The Silicon Jungle

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.

Of course there’ll always be resistance to graphics from some hard-core bureaucrats in and out of government.

“The Macintosh,” gripes one, “takes us back to the time people were drawing pictures on cave walls.”

He’ll tolerate some graphics but loves to read and write twenty-page memos.

And if I were an executive, I myself would growl if my people insisted on Macs just so they could use Old English characters for routine paperwork. In fact, for that, I’d rather work with a Kaypro or a mouseless IBM PC.

“For the world of letters and numbers a computer without a mouse would be better,” says James Fallows, the Atlantic Monthly’s Washington editor, who tried a Mac for several weeks but happily returned to a machine with WordStar. He and I are baffled. We can’t understand the Mac’s lack of cursor keys. Why couldn’t Apple have kindly let Mac users move the cursor conventionally on the screen if they wanted? Omitting the cursor keys was IBM-style arrogance, no ifs or buts. Even if cursor keys become available on a numbers pad, it won’t be the same as having them in a convenient location on the main keyboard.

But graphics? That’s where the Mac and similar machines may pay off for people with overscheduled art departments or an honest willingness to experiment:

● A California designer can draw a hot-water system for an outdoor car wash in just four hours, thanks to his Mac; once it took him days.

● A Washington state man uses his Macintosh to design optimal orchard layouts.

● Another user lays out the Yellow Pages with his Macintosh, while still another employs one to plan paintings.^[29]

Advertising agencies, especially, may benefit from computer graphics even if the Mac-priced technology still has some flaws. Take one example. Just after a Colorado agency bought a Mac, a bank wanted an ad saying that it gave personal service—that its customers were more than computer numbers. But how to get the idea on paper?

“I suggested that the bank use a computer for the ad,” said Rebecca Glesener, assistant art director of Heisley Design and Advertising, a twenty-five-person agency in Colorado Springs. The bank agreed.

Using a Macintosh, a Heisley artist drew a man and woman with masses of numbers on their faces.

“If your bank sees you this way,” the ad said, “come see us.”

Western National Banks loved the results. And when I talked to Glesener, her agency was about to unleash another Mac-drawn ad—the machine’s “self-portrait”—for an Apple dealer.

“We have several clients in the computer business,” Glesener said, “and we thought we should be aware of computers.”

Of course you don’t start instantly doing first-class graphics work on Mac-like machines. Take the man drawing the Western ad. He had “no computer skills” in his background, and he toyed around with the Mac for some six hours or so before he did the numbers heads for the bank.

With the art stashed away on computer disks, though, the Heisley agency could more easily crank out different versions of the same drawing.

It’s like word processing. Once you’ve stored your material on your computer disk, you needn’t start over from step one.

Mac-like machines may also streamline ad agencies’ mock-up work. Through the marvels of graphics an art director can more easily figure out the best location for Brooke Shields’s derriere in a jeans layout.

In fact, the Heisley people said they had used Mac successfully on drafts of a sales brochure and an ad for the U.S. Amateur Hockey Association.

Even so, Don Pierce, the artist behind the bank ad, warns: “Inexpensive machines like the Mac can’t come up with drawings good enough for final ads without a deliberate computer effect. A line other than a forty-five-degree line can be pretty ragged because the machine makes them in steps.” And they lack a good-enough resolution to downplay the roughness.

Eventually, of course—through high-quality graphics made on laser printers—cheap machines may turn out slick ads that don’t scream, “A computer made me!”

Meanwhile, Mac-like computers will do fine for drafts and nonpublished work. Already, when hooked up right to some Compugraphic typesetting machinery, Mac’s sister computer Lisa II can turn out seamless charts for publication.

Who else might use computer graphics? Some examples:

A SALES REP (OR BROCHURE DESIGNER)

Computer graphics would help you simplify a complicated brochure in which twenty statistics proved the superiority of your company’s industrial dishwasher to Brand X’s.

There’s no question—graphics can liven up otherwise dull data, and remember: if people don’t read, there’s less chance they’ll buy. In that sense, sales literature isn’t so different from a newspaper. Again, though, bear in mind that the inexpensive computers may not produce graphics of professional smoothness.

You can Xerox your Mac-drawn pictures of a widget maker or Mayan artifacts—perhaps even include them in test papers. And you or your audiovisual specialist can even prepare overhead slides by photocopying the drawings onto clear plastic sheets.

A BUREAUCRAT

The same slide technique could be a relief to bureaucrats preparing low- or mid-level briefing.

A PERSONNEL OR DIVISION MANAGER

What a boon to the addicted drafters of personnel charts!

Now, there’s a dark side to this. I have a good friend at the Department of Housing and Urban Development named Al Ripskis.^[30] “They’re reorganizing again,” he groans from time to time. It’s a waste of good tax money in Al’s opinion. The faces and desks change; the bungling remains.

Shelton, though, says the better companies thrive on fluidity, and in Silicon Valley he may be right. It depends on your outfit’s style of management. Don’t play computer games with your people, however, just because the machines make it easier to play musical chairs.

AN ARCHITECT

Microcomputer graphics might be just the ticket for rough sketches. In fact, on a sophisticated machine, the computer graphics would do for the final version.

Who knows? An architect someday might carry around a little computer the size of a sketch pad and do designs to be fed into a larger machine for the detail work.

A PRODUCT DESIGNER

If I were one, I’d leap at the chance to try computer-aided graphics. Sooner or later, American industry will make widespread use of machines that automatically turn drawings into real frying pans, soap bars, or refrigerator cabinets. Well, it won’t be that simple. But computer graphics and related technologies will increasingly blur the line between creative types and production people.

Just look at the newspaper industry. Reporters, after all, on most daily papers are basically setting the type for their stories as they tap them out.

But back to the factory. The jargon is computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing or CAD/CAM.

A FACILITIES MANAGER

Working on the floor layout for offices that your company will rent? Computer graphics could be just right in this era of instant partitions.

A CONVENTION PLANNER

What better way to juggle around the positions of various booths on your charts?

A CORPORATE PLANNER

(AND MANY OTHER EXECUTIVES)

Building nuclear submarines, you might worry about your keel before your propeller shaft. An overgeneralization, maybe. But that’s how a defense contractor hit on the need for Project Evaluation Review Techniques (PERT) software.

Charlie Bowie—the home construction executive in the last chapter who worried about his basements before his floors—might have used a PERT-style program with graphics to keep up with his priorities.

“With PERT programs,” says Shelton, “you can graphically draw important relationships: ‘This has to be done before this starts.’ Or, ‘Both of these have to be done before the other thing starts.’ Or, ‘This can wait while the others are done.’”

A more complex PERT can help you juggle priorities of two hundred or so projects. “It’s a capability magnifier,” admits even my friend the hard-core bureaucrat. “PERT charting by hand takes ten times as long as a computer. You can wear holes in the paper—erasing mistakes—if you do it by hand.”

Hearing of PERT, I recalled the Case of The Missing Cafeteria. The taxpayers were supposed to get a cafeteria—worth maybe $500,000 or more—at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C. The landlord’s company, however, laid not one brick for the cafeteria. Some say it was politics—he was once a friend of Spiro Agnew’s. The landlord denies anything wrong. Whatever happened, the case boggles the mind. How could an entire cafeteria slip through the cracks; how could the General Services Administration, the government’s real estate agent, have shoved aside such an important detail even in a $60-million-plus lease? You never know. Perhaps with PERT graphics in the right federal offices in the 1970s, some budget-minded lunchers today wouldn’t feel forced to brown bag it.

“When you have so many little pieces,” says my friend the Hard-Core Bureaucrat, working at another agency, “it’s so easy to let one drop off the table. We could sure use a good word processor-cum-PERT machine.”

Although computers can help you tidy up your work, they themselves can be messy enough unless you know what you’re doing. There’s no substitute for a good computer expert in many cases. And training, too. In the following chapter, you’ll have one answer to “people” problems—the “Who-How Solution.”

◼ VII, Graphics Tips, page 331.