On the other hand, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Can you estimate how much this extracurricular use of your machines costs in wear and tear—in, eventually, replacement costs? Feel your employees out on this one if you’re running a small business or hold sway over a large one. Would they rather enjoy computer privileges or better health insurance? You might offer cafeteria-style fringe benefits, with computer use as one of the options. Employees not selecting this choice might have to agree to it, anyway, if you discovered them using a company computer for personal purposes. This problem, of course, may lessen as the prices of small computers plummet and their capabilities grow.
Whatever the form of potential crime—theft or otherwise—keep remembering one of the basics of data security: It should cost neither more money nor morale than justified.
Now for advice on finding the _most_ crookproof computers and programs.
Buy a micro with 16- or 32-bit word lengths and RAMs of 256K or more. Those specifications will let you use more elaborate codes to protect information. What’s more, they might be less cumbersome than codes on an 8-bit machine. Look, too, for electronic design that lets your computer establish privilege levels—reachable through passwords. That way, Sally, the new secretary, can start out getting into the computer only for word processing. Helen, the payroll clerk, can have access to confidential salary information but not a top-secret budget that doesn’t give her the raise she’s been pestering you about. Questions exist about the effectiveness of passwords and codes, at least when the thieves or snoops may be sophisticated, but that’s another story. Most experts will tell you that anything that can be coded can be cracked. The trick is to make it not worth the criminals’ time and resources. Of course, the best safeguard is still the simplest: locking up the disks and computer after you or your people are through.
New minis, by the time you’re reading this, may all be 64 bit or higher. They adapt to codes—and fancy electronic logs showing the kind of work done on them—more easily than do micros. And they might justify other costly security measures. Suppose, for instance, you want to follow the many government agencies’ examples and pen in the tiny radio waves that computers emit so that eavesdroppers can’t pick them up with sensitive receivers. A micro fortified this way might cost perhaps $10,000. “What’s the sense of doing that for what’s essentially a throwaway computer?” asks Harold Joseph Highland. The “throwaway,” be assured, is an exaggeration, but his point comes through.