was operating, you knew that a service team was either already there or on
the way. Another facility, identical in every way except for the number of
people around, was across the East River, with a different physical location,
different power source, different phone lines, different satellite uplinks.
Each building was a high-rise fire-resistant structure with an automatic
sprinkler system around the computer room, and a DuPont 1301 system in-
side of it, the better to eliminate a fire in seconds. Each system-trio had bat-
tery backups sufficient to run the hardware for twelve hours. New York
safety and environmental codes perversely did not allow the presence of
emergency generators in the buildings, an annoyance to the systems engi-
neers who were paid to worry about such things. And worry they did, despite
the fact that the duplication, the exquisite redundancies that in a military
context were called “defense in depth,” would protect against anything and
everything that could be imagined.
Well, nearly everything.
On the front service panel of each of the mainframes was an SCSI port.
This was an innovation for the new models, an implicit bow to the fact that
desktop computers were so powerful that they could upload important infor-
mation far more easily than the old method of hanging a tape reel.
In this case, the upload terminal was a permanent fixture of the system.
Attached to the overall system control panel which controlled Alpha, Beta,
and Zulu was a third-generation Power PC, and attached to it in turn was a
Bernoulli removable-disk drive. Colloquially known as a “toaster” because
its disk was about the size of a piece of bread, this machine had a gigabyte of
Morage, far more than was needed for this program.
“Okay?” the engineer asked.
The system controller moved his mouse and selected Zulu from his screen
of options. A senior operator behind him confirmed that he’d made the right
selection. Alpha and Beta were doing their normal work, and could not be
disturbed.
“You’re up on Zulu, Chuck.”
“Roger that,” Chuck replied with a smile. The pinstriped engineer slid
the cartridge into the slot and waited for the proper icon to appear on the
screen. He clicked on it, opening a new window to reveal the contents of
PORTA-I, his name for the cartridge.
The new window had only two items in it: INSTALLER and ELECTRA-
CLERK-2.4.O. An automatic antivirus program immediately swept through
the new files, and after five seconds pronounced them clean.
“Looking good, Chuck,” the sys-con told him. His supervisor nodded
concurrence.
“Well, gee, Rick, can I deliver the baby now?”
“Hit it.”
Chuck Searls selected the INSTALL icon and double-clicked it.
RRE vou SURE vou UJHNTTO REPLRCE “ELECTRH-CLERK 2.3.1” WITH NEW
PROGRBM “ELECTRH-CLEHK 2.4.8”?
a box asked him. Searls clicked the “YES” box.
BRE VOU RERLLV sure????
another box asked immediately.
“Who put that in?”
“I did,” the sys-con answered with a grin.
“Funny.” Searls clicked YES again.
The toaster drive started humming. Searls liked systems that you could
hear as they ran, the whip-whip sounds of the moving heads added to the
whir of the rotating disk. The program was only fifty megabytes. The trans-
fer took fewer seconds than were needed for him to open his bottle of spring
water and take a sip.
“Well,” Searls asked as he slid his chair hack I’rom the console, “you
want lo see if it works?”
He turned to look out. The computer room was walled in with glass pan-
els, but beyond them he could see New York Harbor. A cruise liner was
heading out; medium size, painted white. Heading where? he wondered.
Someplace warm, with white sand and blue skies and a nice bright sun all the
time. Someplace a hell of a lot different from New York City, he was sure of
that. Nobody took a cruise to a place like the Big Apple. How nice to be on
that ship, heading away from the blustery winds of fall. How much nicer still
not to return on it, Searls thought with a wistful smile. Well, airplanes were
faster, and you didn’t have to ride them back either.
The sys-con, working on his control console, brought Zulu on-line. At
16:10:00 EST, the backup machine started duplicating the jobs being done
by Alpha, and simultaneously backed up by Beta. With one difference. The
throughput monitor showed that Zulu was running slightly faster. On a day
like this, Zulu normally tended to fall behind, but now it was running so fast
that the machine was actually “resting” for a few seconds each minute.
“Smokin’, Chuck!” the sys-con observed. Searls drained his water bottle,
dropped it in the nearest trash bucket, and walked over.
“Yeah, I cut out about ten thousand lines of code. It wasn’t the machines,
it was the program. It just took us a while to figure the right paths through
the boards. I think we have it now.”
“What’s different?” the senior controller asked. He knew quite a bit
aboul software design.
“I changed the hierarchy system, how it hands things off from one paral-
lel board to another. Still needs a little work on synchronicity, tally isn’t as
last as posting. I think I can beat that in another month or two, cut some fat
out of the front end.”
The sys-con punched a command for the first benchmark test. It came up
at once. “Six percent faster than two-point-three-point-one. Not too
shabby.”
“We needed that six percent,” the supervisor said, meaning that he
needed more. Trades just ran too heavy sometimes, and like everyone in the
Depository Trust Company, he lived in fear of falling behind.
“Send me some data at the end of the week and maybe I can deliver a few
more points to you,” Searls promised.
“Good job, Chuck.”
“Thanks, Bud.”
“Who else uses this?”
“This version? Nobody. A custom variation runs the machines over at
CHIPS.”
“Well, you’re the man,” the supervisor noted generously. He would have
been less generous had he thought it through. The supervisor had helped
design the entire system. All the redundancies, all the safety systems, the
way that tapes were pulled off the machines every night and driven upstate.
He’d worked with a committee to establish every safeguard that was neces-
sary to the business he was in. But the quest for efficiency-and perversely,
the quest for security-had created a vulnerability to which he was predicta-
bly blind. All the computers used the same software. They had to. Different
software in the different computers, like different languages in an office,
would have prevented, or at the very least impeded, cross-talk among the
individual systems; and that would have been self-defeating. As a result, de-
spite all the safeguards there was a single common point of vulnerability for
all six of his machines. They all spoke the same language. They had to. They
were the most important, if the least known, link in the American trading
business.
Even here, DTC was not blind to the potential hazard. ELECTRA-CLERK
2.4.0 would not be uploaded to Alpha and Beta until it had run for a week on
Zulu, and then another week would pass before they were loaded onto the
backup site, whose machines were labeled “Charlie,” “Delta,” and
“Tango.” That was to ensure that 2.4.0 was both efficient and “crash-wor-
thy,” an engineering term that had come into the software field a year ear-
lier. Soon, people would get used to the new software, marvel at its faster
speed. All the Stratus machines would speak exactly the same programming
language, trade information back and forth in an electronic conversation of
ones and zeros, like friends around a card table talking business.
Soon they would all know the same joke. Some would think it a good one,
but not anyone at DTC.
Collegium
“So, we’re agreed?” the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board asked.
Those around the table nodded. It wasn’t that hard a call. For the second time
in the past three months, President Burling had made it known, quietly,
through the Secretary of the Treasury, that he would not object to another
half-point rise in the Discount Rate. That was the interest rate which the
Federal Reserve charged to banks that borrowed money-where else would
they borrow such sums, except from the Fed? Any rise in that rate, of course,
was passed immediately on to the consumer.
It was a constant balancing act, for the men and women around the pol-
ished oak table. They controlled the quantity of money in the American
economy. As though by turning the valve that opened or closed the floodgate
on an irrigation dam, they could regulate the amount of currency that ex-
isted, trying always not to provide too much or too little.
It was more complex than that, of course. Money had little physical real-
ity. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing, located less than a mile away,
had neither the paper nor the ink to make enough one-dollar bills for what