February 1995 / Letters

On the Fence	I read your fascinating cover story ``Apple's High-Tech Gamble'' (December 1994).
Real Programmers and Sine Waves	Thanks for reminding your readers that there are still some ``real'' programmers in the world.
The Pickiest Readers	Just to prove that BYTE readers can really sweat the details, in Dean Abramson's ``Globalization of Windows'' (November 1994), his explanation of the grouping of characters into scripts in Unicode contains a flaw.
You Didn't Gush Enough	In the article ``Starting with a Clean Sheet'' (November 1994), Dick Pountain is not doing justice to modern APL when he says, ``it is tempting to describe CleanSheet as a visual APL for the 1990s.'' That's like saying, ``Counting is likely to be a good mathematics for the twenty-first century.'' Because of its nature, APL is not only one of the oldest computing languages but also one of the most promising of the next century.
Leading the Witness?	After I finished reading the article ``Exploring Chicago and Daytona'' (November 1994), I wondered about BYTE's motives to create such useless drivel.
A Compelling Compiler Request	As a professional programmer, I am delighted at the turn toward more in-depth and technical reports on trends, alliances, hardware, software, and standards.
The Problem 's in the Premise	Ben Smith's review of The Unix Hater's Handbook (Books & CD-ROM, December 1994) is really off-base.
Why Systems Fail	In Scott Wallace's article ``Experts in the Field'' (October 1994), he states, ``Given that TestBench [a model-based expert system] focuses on failures and their causes, model-based reasoning tends to have limited applicability for most prospective users.'' This could not be further from the truth.
RISC Registers	I read ``AMD vs. Superman'' (November 1994) and was wondering how the registers are selected for the r-ops (RISC operations).
Plug and Play and Warp	The article ``PCMCIA: Past, Present, and Promise'' (November 1994) contains a glaring error.
BYTE Could Be an Addiction!	Thanks for a great magazine. I have been an avid reader since 1987 or thereabouts.
Byte: The Word	I would like to get the following on record: The word byte was coined around 1956 to 1957 at MIT Lincoln Laboratories within a project called SAGE (the North American Air Defense System), which was jointly developed by Rand, Lincoln Labs, and IBM.

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