Priorities

It's the 1990s, and this IT pilot fish is supporting PCs and networks at a remote manufacturing plant at a time when managers want a way to telecommute.

"The solution from my corporate bosses was a proprietary piece of hardware that had small computers on cards," says fish. "You bought a box and up to eight cards that slid into slots. Each card had its own hard drive and modem and required its own network connection. You'd load up a laptop PC with PC Anywhere and connect to one of the PCs to check e-mail.

"Each card could only be had with a 9,600bit/sec. modem and used a 386SX processor, but this was big stuff in the early '90s. Corporate was really pushing the concept and wanted me to sell it to the local plant."

It's a tough sell: The box costs $16,000 and each card is another $2,000. And fish isn't surprised when the plant manager balks at the price tag -- and then challenges fish to come up with a cheaper solution.

Fish takes the dare. First he locates four old PCs, and upgrades them with 486-based motherboards. He installs 56K modems and off-brand Ethernet cards that allow daisy-chaining the network connection.

He finds a unique piece of hardware that will power-cycle a PC if a modem loses its connection, then sets up each PC with Windows 3.1, e-mail and PC Anywhere.

"When a laptop user would log in using an encrypted password, he would be presented with a network log-on," fish says. "The user could then log on and check e-mail. He would automatically be routed to his home folder, where he could open documents or whatever.

"The total cost? Under $3,000."

That includes the four phone lines, one network connection and an eight-foot power strip installed by the local maintenance guy -- who's so proud to be part of the project that he has carefully checked the power lines and spent a Saturday tie-wrapping all the wiring.

Better still, the arrangement works very, very well. Local managers sign out laptops and go to offsite meetings, where they show their counterparts from other sites how easily they can dial in and get access to their desktops.

And once word gets around of fish's Rube Goldberg setup, he receives a visit from a corporate IT employee who can only stare slack-jawed at the equipment lined up in a corner of fish's network room.

"He took pictures," says fish. "A week later I was verbally reprimanded for not following set standards.

"Three years later, my system was still working. The corporate group finally gave up on their setup, as they kept having numerous problems and the vendor eventually closed shop."

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