no computer skills” in his background, and he toyed around with the Mac for some six hours or so before he did the numbers heads for the bank.
With the art stashed away on computer disks, though, the Heisley agency could more easily crank out different versions of the same drawing.
It’s like word processing. Once you’ve stored your material on your computer disk, you needn’t start over from step one.
Mac-like machines may also streamline ad agencies’ mock-up work. Through the marvels of graphics an art director can more easily figure out the best location for Brooke Shields’s derriere in a jeans layout.
In fact, the Heisley people said they had used Mac successfully on drafts of a sales brochure and an ad for the U.S. Amateur Hockey Association.
Even so, Don Pierce, the artist behind the bank ad, warns: “Inexpensive machines like the Mac can’t come up with drawings good enough for final ads without a deliberate computer effect. A line other than a forty-five-degree line can be pretty ragged because the machine makes them in steps.” And they lack a good-enough resolution to downplay the roughness.
Eventually, of course—through high-quality graphics made on laser printers—cheap machines may turn out slick ads that don’t scream, “A computer made me!”
Meanwhile, Mac-like computers will do fine for drafts and nonpublished work. Already, when hooked up right to some Compugraphic typesetting machinery, Mac’s sister computer Lisa II can turn out seamless charts for publication.
Who else might use computer graphics? Some examples:
A SALES REP (OR BROCHURE DESIGNER)
Computer graphics would help you simplify a complicated brochure in which twenty statistics proved the superiority of your company’s industrial dishwasher to Brand X’s.
There’s no question—graphics can liven up otherwise dull data, and remember: if people don’t read, there’s less chance they’ll _buy_. In that sense, sales literature isn’t so different from a newspaper. Again, though, bear in mind that the inexpensive computers may not produce graphics of professional smoothness.
A CORPORATE TRAINING OFFICIAL OR TEACHER
You can Xerox your Mac-drawn pictures of a widget maker or Mayan artifacts—perhaps even include them in test papers. And you or your audiovisual specialist can even prepare overhead slides by photocopying the drawings onto clear plastic sheets.
A BUREAUCRAT
The same slide technique could be a relief to bureaucrats preparing low- or mid-level briefing.
A PERSONNEL OR DIVISION MANAGER
What a boon to the addicted drafters of personnel charts!
Now, there’s a dark side to this. I have a good friend at the Department of Housing and Urban Development named Al Ripskis.[30] “They’re _reorganizing_ again,” he groans from time to time. It’s a waste of good tax money in Al’s opinion. The faces and desks change; the bungling remains.
Footnote 30:
Ripskis is not the hard-core bureaucrat I mentioned earlier in the chapter. He in fact puts out an underground newsletter regularly exposing his agency.
Shelton, though, says the better companies thrive on fluidity, and in Silicon Valley he may be right. It depends on your outfit’s style of management. Don’t play computer games with your people, however, just because the machines make it easier to play musical chairs.
AN ARCHITECT
Microcomputer graphics might be just the ticket for rough sketches. In fact, on a sophisticated machine, the computer graphics would do for the final version.
Who knows? An architect someday might carry around a little computer the size of a sketch pad and do designs to be fed into a larger machine for the detail work.
A PRODUCT DESIGNER
If I were one, I’d leap at the chance to try computer-aided graphics. Sooner or later, American industry will make widespread use of machines that automatically turn drawings into real frying pans, soap bars, or refrigerator cabinets. Well, it won’t be _that_ simple. But computer graphics and related technologies will increasingly blur the line between creative types and production people.
Just look at the newspaper industry. Reporters, after all, on most daily papers are basically setting the type for their stories as they tap them out.
But back to the factory. The jargon is =computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing= or =CAD/CAM=.
A FACILITIES MANAGER
Working on the floor layout for offices that your company will rent? Computer graphics could be just right in this era of instant partitions.
A CONVENTION PLANNER
What better way to juggle around the positions of various booths on your charts?
A CORPORATE PLANNER
(AND MANY OTHER EXECUTIVES)
Building nuclear submarines, you might worry about your keel before your propeller shaft. An overgeneralization, maybe. But that’s how a defense contractor hit on the need for =Project Evaluation Review Techniques= (=PERT=) software.
Charlie Bowie—the home construction executive in the last chapter who worried about his basements before his floors—might have used a PERT-style program with graphics to keep up with his priorities.
“With PERT programs,” says Shelton, “you can graphically draw important relationships: ‘This has to be done before this starts.’ Or, ‘Both of these have to be done before the other thing starts.’ Or, ‘This can wait while the others are done.’”
A more complex PERT can help you juggle priorities of two hundred or so projects. “It’s a capability magnifier,” admits even my friend the hard-core bureaucrat. “PERT charting by hand takes ten times as long as a computer. You can wear holes in the paper—erasing mistakes—if you do it by hand.”
Hearing of PERT, I recalled the Case of The Missing Cafeteria. The taxpayers were supposed to get a cafeteria—worth maybe $500,000 or more—at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. The landlord’s company, however, laid not one brick for the cafeteria. Some say it was politics—he was once a friend of Spiro Agnew’s. The landlord denies anything wrong. Whatever happened, the case boggles the mind. How could an entire cafeteria slip through the cracks; how could the General Services Administration, the government’s real estate agent, have shoved aside such an important detail even in a $60-million-plus lease? You never know. Perhaps with PERT graphics in the right federal offices in the 1970s, some budget-minded lunchers today wouldn’t feel forced to brown bag it.
“When you have so many little pieces,” says my friend the Hard-Core Bureaucrat, working at another agency, “it’s so easy to let one drop off the table. We could sure use a good word processor-cum-PERT machine.”
Although computers can help you tidy up your work, they themselves can be messy enough unless you know what you’re doing. There’s no substitute for a good computer expert in many cases. And training, too. In the following chapter, you’ll have one answer to “people” problems—the “Who-How Solution.”
Backup:
◼ VII, Graphics Tips, page 331.
8 ❑ People: the Who-How Solution
Stewart Research, Inc.—a fictitious name, along with the others in this tale, which is true in the main elements—once seemed on the verge of big money.
Frank Stewart, a slim, intense young chain-smoker, was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from a large company to monitor congressmen and bureaucrats influencing certain business activities. He planned to sum up gigantic piles of newspaper stories inside a computer. Then his early-warning service would ferret out patterns for his benefactor and other businessmen trying to keep up with the vagaries of government. Stewart’s plan may come to pass, but last I knew, he was fighting off unfounded rumors of bankruptcy.
“We’ve wasted upwards of $40,000 on computer consultants and the consequences of their ‘advice,’” Stewart told me in the modest white-frame home where he and his wife lived and worked and took in boarders.
“And that doesn’t include the thousands of dollars in business we lost because our computer was down at the wrong times.
“I had to lay off five people largely because of the consultants’ lack of interest in anything but turning a buck off us.”
Stewart’s story illustrates the need for the Who-How Solution in hiring consultants. Who-How may also help micro users train employees and get the most out of their data-processing departments.
Who-How is nothing more than the five Ws and the H of newspaperdom. Like a reporter, you simply ask, “Who?” “What?” “Why?” “When?” “Where?” and “How?” and especially “How much?” Ask those questions often. Ask them when:
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.
Footnote 31:
The ex-Bain man’s quote is from _Harper’s_, November 1982.
“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]
Footnote 32:
_Computerworld_, March 28, 1983.
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.
Footnote 33:
_Computerworld_, March 28, 1983.
“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.
Footnote 34:
The Colligan quotes are from Joel Makower’s useful book _Office Hazards: How Your Job Can Make You Sick_, published 1981 by Tilden Press, Washington, D.C.
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]
Footnote 35:
The material on the Manhattan word processor comes from Barbara Garson’s article in _Mother Jones magazine_, July 1981, p. 32.
“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.”
Footnote 36:
See “Job Decision Latitude, Job Design, and Coronary Heart Disease,” by R. A. Karasek, who participated in a 1981 Purdue University conference on job stress. The Karasek findings appeared on pages 48-55 of _Machine Pacing and Occupation Stress_, a book published in 1981 by Taylor & Francis Limited, London. In Karasek’s words, “Job-design strategies advocating limited skill usage and decision authority for the majority of the workforce appear to be associated with a host of undesirable, unintended consequences ranging from skill under-utilization (and consequent productivity loss) to increased risk of coronary heart disease.”
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]
Footnote 37:
Before Bell adopted the standard touch-phone numbers pad, it did a study showing the superiority of the 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 arrangement. The study had strong financial motivations. After all, the more wrong numbers people dialed, the greater would be the cost to the phone company, since Bell at the time probably wasn’t charging anyone for wrong numbers.
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]
Footnote 38:
For observations on the merits of various colors, see _Ergonomic Aspects of Visual Display Terminals_, edited by Etienne Grandjean and E. Vigliani and published by Taylor & Francis Limited, London, 1982.
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]
Footnote 39:
If you don’t want lines on a CRT to seem to be rolling into each other when you‘re using a bright background, you should worry about something called a _refresh rate_. That’s the number of times the picture “repaints” itself on the screen. Etienne Grandjean, the prominent Swiss expert on VDTs, recommends a rate of at least 80 cycles a second; others say it needn’t be so high. The Xerox 860’s rate is 70 cycles, according to David Eisen, and that’s better than average. Still, I noticed the roll, anyway. In a letter to me in January 1983 Grandjean also recommended a slow phosphor for use with the white background. That means the images would take longer to vanish from the screen than they would otherwise—reducing the perceived flicker.
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.
Footnote 40:
Eisen’s advice on VDTs can be found in the booklet _Humanizing the VDT Workplace: A Health Manual for Local Officers and Stewards_, published jointly by the Newspaper Guild and the International Typographical Union (the price is $1.50 from the Guild, at 1125 15th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005).
“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.
Footnote 41:
The German requirement for detachable keyboards appears in paragraph 4.3.1 of Standard ZH1/618 of “Safety Regulations for Display Workplaces in the Office Sector,” as released by the Trade Cooperative Association, Central Office for Accident Prevention and Industrial Medicine.
“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]
Footnote 42:
The McIlvain example comes from _PC Magazine_, May 29, 1984.
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