As we approach our twentieth year of publishing BYTE, we'll be looking back at highlights from two decades of covering the PC revolution.
5 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
The big story that month was Apple's Macintosh Portable.
It's now considered cool to write off Apple's first attempt at a mobile Mac as a 16-pound goof. But it was an innovative box. It was the first with an active-matrix LCD. Thanks to the use of low-power components and clever power management tricks, the machine could run for 7 to 8 hours on a battery. And the trackball was built right into the chassis. Editors Tom Thompson and Frank Hayes were right when they predicted that the Mac Portable would have a big influence on mobile computers of the future. And most of all, Apple learned from its mistakes: The next portable out of Cupertino was the hot-selling, slim, and sleek
PowerBook.
BASIC turned 25 years old and was given tribute in an article by famous BASIC programmer Bill Gates, who looked at the future and saw the language acquiring a visual component. ``A visual BASIC program will be a mixture of code, programmer-written objects, and visually specified objects.''
Optical computing was in the spotlight, with a look at optical interconnections, hybrid optic/electronic chips, blue lasers, and optical storage. Our forecast? ``The 1990s should be the decade for introducing optics into computers.'' Surely we meant the later 1990s.
Jerry Pournelle, wanting to try out the new Ami word processor, spent 40 minutes installing Windows/386, only to be kicked into DOS. (``Clearly, there are some odd bugs in Windows/386.'') He decided to stick with DOS and Desqview for the time.
10 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
We took our first look at the IBM AT. With its torrid 6-MHz 286, the machine was about 2.5 times faster than the old PC. The base system came with 256 KB of RAM
, but you could jack it up to 3 MB using five expansion cards. If you wanted a box with a 20-MB hard drive, monochrome monitor, and color graphics card, you had to shell out $6600. Our initial reaction? ``The IBM PC AT is an impressive machine, but the most important reason for its existence has yet to arrive--a powerful multiuser operating system such as Unix.'' We promised to get back when Xenix was available.
An ad for the Apple IIe touted the fact that you could increase its RAM to ``an elephantine 512K.'' Yow! Not only that, but you could pop in a Z80 card and run CP/M. That same ad heralded the new Apple IIc ($1300, 128 KB of RAM).
With a Winchester drive ``now within the means of the average owner,'' an article explained how to add a hard drive to an IBM PC. But you should be careful: ``Adding a hard disk to your system might overload the power supply.''
Another article told readers how to write a driver so they could use a Microsoft mouse with Lotus 1-2-3.
15 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
You had to do it yourself back then, kids. Editor Carl Helmers described the processor board in part two of a series on building your own 6809-based personal computer system; he'd detailed the backplane design the month before. Down in his Circuit Cellar, Steve Ciarcia told you how to build an LED graphics display you could hook up to your computer. Another article explained how to interface the S-100 bus with Intel's 8255 chip. There were listings for programs that analyzed utility bills, traced genealogy, did least-squares fitting of data, and simulated 3-D graphics.
``Home computers must advance by a generation before they will be useful, friendly, and entertaining for everyone. . . home users will need the computing power of 32-bit processors, a megabyte or more of memory...''
--- editor in chief Phil Lemmons, October 1984
On the Market in October 1989
Gateway 2000 and Zeos were selling 20-MHz 386 machines--1 MB of RAM, an 80-MB hard drive--for $2995. Early adopters could go to
ALR and buy the PowerCache 4, a 25-MHz 486, for $9990.
Federal Vapor Squad
A Microbytes news item reported that Commodore Business Machines, with a slight nudge from the FTC, had agreed to the novel concept of not advertising ``capabilities that don't yet exist.'' Commodore had promoted the CP/M capabilities of the C64 computer long before a promised Z80 coprocessor was available.
In the News in October 1979
Telecomputing Corporation of America started an online service that featured programs and databases, UPI files, airline schedules, and real estate listings. ``The service will be available in 200 US cities at $2.75 per hour.'' It was called The Source. . . Shugart was rumored to be readying an 8-inch Winchester drive for less than $1000; it would hold 5 megabytes. . . Digital Equipment Corp's Computer Stores ``are proving to be a real success.'' . . . Atari received FCC approval to sell the models 400 and 800 computers.
Photograph: Atari 800
Photogr
aph: IBM AT
Blasts from the Past
