Dennis Barker
5 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
VGA color monitors made the cover
. They were getting to be inexpensive, starting at $399. We looked at 26 of them--very closely. The testers in the lab saw nothing but pixels swimming before their eyes for weeks after.
Machine of the Month:
Compaq's new Systempro. ``A reason to believe in EISA.'' This $16,000 33-MHz 386 server featured the Flex/MP architecture, which allowed for multiprocessing the Compaq way; all I/O, for example, had to be handled by the primary processor. Still, ``a winner.''
Which operating system will dominate the desktop?
The BYTE poll at Comdex showed industry expectations for OS/2 falling faster than a mainframe dropped from the Eiffel Tower. In the spring of 1988, voters
chose it as the operating system most likely to succeed. But by that fall, OS/2 was sliding, and DOS bounced back to the top. Even Unix, exotica for most Comdexers, surpassed OS/2 in votes. Our take: The practicality of staying with DOS outweighs the technical advantages of OS/2 and Unix. Only developers had Windows 3.0 then--but in a moment of shattering insight, we sensed it having a ``negative impact on OS/2 acceptance.''
The
BYTE Unix benchmarks
made their debut in this issue.
Life Within 1 MB.
After those rich and famous 1980s--gas-plasma-screen/4-MB-of-RAM/386 laptops on the Cote d'Azur--it was time to think frugality. We devoted about 50 pages to the minimalist life-style: busting 640 KB, dealing with TSRs, multitasking DOS, compression programs, svelte integrated software, and Borland's VROOM.
Reviews from the Past
NetWare 386
: No more Netgen installation hassles.
OS/2 1.2
: Much improved, but ``needs to go
on a diet.''
Mail-order 386SXes
: From Gateway 2000 and PC Brand, ``a great deal of power at very reasonable prices.''
Autodesk Animator.
In 1990, this is what an animation package for the ordinary PC user looked like. Glitzy it ain't, but, hey, it ran on a 640-KB machine. Not for generating The Lion King, but OK for Beavis and Butt-head.
10 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
Bargain Computing.
We looked at low-cost and freebie ways to extend your PC's power: programming editors such as Vedit and Brief; a $35 program called Surf, for generating 3-D plots; instructions for turning a Commodore 64 into an 80-column terminal; the $815 Slicer kit computer; public domain gems like Andrew Fluegelman's PC-Talk and Jim Button's One Ringy Dingy; and a tutorial on XLISP by its inventor and future BYTE employee David Betz.
IBM Japan introduced its PC for the local market
. The JX crossed the PC and the PCjr: 4.77-MHz 8088, fl
oppy drives, and two slots for software cartridges; the two expansion connectors would take only PCjr cards. The JX went up against more advanced systems from NEC, Sharp, and other giants.
``One of the
complexities of hacking
is that we wanted a pure model. Now the world is more complicated. We have stock options and salaries to worry about.''
-- Mac hardware designer Burrell Smith, quoted in our West Coast bureau's report from the Hackers' Conference
Flat-panel displays were a bit far out
but showed ``promise of eventually supplanting the CRT in several workaday contexts.'' We focused on the technology of gas-plasma and electroluminescent displays.
15 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
Steve Ciarcia advises two men
at the local doughnut shop to ``ease into 16-bit computing'' with Intel's new 8088.
Articles on using a microcomputer
to ``explore the inner processes of a molecule''; solving problems in
volving variable terrain; simulating the landing of a jet-propelled craft; and operation codes of the 8080, 8085, and Z80.
Editorial director Carl Helmers recounted
how he rigged up an Apple II and a Nikon camera to take photos of a solar eclipse. He was going to Kenya for the occasion, with a reader he'd met as a result of an earlier article on the subject.
They'd rejected Steve Wozniak's proposal
, thus inadvertently helping to launch Apple, but now Hewlett-Packard had a PC of its own. The HP-85 looked kind of like a giant calculator: one piece, with a little display (5 inches) and built-in keyboard, plus a drive for tape cartridges and a thermal printer with paper only slightly wider than cash-register tape. The brain was a custom 8-bit processor. Cost: $3250.
Blasts from the Past
