Byte, abril del 86

Proseguimos con nuestro proyecto de leer la revista Byte, cuarenta años más tarde. El resto de entradas de la serie, como siempre, las encontrarás en la etiqueta Byte de obm.

Portada de la revista Byte de Abril de 1986. El tema es numbre crunching. Lo ilusta una especie de cascanueces digital (está hecho de un par de chips) que ha roto un 1 y un 0

Comenzamos con un anuncio del mítico Clipper, un lenguaje de programación pensado para reemplazar el del no menos legendario dBASE. A los programadores de una cierta edad (la última versión salió en 1997) igual se les cae una lagrimita.

Clipper gives dBASE III users more time to do more. Or less. Clipper allows you to run all dBASEIII programs 2 to 20 times taster than they do with the standard dBASE interpreter. That frees up extra' time you're wasting if you're running dBASE III programs without Clipper. Extra time to think. To create. To produce. To use as you choose. You see, Clipper is the first true compiler for dBASE III. Clipper eliminates the timeconsuming translation which the dBASE interpreter performs line after line whenever a program is run. With Clipper, once you've debugged your source code, it's compiled into more efficient machine code. And Clipper compiles all your dBASE III programs. The ones you have today. The ones you'll have tomorrow. But don't wait until tomorrow to order Clipper. Today, Clipper has already been purchased to speed up dBASE run time at 3M and Touche Ross. At Exxon and NASA. In the Harvard Physics Department. For the State of Arizona and TRW. And that's just a few of the installations worldwide. From Greece to Venezuela to Canada to Europe. So stop wasting time. Call our toll-free 800 number and get Clipper. You'll spend less time running dBASE III and more time running the rest of your life.

No os perdáis, por cierto, la sección «Ask Byte» que comienza justo antes del anuncio. Y recordad que se trata del número de abril.

Y un anuncio más. De Xerox y el PARC, su centro de investigación en el que se inventó la mitad de la informática (es probable que me quede corto), hablamos por aquí hace nada más y nada menos que catorce años. En el 86 vendían sus impresoras láser (las inventaron ellos, al fin y al cabo) y su Documenter System (haced zoom en la pantalla del ordenador de la izquierda y descubriréis un sistema que parece de una década más tarde, el Xerox 6085, heredero mítico del Xerox Star).

Anuncio de Xerox. A la izquierda vemos un ordenador con un monitor de 19 pulgadas (descomunal para la época). A la derecha vemos un sistema de impresión láser comercial que ocupara varios armarios, más ordenadores de la familia y un esquema de conexión de muchos ordenadores en una red.

Siguiendo con el tema de la autoedición, un poco más adelante nos encontramos el primer anuncio (que yo recuerde) de una implementación de TeX, que ya venía con LaTeX el sistema de autoedición que se había lanzado en el 84 y sigue adorando el mundo científico cuarenta años más tarde (yo lo descubrí a mediados de los 90, en su versión para Amiga, y no sigo porque si no, se me acabará cayendo la lagrimita).

AT LAST: Professional Typesetting Capability For PC Users With PCTeX™, the best-selling full implementation of Professor Don Knuth's revolutionary typesetting program TeX. FINEST Typeset Quality Printing WIDEST Range Of Output Device Drivers: • Epson FX, LQ • HP LaserJet* • Toshiba • Apple LaserWriter • Corona LP-300* • APS-5 phototypesetter • Screen preview, with EGA or Hercules card MOST COMPLETE Product Offering: PC TeX (not copy protected) includes the following: • Our specially written PCTeX Manual, which enables you to start using TeX right away. • Custom "macro packages" that provide formats for letters, manuals, technical documents, etc. • The LaTeX document preparation system, a fullfeatured macro package for preparing articles, books, reports, etc., and LaTeX User's Manual. • AMSTeX developed by the Amer. Math. Society for professional mathematical typesetting. Site licenses, volume discounts, and interfaces to PC Paintbrush, PC Palette, FancyFont and Fontrix are also available. PRICED FROM ONLY $249.00! (Printer drivers and interfaces additional.) Laser printer, fonts &; software from $2995.00

Unas páginas más adelante, la revista le dedicaba unas páginas a una revisión tanto a PC TeX como a su competidor MicroTeX.

PCTeX and MicroTeX Professional typesetting on MS-DOS machines TeX (pronounced "tech") is a powerful typesetting package developed by Donald Knuth of Stanford University. It gives you unprecedented control over the appearance of typeset output and is especially valuable for setting "penalty" text such as mathematics, tables, foreign languages, technical material, and so on. You can get the complex output in figure 1 by typing: $$F(b) - F(a) = \int _a~b f(x) dx $$ $$f(x) = \lim _{\delta \rightarrow 0} {f(x + \delta) - f(x) \over \delta }$$ The TeX system was written in Pascal to be portable, and it has been installed on a variety of mainframes, primarily at universities and research institutes. (The source code is available from Knuth at a nominal cost.) Despite its portability, however, TeX typically takes some time and effort to install on a new machine due to its size and complexity. Only recently has it become available on a low-cost microcomputer system, and two very nice TeX systems are now available for IBM Personal Computers MS-DOS machines. How TeX Works TeX is a formatter, not a word processor. You can compose your text using any editor that produces a straight ASCII file and insert commands in the text file to control the appearance of the final document. Then you send the ASCII file to the TeX program, which reads and processes it. TeX writes a DVI (device-independent) output file that consists of tightly coded commands to accomplish, for example, the following: move to such-and-such location, set character n from font m. You run the DVI file through a DVI driver to actually print the typeset file on an output device. These DVI drivers are not part of the TeX package itself but are developed independently for each different output device. The final output looks the same— except for resolution— no matter what device you use. You can print draft output at 1 20 dots per inch on a dot-matrix printer, then run a^preliminary distribution copy on a 300-dpi laser printer, and then typeset the final version on a 1200-dpi phototypesetter. The TeX system has a powerful macroprocessing facility and is virtually a language unto itself. Large libraries of macros have been created to handle a variety of typesetting chores. Such macro packages can hide the technical details of the particular design from the user while giving the designer great flexibility in creating a unified document style. For example, you could create a macro called \title that skips 20 points, centers the text that follows it, prints the text in 14-point boldface roman, and skips another 20 points. If you change your mind about the style you want in the document, you can simply change the definition of \title so that, for instance, it moves to the top of a new page, prints 16-point small-caps text, and skips 30 points. You don't need to change anything else in the document. TeX can accept such macro packages as input in two forms: as straight ASCII text files or in a highly compressed form called an FMT (formatted) file. The second form is desirable for packages that you use often because it is much faster. There are many standard packages of TeX macros, such as AMSTeX, LaTeX, and so on, that aid in document design. These are usually provided in ASCII form and then converted to FMT form at each installation, since the FMT form has some machine-dependent features. PCTeX AND MicroTeX ON THE IBM PC Some features are common to both PCTeX and MicroTeX. First, they each require a large system. At a minimum, you need 51 2K bytes of memory and a hard disk. If you want to load all the fonts provided, the systems can each use up to 6 megabytes...

No hablaremos del tema de portada, porque podría provocar mareos y vómitos entre el público, pero sí mencionaremos que habla de aproximar funciones, de invertir matrices o de resolver ecuaciones diferenciales con el método de Runge-Kutta 🤯 (a mí su variante RKF-4, citada en el artículo, me la explicaron en Cálculo Numérico de, creo recordar, segundo de mates) o con series de Taylor.

Sí hablaremos, eso sí, de cuando Pournelle (estoy por comenzar a llamarle Jerry, que ya es casi de la familia) se para de nuevo en el Amiga (y el ST) y sigue viendo que cualquiera de los dos sistemas podría haberse comido el pastel del Mac (esnif).

Amiga The Commodore folks were not at COMDEX. They'd reserved space but didn't use it; instead, they held a press conference. The official line was that Commodore is selling all the Amiga computers it can make and thus has all the dealers it needs; it would be silly to spend all that money just to tell potential dealers they can't come aboard. Atari's comment on that was, "We sell more Atari 520S'1S than Commodore sells Amigas, and we sure want to sign up more dealers." The rumor in the pressroom was that Commodore's bankers were signing its checks and wouldn't advance the money to pay for COMDEX. I wouldn't know. What I do know is that the Commodore Amiga is one hell of an exciting machine. Amiga versus Atari 520ST I've had an Atari 520ST and an Amiga set up side by side for about a week. One thing is clear: either one of these machines could eat Apple's lunch. Both machines have sharp, crisp color graphics. Neither one has a text editor good enough that I'd use it to write books, but that's a software problem: both the Amiga and the 520ST can display professional-quality text in color. It shouldn't be long before someone writes editors transparent enough for creative writers. Indeed, we already have TDI Modula-2/ST up on the Atari, and it wouldn't take a heck of a long time to write a good text editor. In addition, both the Atari-and the Amiga have versions of EMACS, the popular programming editor written by Richard M. Stallman. I haven't worked with the current versions, but real EMACS can be customized to know what language you're programming in, making the programmer's life much easier. By the time you read this, both machines will have Lattice C. Lattice also has a bunch of software tools, like r Ifext Utilities and MacLibrary, a collection of C functions compatible with Macintosh QuickDraw. Software developers are enthusiastic about these: they make it easy to convert Macintosh software to the Amiga. Meanwhile, Borland is porting Turbo Pascal to the Amiga, and, as I've already mentioned, we have TDI's Modula-2 for the Atari. The Amiga's Microsoft BASIC is, as I write this, greatly superior to the Atari's present BASIC, but once again things are changing rapidly. Metacomco, a reliable outfit, is working with Atari, and its Personal BASIC ought to be up on the Atari well before you read this. Moreover, Metacomco is also working with Lattice to bring Lattice C and Ibolkit to the Atari. There won't be any shortage of programming languages for either machine. Amiga has one major advantage. Microsoft is emphatic about having no plans whatever to port anything to the Atari; but Microsoft's Excel is still the best spreadsheet on the market, and by a lot. The 520ST with Excel would be a dynamite combination and would practically guarantee Atari's penetration into the business world. Excel is written in C for the 68000-based Macintosh, and both the Atari and the Amiga are 68000 machines; it wouldn't be that hard to get Excel onto either one. The story I get is that Atari was originally going to run with Microsoft Windows, but when Microsoft didn't have Windows running in time for the 520ST's release, Atari went with Digital Research's GEM, which irritated Microsoft no end. Whatever the story you're likely to see Excel on the Amiga long before it gets to the Atari 520ST. It'll be a good combination, too. Meanwhile, there's already powerful business software for the Atari, including DB Master and Quickview's Zoomracks. In my judgment, the Atari and the Amiga between them spell big trouble for Apple. I haven't seen anything you can do with a Macintosh that you...

Lo de que el ST iba a ser Windows sobre Motorola 68000 es el WTF más importante que haya leído yo en lo que llevamos de repaso de la revista. ¿Os imagináis?

Y sigo con «Jerry» viéndose venir la revolución que iba a suponer el CD-ROM. Desde 1986. Puntos para él, que la cosa no era tan obvia.

The Information Revolution We've seen it coming for a long time, but now the CD-ROM is here. CDROM is the name agreed on for using compact disks as read-only storage for computer information. The CDROM disk drive is about the size and price of a good floppy-disk drive. Each CD-ROM disk can hold hundreds of megabytes of information: programs, data, text files, music and speech, animation and motion pictures— all can be put onto the disk and accessed. Phillips has CD-ROM drives for sale, and there are already a number of commercially available CD-ROM disks, along with software to access the data. Activenture, Gary Kildall's new company has Grolier's Academic American Encyclopedia with a really neat indexing system; in a few seconds to tens of seconds, you can search through the whole encyclopedia. It took less than a minute to find all the references to science fiction (about a dozen) and all references to science fiction with the name Pournelle in the same article (alas, none). The Phillips people tell me there are about 40 databases on CD-ROMs. These include back issues of newspapers, stock-market histories, all kinds of financial data, technical manuals, math handbooks, you name it. Many haven't been announced yet, but Phillips is aware of them. Meanwhile, software to access these databases is either in preparation or, like Kildall's, already available. CD-ROM disks can be manufactured for about $5 each in quantity and contain all the text information in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A single CD-ROM disk can contain more text than the best industrial-quality line printer will print over its useful lifetime. A set of 20 of those disks would make an encyclopedia like nothing that ever existed: illustrations could include motion pictures and stereo. The article on space could include shots of Apollo 1 1 taking off, and so forth. It can't be long before this technology changes the way we look at and use information. Couple a CDROM disk drive to an Atari, and you have the potential for a powerful educational system: the greatest teachers and lecturers in the world complete with every demonstration tool they ever wanted. Want to explain the solar system? You can be a talking head for a while, then switch to color animated models, first of the planets in their orbits, with speedup at perigee and slowdown at apogee; color bars to show that the planets sweep out equal areas in equal times; and actual Voyager photographs of the planets themselves. Moreover, a section on integral calculus could use the planetary orbital animation to illustrate just what an integral is. Now, true, the educational lobby will try its best to hang on to "credentialism" and will continue to insist that no fundamental changes be made in our present educational system. But no matter how hard educators drag their feet, this new technology can't be stopped. Not only the Library of the Month Club but the College Course of the Month Club have just become realities. CD-ROMs will change the whole nature of scholarship. Even after all these years, only a handful of scholars have had access to the original text of the Dead Sea Scrolls; now, everything known about them, including...

Ante un pequeño alud de software para el ST y el Amiga, Bruce Webster dejaba la segunda parte de su comparativa de ordenadores basados en el 68000 de Motorola para el mes siguiente…

Amiga Software As mentioned last month, Amiga software has just started to hit the shelves. In the past week, I've received about a dozen programs, all coming from just two publishers: Electronic Arts and Lattice. As with the ST, the best Amiga program so far is a painting program: Deluxe Paint, written by Daniel Silva and published by Electronic Arts. Deluxe Paint is reminiscent of MacPaint— a menu bar across the top, icons along one side— but there's a big difference: color. And lots of it. What really makes Deluxe Paint stand out are its features. Let's start with the color palette. In low-resolution mode (320 by 200 pixels), you can have 32 different colors (out of a possible 4096). Like DEGAS, you can individually adjust each color. But the palette's functions don't stop there. You can select any two colors on the palette and have it automatically generate a set of intervening colors. For example, if color #5 is pure red and color #15 is pure green, the spread function will turn colors 6-14 to shades that go from red to green— in this case, passing through orange and yellow along the way. I was able to easily generate a "rainbow" palette by creating the classic rainbow colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) at regular intervals, then using the spread function to create intervening shades. Like DEGAS, you can set up a range of colors to cycle through; unlike DEGAS, you can define up to three different cycle ranges, each with its own speed. As for painting, you have most of the tools found in MacPaint and DEGAS— like lines, filled and framed shapes, etc —and quite a few found in neither, like the ability to do smearing, shading, or blending of the colors. You can grab any rectangular portion of the screen and use it as a brush. You can save and load brushes, which gives you an effective "clipboard" for saving chunks of pictures. Comparing DEGAS (on the ST) and Deluxe Paint (on the Amiga) isn't easy, if simply because they are on two different computers. I prefer the two-screen user interface of DEGAS; it's easier to learn and a bit less cryptic. Deluxe Paint, on the other hand, has significantly more capabilities and options. Just about everything that DEGAS lets you do, Deluxe Paint lets you do in more ways and with more options, though there are a few things that DEGAS does better (or that Deluxe Paint just doesn't do). And like DEGAS and the ST, Deluxe Paint is a program you should buy if you own an Amiga. Three of the remaining EA programs are games: Seven Cities of Gold, One on One, and Archon. Unfortunately...

Nótese la admiración por Deluxe Paint, absolutamente merecida.

Y nos vamos (este mes os lo he hecho breve) con un anuncio para no dejar desierta la categoría de «cosas que creemos que se han inventado ahora, pero no»:

Ilustración minimalista, con una enorme área negra en los dos tercios de la derecha en negro y el tercio de la izquierda en azul. En la frontera entre el blanco y el azul parece una bola de luz de la que salen algunos filamentos brillantes. Hay un nombre en grande, Guru, y un texto que dice Introducing software with a mind of its own.

Sí: hace 40 años la IA ya se iba a comer el mundo de los negocios. (Micro Data Base Systems, la empresa del anuncio, había lanzado un gestor de bases de datos un par de años antes, que vendían como un dbASE más potente y ¡con SQL! (SQL es del 73, pero no se estandarizaría hasta el 86) y lo complementaban ahora con un «entorno de soporte a decisiones», KnowledgeMan, y Guru, un «sistema experto»revolucionario sistema de IA».)

Pues eso: hasta aquí la Byte del mes. Si queréis hacer los deberes para el mes que viene, como siempre, aquí tenéis los archivos de la revista Byte en archive.org.

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