Being a BYTE reader since way back 20 years ago, I had a sort of special feeling going over your anniversary edition (September) -- not the least of which was noticing I'm 20 years older and still banging away on a computer keyboard. Twenty years is a heck of a long time. Far more than any other magazine, you have pioneered this industry. BYTE has a place of its own somewhere along with the Apple II and Turbo Pascal.
Gus J. Grubba
gus@sgi.grubba.com
Reading your anniversary articles was a trip down memory lane. I have used or owned many of the computers you mentioned. I have special praise for the Radio Shack Model 100, since it is now the heart and brain of my lawn-watering system. However, it does not use the Z80 CPU as mentioned in your article "Top 20 Small Systems." Many other Tandy machines were driven by the Z80, b
ut the soul of the Model 100 was the 80C85.
Richard Poitras
Missoula, Montana
poitras@montana.com
The Model 100 did indeed use an 80C85, clocked at a blazing 2.4 MHz. We regret the error. -- Eds.
The "20 Spectacular Failures" piece lacked one product worthy of inclusion -- Microsoft Bob. What an oversized piece of dreck. I also expected to see somewhere in the section at least one entry regarding the Heathkit computers. A lot of us cut our eyeteeth on H-8s. You guys really seem to have a blind spot regarding the Heath company, as I pointed out the last time you did this type of historic review. Put a big pop-up reminder in your database so you don't leave them out again!
Welbrey A. Hill
hillw@freenet.fsu.edu
I am dismayed at the complete avoidance in your anniversary issue of any mention of OS/2, either in the "Most Important Software Products" article or in "The 10 Most Important Programs of Today
" sidebar.
OS/2 2.1 was a revolutionary milestone in personal computing. The first real alternative to the MS-DOS/Windows 3.x combination, IBM's OS offered unparalleled backward compatibility. The DOS sessions were fast, protected, and individually customizable without having to reboot. OS/2 ran Windows software as well as native Windows seamlessly on the OS/2 desktop -- an accomplishment Microsoft felt was impossible. Flat memory model, true preemptive multitasking (even with legacy software), unheard-of backward compatibility, object-oriented desktop, and a vision for the future make OS/2 a revolutionary product.
As Windows 95 falters from over-marketing and the usual bugs, OS/2 Warp becomes even more attractive as an alternative to Microsoft's offerings.
Tom Robeson
drtom@infi.net
Thanks for your stimulating list of error messages in the twentieth-anniversary issue. From 1983 to 1990, I worked as a freelance writer and used Acorn Computers (6502-b
ased). The last of these machines died with a single intelligible phrase amongst all the garbage on the screen: "Klaatu Barada Nikto," which you may remember from the science-fiction classic
The Day the Earth Stood Still
.
Grant Nightingale
Oxford, England.
100256.1361@compuserve.com
Congratulations on the September issue. I can't, however, understand why you place three versions of the Apple Macintosh among the top 20 small systems and leave out the Commodore 64. The C-64 was a quantum leap when it appeared and was probably the best-selling computer of all time.
On another note, I have every BYTE since the January 1982 edition. Any chance these will ever come out on CD-ROM?
Eduardo Chaves
Campinas, Sao Paolo, Brazil
chaves@turing.unicamp.br
We will add your votes for Commodore's 64 and Amiga in the growing bin of "How could you leave out such-and-such?" letters. Regarding back issues, we d
o have a BYTE CD-ROM that goes back five years. You can order one by calling (800) 924-6621 or faxing (609) 426-5592. You can also scan our archives on our Web page (
http://www.byte.com
) or our FTP site (ftp.byte.com). -- Eds.
Happy Anniversary
