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
EISA arrived, and we heralded it as ``the new 32-bit bus standard.'' This enthusiasm was based on the technical details of the bus specification rather than on any hard test results. Hewlett-Packard's Vectra 486 was the first EISA system we could get our hands on; it used a preproduction 486 CPU (which was brand new) and had no EISA add-in cards, because EISA add-in cards weren't shipping.
EISA was controversial, but it's hard now to see why. It aimed to replace the ISA bus, yet EISA connectors could accommodate ISA cards (unlike IBM's Micro Channel). It's fast, up to 33 MBps. And it was developed by a reputable Gang of Nine that included Compaq, HP, NEC, and
AST. A wait-and-see attitude that Brett Glass noted in his ``Under the Hood'' column about the new bus was persistent. EISA has been a big hit in the tony turf of servers, but PC makers never did adopt it for their low-cost desktops. Before that could happen, along came local-bus technologies like PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect). But you can't call EISA a dog, either. According to Computer Intelligence InfoCorp (La Jolla, CA), there are about 4 million EISA machines out there.
A ``cheap'' 486, like ALR 's PowerFlex 40, sold for $4490. It was a 286 system with a 486 on a plug-in board. That sounds pricey now, but you could also spend as much dough for a 386; AST's Premium/386C, for example, sold for $4395, and that was without a monitor or hard drive.
OS/2's future as a mainstream operating system looked so bright. Microsoft was about to release Excel for OS/2 (we found it ``substantially slower'' than the Windows version in file loading and screen movement). And Bill Gates himself, in a
n ad for Digitalk's Smalltalk/V PM, called OS/2 ``a tremendously rich environment.''
``By 1991, a new generation of RISC chips will be doubling the performance of current implementations, and CISC will have to play catch-up again (probably in 1992) with the 68050 and the 80586.''
-- Michael Slater and John Wharton,``Revenge of the CISCs''
10 Years Ago in BYTE
``This is the first [truly portable and fully functional] machine that is as useful as the computer on your office desk,'' we wrote. It was a 10-pound, battery-powered, IBM-compatible PC, and it came from Data General. The $2895 DG/One showed that a minicomputer maker could downsize and make a portable PC. But subsequent months showed they couldn't sell it.
Back in the days before PDAs, we called them pocket computers. The Psion Organiser was sort of like an electronic address book, sort of like a calculator. For storage, it used write-once PROM cartridges, called Datapaks, that plugged into the side of the machine and could
hold 16 KB, or 300 phonebook entries. Mini applications also came on Datapaks.
In the News
A California start-up called Ferix introduced a novel thin-film magnetic printing technology. It embedded the print-head array in a flexible strip, which slid across a rotating drum and deposited a magnetic image. Ferix expected its technology to cut sales of laser printers. Kaypro announced the New Kaypro 2. The $995 transportable came with WordStar and MBASIC. Finding demand less than delirious, Apple cut the price of its new IIc by $100 to $1195.
What Was Hot, November 1984
-- Intel's 286
-- Motorola's 68020
-- Software Publishing's pfs:Plan spreadsheet
-- Samna Word III
-- HP's 150 touchscreen computer
-- Multimate and Leading Edge word processors
-- PC/FORTH
15 Years Ago in BYTE
The Fun and Games issue. Fun and games didn't mean Myst and Mortal Kombat. It meant using a microcomputer to program a game of Reversi, solve SOMA cubes, write animated games in 80
80 assembly language, design a spacecraft simulator, and play chess. We published code for a baseball simulation, but in all those lines of North Star BASIC is no accounting for a players' strike.
Steve Ciarcia used Intel's System Design Kit to build a PC around the new 8086 chip. ``Running up to 8 MHz, the 29,000-transistor 8086 is the fastest single-chip central processor currently available.'' For $780, you could buy the SDK-86 and build a 16-bit computer with 2 KB of RAM, 8 KB of ROM, serial and parallel I/O, and an eight-digit LCD.
Price Quotes: November 1979
Commodore PET 16N computer $995
Dual floppy drive for the PET 16N $1295
11-MB 8-inch Winchester drive, from International Memories $1775
Microsoft BASIC interpreter for the 8086,
from Seattle Computer Products $350
Subscription to BYTE $18
Illustration: EISA Connector
Illustration: Reversi
Photograph: Psion Organiser
Blasts from the Past
