Aucbvax.2262
fa.works
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works
Mon Jul 13 05:20:44 1981
Working at home
>From Joe.Newcomer@CMU-10A Mon Jul 13 05:13:06 1981
Huh? "I'll leave my work behind when I go out the door?"
I've never heard such bullshit. First of all, it makes
the rather bizarre assumption that I even want to come IN
the door. Actually, I would much rather work at home. This
means such serious issues as how to get reasonable communication
bandwidth between my processor and the rest of its network is a
very serious problem. And it also seems to be predicated on the
strange (and patently false, in my case) assumption that one WANTS
to leave the machine behind. I ENJOY what I'm doing, and want to
be able to do it equally well from home or "work". Thus the goal,
for example, of giving every CMU researcher a personal machine is
not really satisfactory; I need two, or at least a display with a
high-bandwidth (say, 10MHz) connection to the "real" machine.
Perhaps in that strange world where people turn their minds off
when they leave the office this is a reasonable attitude, but I've
never yet met a professional in any area who was capable of doing
this. And if you DON'T make the facilities available at home, you
are defeating the purpose of having personal workstations: to make
individuals more productive. I don't think it is the domain of
office automation designers to dictate when and where one has
automation available. Assume it needs to be available 24 hours
a day, 7 days a week, at home and "at work", THEN figure out what
the problems are.
I have this from direct experience. When I had a 1200 baud
C-100 in the office and a 1200 baud C100 at home, I could work
interchangeably in either location. When I got 9600 baud in
the office, I worked less at home. Now that I have a Perq in
the office, I can't work at home at all. This is a real drag.
I see absolutely no philosophical reason to not provide equal
computing facilities at home and at work. The only limitations
are technical (like bandwidth) and financial (most companies
can't afford two $30K workstations per user). So "office"
automation designers should go after those problems, and quit
making such totally wedged statements that seem to reflect a
basic misunderstanding of what a "personal workstation" really
should be!
joe
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