Poor Standards, Poor Timing

Your September editorial on ``Plug and Play'' is absolutely correct but about 10 years too late. Your belated recognition of the albatross of PC compatibility is ironic and even hypocritical, because BYTE was in the forefront of those magazines proclaiming ``Industry Standards uber alles'' during the formative period of the industry. Never mind that such standards were ill-designed and deficient as a base from which to evolve future computing environments. The situation is somewhat equivalent to that of the QWERTY keyboard, widely acknowledged to be deficient, but so deeply embedded as to be impossible to change. I have this recurring nightmare that on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Geordi LaForge has to debug the difficult computer problems with a hexadecimal dump and an x86 code card. But the actual immense costs of deficient embedded standards aren't paid in large amounts at critical times, they're paid in small installments every day.

David A. Bridger

St. Louis, MO