Byte, marzo del 85

Es marzo, y toca revisar la revista Byte de marzo… de hace 40 años…

(Ya os avanzo, eso sí, que no es el número más apasionante de los que hemos repasado hasta ahora.)

Portada de la revista. El tema es bargain computing. Se ilustra con una enorme moneda de un céntimo en el que la efigie es la de un ordenador

Algo podemos adelantar: no, querido lector, «bargain» no va ser un ordenador por cien euros actuales.

Abrimos fuego con la editorial:

Editorial

ANOTHER WORLD: THE 68000

A year and a half ago, the world of personal computing looked as if it were becoming more and more the domain of a single class of computers, the IBM PC and its compatibles, and a single family of microprocessors, the Intel 8088 and its relatives. The IBM-Intel world has fostered the development of a great variety of software but signs of intellectual stagnation had appeared. Almost all hardware manufacturers had the same strategy: IBM compatibility. Almost all software houses besieged the same market: the corporate office.

When IBM reduced its prices and intraduced the PC AT at a surprisingly low price, many manufacturers of compatibles faltered or fell. While a number of software houses tottered IBM introduced dozens of its own software packages. Macintosh offered some hope of a pluralist world in personal computing but software was extremely slow to appear, and in many cases the Macintosh version of a program originally developed for the IBM PC was less capable. It was unclear whether the Macintosh would be able to stem the tide of IBM machines and software. 

In the past few weeks, however, an assortment of 68000-based machines has been announced or reported. Atari has announced 68000-based systems at astonishingly low prices and with impressive software from Digital Research. Hewlett-Packard's 68000-based Integral is a remarkable UNIX transportable with an electroluminescent display. Tandy also introduced a 68000-based system at the Consumer Electronics Show. Commodore has acquired rights to the68000-based Amiga system. Published reports say that AT&T will release a powerful 68000-based system. Put all these together with the 68000-based Apple machine. the Sinclair QL, S-100 68000 systems, and systems from Cromemco, Arete, Sun, Charles River Data Systems, Stride, Altos, IBC, Plexus, Pyramid, and
several others, and you have a
remarkably rich world encompassing everything from $300 home machines to expensive but economical 88-user UNIX systems. Will 1985 be the year of the 68000? The Motorola processors may not surpass...

¿Os suena el discuro «no todo el mundo es WinTel»? Ahora que parece que Intel está entre la espada y la pared, que la arquitectura Arm se come el mundo con permiso de Nvidia y sus GPUs, y que este año del señor de 2025 hasta es posible que podamos comprarnos un ordenador con una CPU de arquitectura RISC-V, ahora es posible que se cumpla que no toda la informática personal se base en las arquitecturas de Intel. Solo han hecho falta… ¿30 años para que eso se hiciese posible? ¿25, siendo muy generosos? Y de Motorola, y su pobre arquitectura 68000, que amenzaba la hegemonía de Intel hace cuarenta años, que en aquellos momentos alimentaba los Macs y, sobre todo para mí, los Amiga, lamentablemente, ya no se acuerda nadie (y Motorola la abandonó hace ya más de 30 años).

Mientras tanto… la invasión MSX de Estados Unidos no acaba de llegar:

MSX Computers Shown, Not Sold, at CES

A number of Japanese and Korean companies exhibited MSX home computers at a
Microsoft-sponsored MSX booth at January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. but only Yamaha has definite plans to bring an MSX computer to the U.S. (See page 43 5 for details on Yamaha's CX5M Music Computer.) Because computers based on Microsoft's MSX standard all use the same basic hardware and software configuration. MSX cartridges and cassette software will run on any MSX computer.

Canon, Casio, Daewoo, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sanyo, Sony, and Toshiba all showed MSX computers –available in Japan– but declined to comment on U.S. pricing or availability dates. Most companies said they were waiting for reaction from American dealers and consumers. Spectravideo, the only U.S. company making an MSX computer, also
displayed its computer.  Financially troubled Spectravideo was recently acquired by Bondwell, a Hong Kong computer maker.

At least 19 software companies are reportedly developing versions of popular programs
for MSX computers in Japan and the U.S., including Activision, Broderbund,  lnfocom, and Spinnaker. However. those companies. like U.S. dealers. are hesitant to commit large development efforts to an American MSX computer market until the Japanese commit to a U.S. marketing effort, which they failed to do at CES.

Also at CES, Nintendo showed its Advanced Video System, a version of the FCS home video-game system it offers in Japan and that it says holds 90 percent of the Japanese home video-game market. An optional keyboard unit turns the system into a computer; several other peripherals will also be available. Nintendo had not set a price for the system but said it will be available in the U.S. in June.

Los wearables siguen pegando fuerte:

Japanese Show More Wrist Computers

Seiko and Epson both showed watches that interface with computers at CES. Seiko's RC-1000 is similar to its earlier UC-2000, which used a separate keyboard to enter 2K bytes of text data for later reference. However. the RC-1000 includes an interface to any computer with an RS-232C serial port.

Epson's RC-20 wrist computer uses a Z80-compatible processor and features a 23-position touchscreen. It includes 8K bytes of ROM, 2K bytes of RAM. and a 4-line by 7-character display. Programs are included for appointment scheduling, address and phone listings, a calculator, and standard time and alarm functions. Neither price nor availability date were
released.

Y algo se mueve por la accesibilidad:

Braille Printers Aid Sight-Impaired

Visualtek, Santa Monica, CA, is shipping the MBOSS-1 Braille Printer, a bidirectional, continuous form-feed braille embosser. Based on a C. ltoh F10-55. MBOSS-1 runs at 10 cps and produces hard copy from a computer, word processor, or refreshable braille device. It connects through RS-232C serial or Centronics-yype parallel interfaces and uses audio status indicators. The list price is $3225.

Nippon Dentsu Co . Ltd. Hachioji-City, Tokyo, Japan will ship its Ohtsuki braille printer to the U.S. this month. The Ohtsuki produces standard text and braille simultaneously. It can be run from a standard word-processing program

Más me llama la atención, eso sí, el lanzamiento del Atari ST. Que uno siempre fue claramente más del Amiga que del Atari, pero Atari > Apple > todo lo demás…

To New Color Computers from Atari

Atari has two new color computer lines: the 68000-based ST and the 800-compatible XE.

The ST comes with a two button mouse and Digital Research's GEM, a user interface that has pull-down menus, icons, and overlapping windows. GEM is embedded in 192K bytes of ROM along with TOS (Tramiel operating system named for Atari president Jack Tramiel) and a game. For more on GEM, see page 39 of the December 1984 BYTE.

The ST, which can handle television, composite color, monochrome, and RGB outputs, produces graphic resolutions ranging from 640 by 400 pixels (monochrome) to 320 by 200 pixels (16-color mode). Its 84-key keyboard is augmented with a numeric keypad and 10 function  keys, ROM cartridge, RS-232C serial, Centronics parallel, and floppy- and hard-disk drive interfaces are supplied. Also, the ST carries a three-voice sound chip and a MIDI port for linking it to musical instruments and synthesizers.

The 128K-byte Model 130ST will sell for approximately $400, and the 512K byte Model 520ST will be about $600. Shipments are to begin shortly. Atari plans to offer a 10-megabyte ST hard-disk drive for about $600. Both a composite color monitor and a 3 1/2-inch disk drive will be priced in the $150 range.

Hablando de Commodore, este no lo recordaba yo:

Commodore Unveils 3-Pound Portable

The Commodore LCD is a 3-pound portable computer with a flip-up 16-line by 80-column liquid crystal display (LCD) and a built-in 300-bps modem. It's powered by either batteries or an external AC supply.

The LCD comes with word processing, file-management, spreadsheet, appointment schedule, and communications software in 96K bytes
of ROM. It also has calculator, memo-pad, and address-book features. Because the software resides in ROM. the LCD's 32K bytes of RAM are ready
for file and data storage. Commodore says the LCD can employ any C64 serial peripherals. such as printers and disk drives. It also has both RS-2 32C serial and parallel ports.

The Commodore LCD is expected to sell for under $600. Contact Commodore Business Machines Inc..
1200 Wilson Dr., West Chester. PA 19380. (215) 431-9100.

(Según la wikipedia, no llegó a salir nunca al mercado.)

Mientras tanto… ya no se hacen interfaces como las de antes:

Footmouse frees your hands

Versatron is shipping the Footmouse, a foot operated mouse for microcomputers. The manufacturer notes that the primary advantage of the Footmouse is that it frees both your hands for data input.

Footmouse reportedly works with any software package that uses a cursor. It emulates the keyboard cursor functions. yet it does not interrupt normal cursor operations. Footmouse plugs between the keyboard and the computer, requiring neither special boards nor software support.

Presently available for the IBM PC and IBM PC-compatibles, versions of the Footmouse for the Apple lIe, Macintosh. IBM PC XT and PC AT, Ivy, Compaq, and RS-232C terminals will be available shortly. The suggested list price is $225.

Y, en productos que, cuarenta años más tarde, siguen estando a punto de «petarlo»… la robótica personal ¡y autónoma! (Como mínimo, es de agradecer que no se fueran a las formas humanoides que tanto han llamado la atención en el Mobile World Congress y que, dejadme vaticinar, no se impondrán).

Anuncio del primer robot autónomo personal, personal, Gemini, de Arctec Systems. La forma del robot es más o menos cónica, y no se acaba de apreciar qué tamaño tiene. ¿Quizás un metro y medio de altura? Cuenta con tres SONARs en la cabeza y cinco más en el cuerpo, tres micrófonos, una interfaz con varias teclas de función y una pantalla LCD de 40 columnas y 8 líneas. Tiene ordenadores para controlar su proplsión, y la entrada y salida de voz, basados en procesadores 65C02s con 92 Ks de ROM y 74 de RAM

Algo me dice que esos procesadores 65C02 con 92 Ks de ROM y 74 de RAM van a ir pelín justitos para la entrada y salida de voz, pero qué sabré yo…

En la serie «artículos que provocarían derrames cerebrales» si se publicasen en una revista generalista de informática hoy», toca…

By Peter Rice

Arithmetic on your PC

Use strings and arrays to perform operations on 200-digit numbers.

Ask some bright I0-year-olds to square your Social Security number and, after a bit of pencil chewing, they'll give you the answer. Ask your computer to do the same. and you will receive something like this:
302.325.855 x 302.325.855 =
9.140092260148103 D+6

Note that the correct answer is
91.400.922.601.481.025. The reason
for the slight inaccuracy is that all
computers-including the IBM Personal Computer (PC). on which I made this calculation-assign a specific amount of space for storing integers. Any number that requires more than the allocated space is converted to a floating-point decimal. In the case above. the last digit was lost and the answer was rounded off. In the IBM PC. an integer must fall between -32.768 and +32.767; if a calculation exceeds this range. the IBM PC converts the result to a double-precision real number, accurately represented to 16 digits.

…aritmética entera con 200 dígitos de precisión. (También añadiré que igual elevar un número de nueve cifras al cuadrado está más allá de las habilidades típicas de los niños de diez años de edad de hoy en día… y que no me parece ningún problema que sea así, por otro lado.)

En nuevas tecnologías: ¡las pantallas planas!

TWO FLAT-DISPLAY TECHNOLOGIES

 No one likes the bulk and fragility that arise from the classical cathode-ray tube's (CRTs) bulbous vacuum-tube/electron gun structure. Yet in cost. versatility, and quality of display. the technology of the CRT has proved hard to beat. At present. there are three leading alternatives to CRTs: the liquid-crystal display (LCD), the gas-plasma-discharge panel. and the electroluminescent display (ELD) . All of these are flat screens, and the display modules are a couple of inches thick at most. Currently. each excels in certain applications; none has yet attained the general-purpose utility of the CRT but efforts to improve all three are continuing.

The LCD has become familiar through its use in wristwatches, calculators, and most of the current generation of briefcase-size portable computers. It is the most common flat-screen alternative to the CRT today. The LCD's frugal power requirements are especially valued. (See references I and 2.)

But the liquid-crystal display has its
limitations. Not emitting light, it must
scatter or absorb light supplied by
other sources. Furthermore, the constraints of pixel (picture element)
decay times and scanning rates cause
problems in the larger sizes preferred
for computer work, notably lack of
contrast, and adjustment of the viewing angle is usually critical. Also. current LCD technology can produce
only a poor gray scale.

The other two display technologies, though less familiar, show promise of
eventually supplanting the CRT in
several workaday contexts. In this article I will focus on gas-plasma...

Ni los paneles de gas-plasma ni las pantallas electroluminiscentes eran la solución al problema, pero el artículo, hay que reconocerlo, miraba al futuro con ganas. Uno podría pensar que la siguiente pieza también lo hacía…

Navigation

Putting the microcomputer to work at sea

A number of years ago, I had the opportunity to do some navigating for the U.S. Navy. At that time, I had to use a variety of instruments and consult several books of tables to chart my course. Now, with a portable microcomputer and a few navigation instruments you can find your way across any ocean.

Not long ago, only large ships could carry computers with the precision to navigate. Now, navigators of the smallest sailing craft have precise, low-power microcomputer systems available...

…pero no, no se trata de un avance del GPS, sino de una sesuda explicación de los fundamentos de un programa para ejecutar los cálculos trigonométricos para navegar por los océanos (esta vez el programa, para el TRS-80 III, era lo suficientemente grande como para no estar su código en la revista, y tener que descargarse vía modem). Qué cosas.

Y llegamos, ahora sí, a la informática «de oferta». La cosa comienza no apta para cardíacos, con los esquemas para hacer un terminal de 80 columas para el Commodore 64 (que, amiga lectora, tenía una pantalla de 40 por 25 caracteres)…

THE COMMODORE 64 80-COLUMN TERMINAL

BY JOHN C. FIELD , GREG RICHARDS, AND ERIC BEENFELDT

If you've got an EPROM programmer handy, build this modification for the Commodore 64

THE motivation for this project was
the 10 Motorola 68000-based Educational Computer boards we have here at the University of Maine at Orono. Although we had the boards. we had no terminals to use with them. We didn't want to buy expensive new terminals, so we looked at alternatives,
including building Steve Ciarcia's Term-Mite ST. However, we thought
modified Commodore 64s looked like
the best alternative because we can
use them for microcomputer experiments when we're not using them as terminals.

We modified the Commodore 64s
by building an RS-232C converter
card for the Commodore's expansion
port and a video card for its user port.
Both of the cards are shown in photo 1. The video card contains a 2K-byte
block of screen memory on a 6116
chip; a 684 5 cathode-ray tube controller (CRTC); various timing, logic,
and mixing circuits: a character EPROM (erasable programmable read-only memory), and a program EPROM. The RS -232C converter card brings the Commodore's TTL (transistor-transistor logic) voltage-level expansion port up to RS-232C voltage levels...

Porque, efectivamente, la frase «si tienes un programador de EPROMs a mano» era una frase que daba mucho menos miedo hace cuarenta años que ahora…

Y qué mejor manera de cerrar marzo del 85 que hablando de gráficos 3D baratos (bueno, hay un artículo sobre XLISP e inteligencia artificial, pero confieso que no me atrevo):

BUDGET 3D GRAPHICS

Plotting three-dimensional surfaces on a computer can be valuable to a mathematician or scientist. It can also produce visually pleasing geometric forms. Unfortunately, it is not easy to write a program to generate such plots, especially if you want to include such niceties as hidden-line removal and the ability to rotate your plot around the three axes. However, Bridge Software (31 Champa St., Newton Upper Falls. MA 02164. (617) 244-2306) markets a rather versatile program to make generating 3-D plots easy. The program is called SURF, and it runs under PC-DOS 2 .0 or higher on an IBM PC or PCjr with l 28K bytes of RAM (random-access read-write memory) and a color monitor. SURF will also plot the surfaces in high resolution on an Epson printer equipped with Graftrax. if you have 256K bytes of RAM. The package includes two versions of the program-one that supports the 8087 NDP (numerical data processor) chip and one that does not. Best of all. SURF (with its 16-page user manual) is available for $35 plus $1. 50 shipping and handling.
To use SURF. you just enter the equation of the surface that you want to plot. If there are any singularities in the plot. you also enter them. In most cases. you can then let the package automatically set the parameters necessary to draw the plot by selecting the "auto-graph" feature from the menu. You can rotate the figure around any axis by selecting the appropriate menu item and specifying the number of degrees to rotate (rotation is not done in real time). You can alter the viewpoint or the position of the projection plane as well. In addition, you can stretch the 2-D picture in the horizontal or vertical direction (thus distorting the plot), or you can change the scale of the x-, y-, or z-axis to accentuate a gradual change in one of these directions.
SURF is also sold in a package with two other plotting programs for $90 plus $1. 50 shipping and handling. The CURVES program plots one or two 2-D curves in polar, rectangular, or parametric coordinates with up to four parameters and features a movable "magnifying window" that allows you to repeatedly large part of the plot to graphically solve simultaneous equations. The DIFFS program plots any ordinary first-order differential equation as a tangent field.

¿Qué son 35 dólares de la época (unos 105, actualizando la inflación) por poder generar esos gráficos ochenteros?

Gráficas de dunciones tridimensionales como (sin(x*x+2*y*y)*exp(-x*x-y*y), o x*y*(x*x-y*y)/(x*x+y*y)

En fin… ya os avanzaba que no era el mejor de los meses en Byte, este marzo de 1985. Os puedo avanzar, eso sí, que abril vine calentito, con número dedicado a… ¡la inteligencia articial!

Si queréis adelantaros, siempre podéis pasaros por https://vintageapple.org/byte a curiosear. Y si no, pues… hasta el mes que viene.

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