Dennis Barker
5 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
The new Amiga 3000
had a 68030, a 32-bit architecture, a multitasking OS, and a new GUI. It had a high-resolution display. It had stereo sound and connectors for video gear. It was "the ideal multimedia platform." It cost about half as much as a comparable Mac IIci. It had zealous owners. It had everything but big sales.
Intel's new 33-MHz 486
fueled ALR's PowerVEISA and AST's Premium, both screamers, but our review found that ALR's 64-KB external cache gave it more vroom.
Can you hear it huffing and puffing?
Everybody was doing aerobics back then--including batteries. We reported on a zinc battery that breathed airborne oxygen and mixed it with water molecules in an alkaline gel electrolyte, which p
roduced hydrogen atoms, which...well, eventually it all generated electricity. Since our article, the Aerobic Power battery has been commercialized by AER Energy Resources. It's being used in power packs for hand-held computers in vertical applications, and there are versions in the works for notebooks, including the Zenith Noteflex. "Zinc air batteries increase your run time by about five times," an AER spokesman said.
QUIZ SHOW
This object is...
a. a cubist sculpture of a fried egg
b. a prop from
Star Wars
c. the head of a cybernautic cyclops
d. an alternative input device, circa 1990
10 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
AT&T's Unix PC
was the company's attempt to get Unix into the mainstream office. They were going to make Unix easier to use, see. The system came with menu-driven software that stepped you through most operations. It also featured two things novel enough to get italics:
virtua
l memory
and
telephony
.
Multiprocessing was the theme.
We spent nine pages debating what it is--"it may mean two independent Z80 computers sharing only the same hard disk, [or] it may mean 2 million 68000s sharing everything from resources to the same program"--then concluded that most micro users don't need it.
Two now-legendary PCs came in for review that month:
the new Compaq Deskpro and the new IBM AT. The Deskpro had a dual-speed 8086. For pure PC compatibility, you had to run at 4.77 MHz to emulate the PC's 8088. If you preferred speed, you could switch into 7.14-MHz mode.
The AT trumped the PC, the XT, and a million clones
by having the new 286 chip. This meant faster clock speed (6 MHz), a 16-bit data bus, and protected mode. IBM also added a new floppy format: 1.2 MB. But there was one thing the AT couldn't do that the Deskpro could: run Flight Simulator.
Desktop revolution.
Our West Coast bureau
described a new program from a company called Aldus. The program was called PageMaker. People would use it to do something called "desktop publishing."
Jerry Pournelle gave his Folly of the Year Award
to execs at two companies threatening new copy-protection schemes. One would plant malfunction-inducing worms in the PC. The other promised "booby traps that will make Vietnam look like a birthday party."
Smalltalk fans finally had some microcomputer versions to use:
Digitalk's Methods, for the IBM PC, and Smalltalk-PC, for the Apple II. Wrote Bruce Webster: "Perhaps now that some `real' Smalltalk implementations are reaching the micro market, the object-oriented approach to software development will get its first true test."
15 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
Floppy drives were exotic and expensive.
We explained how to build a disk-controller board so you could hook a Shugart drive to your 8080A box.
You could
stick with cassette tapes.
"Floppy disks may be a glamorous way to store programs and data," one author wrote, "but the cassette is far from dead." Not only far from dead, but "here to stay." Like that parrot in the
Monty Python
skit, cassette storage must be merely resting.
Baked Apple.
Editor Carl Helmers, in Kenya, set up his Apple II to control a camera for photographing the solar eclipse. But it kept crashing. It was too hot. The sun had cooked the main board to about 180F.
Return to Sender.
A new report predicted that $4 billion would be spent on E-mail services and equipment by 1990. "The field will be dominated by IBM, AT&T, and GT&E, with the U.S. Postal Service getting about one-quarter of the business."
PRICE CHECK
Apple II, with 16 KB of RAM $959
TI-99/4, with 16KB of
RAM and a color monitor $979
Micropolis MetaFloppy
drive, with controller $999
Altos 4-user system, with
29-MB Winchester drive $14,260
Microsoft BASIC Compiler $395
An Introduction to
Microcomputers by Adam Osborne $12.50
photo_link (6 Kbytes)
Blasts from the Past
