In 1980, CNN started changing the face of news, a B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States, and Mount St. Helens blew up.
Cheap computers started arriving: the Sinclair Research ZX80 went for just $200, and the Commodore VIC-20 sold for only $299. At the other end of the scale, Apple announced the ill-fated Apple III (for $3,495); the machines suffered a nearly 100 percent failure rate and almost killed the company. Satellite Software announced a new word-processing program for Data General computers; the program was called WordPerfect. The computer adventure game Zork became a best seller. BYTE covered it all, and also looked ahead: An article on "A Computer-Generated Message Reminder" foretold the host of PIMs and schedulers to come; and the first hints of the graphics capabilities we take for granted today appeared in "Digital Storage of Images."
Not trivially, in the July 1980 issue, Jerry Pournelle began his unparalleled run as a phenomenally popular BYTE columnist.
1981 In 1981, the first space shuttle (Columbia) was launched; the first AIDS cases were reported, although the disease wasn't well identified and didn't even have a name yet; in England, Charles and Diana wed.
Hayes introduced the Smartmodem 300; it and its "AT" command set would become an industry standard. Timex contracted with Sinclair to produce the cheesy but affordable sub-$100 Timex/Sinclair 1000. Xerox developed the Alto -- a windowing, mouse-driven, Ethernet-enabled computer that was at least partially the inspiration for the Apple Mac (still three years away). Adam Osborne rolled out the first portable---the Osborne I, costing $1795, sporting a 5" display, a Z80 processor and 64K of RAM. Perhaps most significantly, a company called IBM introduced its first PC: A $3,005 unit with an 8088 CPU, 64K of RAM, and a single 5.25" floppy. It used Microsoft's OS. BYTE was on the scene for it all, and also made waves of its own when it rolled out the first formalized small computer benchmarks: As was always the case, BYTE's tests were platform independent.
2008 International Mathematica Conference Dr. Dobb's interviews Wolfram Research's Theo Gray, co-founder and Director of User Interfaces, and Roger Germundsson, Director of Research and Development, about the upcoming 2008 International
Mathematica Conference.
How Do You Do Nightly Builds and Tests when there is No Overnight? Software Production in a Geographically Distributed Environment
Attend this Webcast and find out how to overcome common build-test-deploy challenges that affect all members of a distributed team, including:
<ul>
<li> Communication difficulties, because of time-zone and cultural differences</li>
<li> Workflow challenges, like lack of documented procedures and build and test handoff problems</li>
<li> Slow build and test cycles, broken builds, and other factors that hamper distributed team productivity</li>
</ul>
Thursday, September 25, 2005 " 11am PT / 2pm ET
</p>
In this volume of Best of BYTE, we explore the emergence of some heuristic algorithms. Although we have only scratched the surface of this intriguing subject, we hope we've suggested the potential of the synthesis of heuristics and algorithms.
Understand C/C++ code in less time. A new team member ? Inherited legacy code ? Get up to speed faster with Crystal Flow for C/C++. Code-formatting improves readability. Flowcharts are integrated with code browser. Export flowcharts to Visio.
