Dennis Barker
5 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
"The era of the personal laser printer is upon us."
Low-cost lasers was the cover story. The lab tested a bunch of them, all compatible with the HP LaserJet II, and many priced in the $2000 neighborhood. Favorite picks were the LaserJet III, the TI microLaser, and the Mannesmann Tally MT 906.
Microbytes reported Microsoft's new spin on OS/2.
VP Steve Ballmer told us the new nickname for OS/2 is Windows Plus. The alternative reality was thinking of Windows as OS/2 Minus.
We explored a range of input, control, and navigation devices,
including stereoscopic displays for 3-D virtual environments, speech recognition, and gestures. As great as they sounded, note that most of us are still tapping on a mec
hanism developed more than a hundred years ago.
Computing without keyboards was the State of the Art focus.
To test our theory that you could do real work without punching keys, we strapped this subject to a special chair, put restraints on his wrists, and made him use an eye-tracking device to control the cursor. (At least he wasn't too close to the monitor and didn't risk repetitive-stress injury to his wrists from too much typing. However, eyestrain might be a danger.)
Buzz box.
There was a lot of talk about the Airis VH-286, a 6.5-pound notebook that the company first showed us under heavy secrecy. This $1895 "innovative new machine" had a 12.5-MHz 286, 2-1/2-inch 20-MB hard drive, 11-inch black-on-white LCD, and 2400-bps modem on the motherboard, but no built-in floppy drive. It was a nice unit, but before the Chicago start-up could sell any, it met an untimely demise.
Notable reviews:
The Silicon Graphics Personal Iris Turbo workstati
on: "places real graphics in the hands of the people who need it most."
Lotus Notes 1.0: "a strange beast [and] an interesting distributed-database network."
Zortech's C++ 2.0: "fully suited to professional code development."
10 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
Computers and space.
Some fun stuff for the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo generation: astronomical applications of microcomputers, calculating the locations of asteroids and comets, a program to determine the positions of satellites, ways to automate a telescope, and how NASA used a network of PCs to acquire and analyze data.
We reviewed two space-flight simulators: Rendezvous, where you tried to hook up with a space station in Earth orbit, and Saturn Navigator, where you tried to reach a station near the ringed planet. Neither included a malevolent but mannerly computer that said, "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that."
The Texas Instruments Pro-Lite was a 10-pound portable
that
could take enough options to be nearly as functional as its desktop sibling, the TI Professional. It was one of the first PCs to have 3-1/2-inch floppy drives. Our benchmarks showed it could load a WordStar document in 6.6 seconds, compared to 9.9 seconds on an IBM PC.
NCR's Personal Computer Model 4
looked
like a portable,
especially with those two built-in vertical disk drives. But it tilted the scales at a hefty 50 pounds. The keyboard alone weighed 4.5 pounds.
According to Webster.
In his inaugural column, "semiretired software engineer" Bruce Webster covered what's new: the Fat Mac (512 KB, two floppy drives), 10-MB hard drives for the Mac, a "mind-reading" program called Mind Prober, Steve Jasik's MacNosy disassembler, and IOmega's Bernoulli Box.
15 YEARS AGO IN BYTE
Computers in education.
Discussion and debate on PCs and learning. "Computer-aided instruction has many advantages and disadvant
ages that tend to offset or cancel one another," one contributor wrote.
Forecast:
"By the year 1984, there will be millions of general-purpose microcomputers in schools, colleges, and universities, with an even greater number available for educational use in the home."
J. C. Johnston, a graduate student at Cleveland State,
wrote of his adventure building his own PC on a student's budget. Here's what he had to shell out:
Z80 processor board $120
4-KB memory board $ 90
I/O board $ 60
motherboard $ 45
power supply $ 25
enclosure $ 40
power-supply extension $ 12
video terminal $200
total $592
Dawn of Chaos.
Jerry Pournelle's first BYTE column appeared in this issue. "This will be a column by and for computer users, and with rare exceptions I won't discuss anything I haven't installed and implemented here in Chaos Manor.
"
Blasts from the Past
