Blasts From The Past

Laser printers with roughly 2-ppm performance ranged from $1995 to $3695. While reviewing Tandy's new 386-based PC, we noted prices for 386 boxes had dropped from about $6499 to $4299 (with 40-MB hard drive and monitor) in about a year.

Did the power of the PC spreadsheet help drive the leveraged buyout mania of the 1980s? Our cover story discussed how PCs and programs like VisiCalc were deli vering new ways to quickly analyze complex financial data.

We looked at a new high-level programming language that was originally designed to run under Unix on the DEC PDP-11series of machines. This new language was called C. Also covered: How to analyze your car's gas economy with your computer; APL interpreters; and a BASIC version of the Othello game.