maintenance, whatever precaution you’re taking?
Do keep data security in perspective. Remember, even if you must be a
zealot at times, it’s just part of surviving with your computer. Harold
Joseph Highland, a data-security stalwart in his work—a believer in two
backup disks of book manuscripts—tells of people who make out very well
with far less copying. They are students at the University of Minnesota,
computer-science majors, and they trudge through snow and ice carrying
unbacked-up floppies in their books. Their professors are tolerant. If a
disk fails and a student’s assignment is late, they understand. The
students can’t afford too many floppies, and some just don’t have the
time for backups. It’s the same, perhaps, at countless other colleges,
and maybe that’s only right for twenty-year-olds who’ll learn soon
enough about disappointments beyond the campus.
But you’re in business, perhaps, without a friendly professor ready with
a sympathetic nod. Your making regular backups is just plain good sense,
and if you don’t, you deserve what’s coming to you.
Isn’t that what data security should be about?
It needn’t be Orwellian at all. If anything, in fact, Winston Smith had
more of a data-security problem than Big Brother. Privacy, certainly, is
an important data-security element, as is what the jargonists call
=integrity=—accuracy and completeness of files. Think of Winston Smith
and his appreciation of history and Big Brother’s propensity for
tampering with the contents of back issues of the _London Times_! Even
if “1984” has already become a year, the number, to true believers in
data security, remains a warning.
This will be especially true as more and more machines swap secrets over
the wires between home and office.
11 ❑ Wired to Work
John Fuller’s daughter is grown now, and he’s taken over her room,
cluttering it with computer and boating magazines and his Heathkit
micro. At first glance it looks like the computer room of any of
thousands of hobbyists. You may, in fact, catch whiffs of smoke from
Fuller’s soldering gun.
It’s an unlikely setting for a working office of the U.S. Navy.
And yet that’s exactly what it was when Lieutenant Commander Fuller
responded to my notice on an electronic bulletin board asking if anyone
at home was hooked up to his boss via computers.
“I’ve been getting away with it for six months,” Fuller drawled proudly.
On the verge of retirement from the navy, he was determined to
telecommute in civilian life, too, perhaps as a management consultant,
his military job. “It seems foolish for me to get in a car to go to an
office,” he said, “if I can go to that office by phone. I’m much happier
not having to get into traffic for forty-five minutes each morning. I
can have coffee and read the _Washington Post_, and I’m not tense. I
work fewer hours. But I don’t have five or six guys to talk to about
ball scores, either. The government’s getting a better deal from me
working at home.”
In fact, Electronic Services Unlimited (ESU), a research firm in New
York City, found typical productivity increases between 15 and 20
percent.
So it isn’t surprising that at least 250 firms, including some big names
like American Express and McDonald’s, were allowing work at home as of