Pentium Bug

I read Raphael Needleman's Editorial (March) with great concern. To pass off the Pentium bug (and generalizing this concept) as a fact of life is troubling. To me, there's a big difference between application software and fundamental building blocks (i.e., the CPU). If you look at any piece of complex software and break it down into its layers, then the bottom layer (the CPU) must be the most rigorous. Bugs in the lower layers will have a much more devastating effect than bugs in the top layers (which may only affect one option as opposed to the entire application).

This is one of the worst editorials I have read from BYTE in the last 15 years of reading the magazine and the only one that has prompted me to reply.

I've been very pleased with the refocus on core technology over the last two years (which is what the orientation of the magazine was in the early 1980s). I stopped bu ying the magazine in the latter half of the 1980s when it became another IBM-compatible magazine.

Trevor Coulson
Frewville, Australia
maptek@wattle.itd.adelaide.edu.au

I am sorry you did not like my Editorial. But I do think I was misunderstood (as a writer, that's my fault, not yours). To expect and understand how a bug can crop up in foundation technology (a CPU) is not the same as to forgive it, which I do not do. Thanks for reading and for the candor of your letter.

--Rafe Needleman