Categoría: Leído por ahí…

Byte, enero del 86

Lo de siempre: seguimos con nuestro proyecto de leernos la revista Byte… con cuarenta años de retraso, y esta vez con un añadido final extra. El tema del mes… ¡la robótica! (Tema que vamos a ignorar bastante completamente, porque no me pone nada. Pero las portadas de Byte son un clásico, o sea que aquí va la del mes:

Portada de la revista Byte de enero de 1986. El tema de portada es la robótica. La ilustración es un huevo, que rompe desde dentro un brazo robótico, como si fuera un polluelo al nacer

Comencemos, pues, por la editorial:

A Threat to Future Software Last October Digital Research Inc. yielded to pressure from Apple and agreed to change its GEM software to decrease its resemblance to Apple Macintosh software. (GEM is an operating environment for several MS-DOS- and PC-DOS-based computers that allows a user to interact with a computer via windows and icons rather than the usual text-only commands.) Let's ignore, for the moment, the uncertain worth of a "visual copyright" (the legal term for Apple's copyrighting of the overall "look" of Macintosh software). Let's also ignore the ethics of Apple's actions. The point to focus on, instead, is that Apple's actions are to no one's benefit: Both the microcomputer industry and Apple itself will suffer from their effects. Apple's actions will slow the growth of the microcomputer industry, which will hurt Apple by shrinking the potential microcomputer audience. Already, several small companies are worried that some project they're working on (and, often, they with it) will be cut down because it is "too Mac-like." In addition, the success of Apple's tactics may encourage other companies to try similar actions, thus increasing the paralysis and anxiety in the industry. These actions will stifle the incremental evolution that is at the root of any significant growth in our industry. By "incremental evolution" I mean the process of gradual improvement of a product type that eventually leads to a more robust, useful product. For example, Ashtonlate's Framework did not spring full-blown from the heads of the programming team at Forefront. It had its roots in Dan Bricklin's and Bob Franston's VisiCalc spreadsheet, Sorcim's Supercalc (which added functions and sold to a market not supported by VisiCalc), Mitch Kapor's VisiPlot (which gave the distinctive highlighted menu bar now used in so many programs), the software integration of Lotus 1-2-3, and the icons, windows, and pulldown menus of— well, you get the point. If companies are afraid to go to market with what they think are incremental— but distinct— improvements on a basic design, we will become a stagnant industry bounded by the usual and comfortable. According to Irving Rappaport. Apple's associate general counsel, Apple's intent is to prevent other companies from creating products that are easy to use because of their similarity to the Macintosh. "If people look at it and say, 'Gee. that's like the Mac— I can operate that,' when that's the result you get, it's over the line" of infringement of Apple's copyrights. The effect of this intent is to fragment the industry in the face of what was becoming a de facto standard for human-computer interaction. This lack of standardization will cause many people to stay uninterested in computers because they will have to relearn basic skills with each brand of computer they encounter. (Imagine how many people would drive cars if car manufacturers used different controls for every function in the car.) Apple might argue that, by claiming a larger slice of a smaller pie, it will still come out ahead. We believe that it will be hurt directly by its actions and will end up with a smaller piece of a pie that is itself smaller. Apple will, in effect, build a wall around its ghetto of Macintosh products, thus limiting its own growth and encouraging people to "live" elsewhere. Texas Instruments' TI-99/4A provides a good example. TI announced that it intended to directly profit from all software written for its machine by forcing third-party software developers to publish their products through TI. When a brave few brought out 99/4 cartridges on their own. TI added a proprietary chip to their cartridges that the computer required before it would run the enclosed software. Needless to say, the few developers working on 99/4 software wisely turned to support other computers. The same may happen to Apple. IBM already sells over half the business computers bought today, and IBM PC-compatibles account for a fairly large slice of what's left. If Apple has been slowing the erosion of its market share to IBM with the Macintosh line (and I think it has), its current moves will alienate software and hardware developers, who will begin to lavish their creativity upon the more congenial IBM PC-compatible marketplace. And where innovation goes, the market will follow. Consider: IBM made its software and hardware architectures open. It allowed the development of innumerable hardware clones, many far more similar to IBM products than GEM is to the Macintosh desktop; consequently, the IBM PC-compatible market far outdistanced its combined competitors in less than two years. On the other hand, Apple is actively discouraging not only copying but also borrowing from its software design. It claims the sole right to benefit from a set of ideas that Apple itself has borrowed and improved on (the most direct borrowing was from work done at Xerox PARC). Given these two opposing directions, what do you think will happen? A Call to Action We at BYTE call on Apple to recognize the long-term implications of its actions and limit itself to prosecuting cases where the alleged theft is not of "looks" but of actual program code. Barring that, we call on Apple to license its allegedly copyrightable interface to markets that do not directly compete with its current or planned product line— if the licensing fees are reasonable, everyone will profit. If neither of these things happen, we call on the judicial system to hand down rulings that reflect a strict interpretation of the visual copyright laws— that is. that a product is at fault only if it shows no distinguishing characteristics in appearance or operation from the alleged original; this would protect products that show incremental evolution. We also call on the industry to do two things. The first is to stand up to Apple and see the case decided on its legal merits. The second is to develop an alternative graphic interface and allow its wide adoption throughout the non-Apple computer community; in this way. the rest of us can get on with the business of making computers— in general— good enough that everyone will want to use them. [Editor's note: Apple maintains that the agreement covers "only three specific products," but one of them is GEM Desktop, which defines the overall GEM environment. Also, according to Kathleen Dixon of Apple, the agreement includes any custom work DRI has done, including the modified GEM software that Atari uses in its 520ST computer] ■ —Gregg Williams, Senior Technical Editor

¿Creíais que Apple se quejaba solo de que Microsoft la copia? (Todo sea dicho: a lo largo de la historia Microsoft ha copiado cosas de Apple… y hasta hay casos en los que Apple ha copiado de Microsoft. Y donde dice Microsoft, puede decirse Google/Android.) Pues antes de quejarse de Microsoft y Windows, se quejaron de GEM, la capa gráfica de Digital Research para sistemas PC/MS-DOS (y no solo estos: volvemos sobre el tema más abajo). Respetando la propiedad intelectual de Apple (más que el editor de Byte, después de leerle), comparto con él que con estas cosas, entonces y ahora, el consumidor sale perdiendo bastante.

Seguimos con los «microbytes» la sección de noticias breves. En esta ocasión, por un lado, evolucionamos con algo que ya habíamos visto por aquí… a las pantallas planas LCD les llega el color:

Epson, Toshiba Announce Color LCDs Toshiba has developed an active-matrix, eight-color, 640- by 480-pixel, 10-inch-diagonal liquid-crystal display (LCD) that nearly matches the brightness of a standard color TV. No pricing or availability information was given. Epson announced a backlit high-contrast, 5.13-inch-diagonal color LCD with a resolution of 480 by 440 pixels (one-third of which are red, green, or blue). Epson says the display's contrast ratio is more than 10 times that of a standard reflective LCD and has a viewing angle greater than 60 degrees. Epson also unveiled a high-contrast, 9-inch-diagonal monochrome LCD with a resolution of 640 by 400 pixels. Samples of both displays will be available during the first half of 1986; prices should be approximately twice as much as standard reflective LCDs. Epson also announced two 10-inch-diagonal monochrome displays using ferroelectric smectic-C crystals. The 640- by 400-pixel and 640- by 200-pixel displays are said to have high contrast ratios, low power consumption, and moderate cost; samples may be available late this year.

Y por el otro (literalmente, hay que girar la página para llegar a ello), desmontamos un poco el mito de que Kodak murió por no innovar en fotografía digital:

Kodak Proposes Tiny Magnetic Disk for Photographs Eastman Kodak, Rochester. NY, has lined up more than 30 companies— including Sony, Hitachi, and Fuji— to support its 47-mm (1.85-inch) floppy disk for storage of electronic still images. The 800K-byte disk can store up to 50 images of 240-line NTSC video. Eventually, the disk is intended for use in cameras; for now, Kodak is working on a 35-mm film-to-disk transfer station for use in developing labs and a still-video player/recorder for the disks.

…y es que pocas compañías investigaron e invirtieron en el campo de la fotografía digital como Kodak, que acumuló una inmensa bolsa de patentes sobre el tema. Lo que mató a Kodak (bastantes años después de 1986) fue, sobre todo, el miedo a canibalizar su mercado «químico».

Nos vamos, ahora, a la publicidad:

Anuncio del modem Hayes Smartmodem 2400

Sí, amigas, 1986 es el año de volar a 2400 baudios, no a los «viejos». Casi dos kilobits y medio, sí. ¿Recordáis la tortura que es tener cobertura «solo» 4G y descargar cosas a pocos megabits? (Pero no os emocionéis: no todas las líneas telefónicas de la época soportaban esa barbaridad de velocidad.)

Y seguimos mirando anuncios, con un momento histórico: ¡el primer anuncio que vemos de Windows!

Gran texto, Introducing Powe Windows. Vemos una pantalla de ordenador con quizás 8 colores y cuatro ventanas, que no se solapan, sino que se muestran una al lado de la otra. También vemos un ratón y un disquet de 5 ¼ con la etiqueta Microsoft Windows.

No os pongo el publireportaje entero (8 páginas tenía en total, que Microsoft ya tenía unos dineros en la época), pero sí os dejo aquí esta maravilla de gráficos:

Doble página con una gran imagen de una captura de pantalla con hasta cinco ventanas mostradas en pantalla, de nuevo sin solaparse. Vemos la aplicación de relog, una ventana con un primitivo explorador de archivos, un "filing assistant" y una gráfica de barras en riguroso blanco y negro.

¿Reconocéis vuestro Windows «de toda la vida»? Yo tampoco.

Hablábamos antes de GEM… y lo recuperamos aquí, porque en este número se analizaba el Atari ST, la tercera de las máquinas con procesador Motorola 68000, después del Macintosh y el Amiga (recordemos siempre: Amiga mejor que ST mejor que Mac). Y el sistema operativo del ST era, efectivamente, el GEM de Digital Research (bueno, GEM era, como con los PCs, la capa gráfica sobre TOS, el verdadero sistema operativo).

The Atari 520ST The 68000 unbounded Editor's note: The following is a BYTE product description. It is not a review— for several reasons. Some of the equipment we received, such as the hard-disk drive, were prototypes, and at the time of this writing, software is scarce. Atari has not yet completed its BASIC interpreter, and the operating system. TOS, remains unfinished. Nonetheless, we are as intensely interested as our readership in new technology, and we feel we have learned enough to share some of the results of our investigations. We began our work on this description as soon as we were able to get a system from Atari. A full review will follow in a subsequent issue. For many years the public has equated the Atari name with arcade games and joysticks. In truth, the Atari 400/800/XL computer line is technically at least comparable if not better than other 8-bit machines, so it should not be a surprise that the company's latest venture, the 520ST (see photo 1), is a competitive 68000 system. Indeed, we are most impressed with the clarity of the graphics, with the speed of the disk I/O (input/output), and with the 520ST's value. The system is not without its problems. The desktop is less effective than the Macintosh's, the keyboard has an awkward feel, and the current operating system makes it impossible to switch between high-resolution monochrome and low- or mediumresolution color without installing the other monitor and rebooting. Nonetheless, we are left with a very favorable impression; several software-development languages are already available, including FORTH, Modula-2, and C. With them, you can tap the power of the 68000 at a most reasonable price. System Description The Atari 520ST is a keyboard computer. Like the Commodore 64 and the Atari 400/800, the 520ST keyboard unit contains the microprocessor, the memory, the video and sound circuitry, and so on. The power supply disk drives, and monitor are external devices. The 520ST has a variety of ports, but there are no internal expansion slots. The In Brief box on page 90 summarizes the features of the Atari 520ST. For $799, you get the CPU, a 12-inch diagonal monochrome monitor, and one external single-sided double-density floppy-disk drive. For $999, you get the same system with a 12-inch RGB analog monitor in place of the monochrome monitor (see photo I). Both systems provide 51 2 K bytes of RAM (random-access read/ write memory), a Motorola 68000 microprocessor, MIDI ports with a transfer rate of 31,2 50 bps (bits per second), a DMA (direct memory access) port with a transfer rate of 10 megabits per second for a hard disk or CD-ROM (compact-disk read-only memory), and much, much more. To be sure, owners will make some sacrifices. The unit does not have an RF (radio frequency) modulator for television output, every peripheral has a separate power supply (wire haters beware), and the operating system currently rests in RAM, stealing over 200K bytes from your workspace. We have summarized other problems below, but almost all are insignificant when you consider what you do get for the money. And rest assured, the system works. Our first system, like most of the first production units, had to have several chips reseated. It now functions properly, and we have not heard of any similar quality-control problems on the latest 520STs. The Hardware Design The heart of the 520ST is the MC68000, with its 1 6-bit data bus and 24-bit address bus, running at 8 MHz (see figure 1). The rest of the system was designed to stay out of the 68000's way. (See the 520ST motherboard in photo 2.) The Atari design team began work on the 520ST in May 1984. From the start, they had several specific goals in mind. The first was to choose a fast microprocessor and do everything to let it run effectively at full speed. To the Atari team, that meant maximizing bus bandwidth and relegating as...

Y… ¿vamos a comparar GEM con Windows, tal y como lo presentaba la mismísima Microsoft en su campaña publicitaria?

Dos fotos de pantallas con GEM a media resolución en una y a alta en la otra. La presentación es muchísimo más sofisticada que la de Windows que hemos visto antes, con ventanas que se solapan y los menús del sistema.

(Eso sí: reconoceremos que el parecido con el sistema operativo de los Macintosh es más que notable. Es innegable.)

Seguimos con nuestra sección «esto no lo ponemos en una revista hoy, que nos lapidan» con un programa en BASIC para dibujar superficies 3D:

EASY 3-D GRAPHICS BY Henning Mittelbach A BASIC program for plotting 3-D surfaces AFTER READING "Budget 3-D Graphics" by Tom Clune (March 1985 BYTE, page 240), I decided to develop a low-cost program for three-dimensional graphics on small computers. The program is based upon the formulas for an axonometric projection in relation to the origin, as shown: XB = X*COS(PHI) - Y*COS(PSI) YB = X*SIN(PHI) - Y*SIN(PSI) + Z Depending on the graphic window of the computer used, you may change these formulas to XB = XO + X*COS(PHI) -Y*COS(PSI) YB = YO - X*SIN(PHI) - Y*SIN(PSI) - Z where XO and YO will represent the origin of the axes, as shown in figure 1. (I developed the program on an Apple II, with XO = 110 and YO = 180.) Also in figure 1, (XB.YB) is the point to be plotted, and PHI and PSI are the angles referring to the horizon. The function Z = F(X,Y), in line 200 of the program, needs a scaling factor F (line 210) that the user has to introduce in the program. The Program The program starts at lines 100 to 180 where you set the parameters X0, Y0, ...

Ojo, que el programa tenía una cierta complejidad y hasta ocultaba las superficies ocultas:

Gráficas de las funciones seno por coseno, exponencial del seno de x por y) y equis por y.

(Si esto no os fuera suficiente, os podéis ir a la página 397 para ver cómo implementar el algoritmo de Euclides para calcular el máximo común divisor.)

He dicho que me iba a saltar la robótica, pero sí me quedo con uno de los artículos de la sección:

MACHINE VISION by Phil Dunbar An examination of what's new in vision hardware THE POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS of machine vision are many and obvious. Everything from quality assurance to robotic navigation could benefit from the availability of reliable vision systems for computers. Perhaps less obvious, though, is the variety of problems that hamper development of the technology. These problems appear on all levels of machine vision— hardware, low-level analysis, and high-level AI (artificial intelligence) manipulation of low-level data. This article will discuss problems that plague the development of vision-system hardware and indicate some of the technology that has emerged to address these problems. You might think that the most difficult hardware problem in vision systems is digitizing the high-frequency analog stream of camera data. In fact, that is not so. Currently, machine vision algorithms use gray-scale (i.e., monochrome intensity) video information almost exclusively. Such information can be adequately extracted from an analog signal by a 6-bit or 8-bit A/D (analog to digital) converter. Real-time conversion requires approximately a 10-MHz conversion rate to digitize a 512- by 512-pixel image. These rates can be achieved with flash converters, pioneered by the TRW company when it introduced the TDC 1007 in 1977. Flash converters employ (2")-l comparators to perform A/-bit conversions. That is, an 8-bit flash comparator requires 25 5 comparators to operate. Since all possible digitized values can be compared to the signal at once, the throughput is much greater than with successive approximation methods. Of course, the complexity of the converter rises exponentially with linear increases in resolution. Notable among the commercially available flash converters is TRW's 8-bit monolithic chip flash converter (TDC 1048) that can operate at speeds necessary for real-time machine vision applications and costs about $140 per unit. The real problems with vision hardware revolve around the cameras. The problems fall into two basic categories: video signal standards and limitations of particular camera hardware technologies. Television Standards Much of robotics suffers from a lack of standards. Machine vision, on the other hand, suffers from the existence of video signal standards that are not appropriate for our needs. Those standards were created by and for the television industry. Since the entertainment industry is still a far more lucrative market for camera manufacturers than machine vision, few image sensors and cameras deviate from television standards. The monochrome video signal standard used in the United States, Japan/ and most of the Western Hemisphere is RS-170, a subset of the NTSC (National Television Systems Committee) standard. Europe uses the international CCIR (Consultative Committee, International Radio) standard, which is similar to, but not compatible with, RS-170. Since both standards present essentially the same problems to machine vision applications, I will limit my remarks to the RS-170 standard. The RS-170 standard defines the composite video and synchronizing signal that your television uses (see figure 1). The image is transmitted one line at a time from top to bottom of...

Y después de la visión venía una pieza dedicada a los sensores táctiles, otra sobre navegación autónoma y una sobre IA en visión por ordenador. De nuevo, uno no sabe si estamos en el 86 o en el 26 (y no se siente con ánimos de explicar a los autores que a la cosa aún le quedaban unas pocas décadas).

Y echamos una última mirada a la publi, y es que creo que no habíamos reflejado por aquí la maravillosa campaña «Charlot» de IBM:

Anuncio a doble página. A la izquierda leemos que el PC ha llvado el rendimiento a una nueva altura. Al la derecha vemos a Charlot sentado sobre una pila kilomética de documentos de todo tipo, trabajando con un PC de IBM.

Que no fue un único anuncio, os lo aseguro. Años, duró la campaña, siempre visualmente maravillosa. Os dejo aquí un recopilatorio de anuncios televisivos.

Y nos vamos a ir con otro momento histórico:

The Acorn RISC Machine A commercial RISC processor by Dick Pountain Acorn Computers Ltd. is one of the U.K.'s most successful computer companies, but like many others, it had its share of financial problems during the depressed year of 1985. Set up in 1 979 by two Sinclair alumni, Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser, the Cambridge-based firm (4a Market Hill, Cambridge CB2 3NJ. England) started out manufacturing a set of modular single-board controllers based on the MOS Technology 6502 processor. These small boards stacked together to make up complete industrial-control systems. The following year the Acorn people launched the Atom personal computer, a packaged but expandable machine that arose out of their experience with 6502 systems. For a while, at around £200, the Atom was the cheapest hobby computer available here, and it attracted a strong following, particularly among those who are as handy with the soldering iron as with the assembler. Hopped-up Atoms can still be found to this day. Acorn's next product, initially called the Proton, was designed to meet a very advanced—for the time— specification published by the BBC (British Broadcasting Company), which was requesting bids to supply a personal computer around which an educational television series would be produced. Acorn won the contract, after a strong and often acrimonious contest in which Sinclair Research, whose 48K-byte color Spectrum was already on the market, lost out. After a frustratingly long delay due to quality-control problems with the ULAs (uncommitted logic arrays), the BBC computer was launched and proceeded to corner the market in schools and universities. Acorn became a very wealthy company, with a turnover reputed to be £100,000,000 per annum at its high point. The BBC Micro (alias the Beeb) is still quite a deluxe machine, with better highresolution color graphics than any of its competitors, and quite a bit faster, thanks to its 2-megahertz 6502. Another plus is the provision of a 10-MHz bus, called the Ttibe, to which second processors can be attached. Acorn charges a lot of money for this sophistication though, and the Beeb has kept its £400 price long after competitors have slashed theirs to below the £200 mark. Acorn had from the start paid more attention to software than most manufacturers, recruiting the brightest Cambridge University computer science graduates for its software division. As a result, the Beeb acquired a range of languages unrivaled by any machine but the Apple II, including an advanced structured BASIC, LISP, Logo, FORTH, Pascal, BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language), and more. But despite all these positive points, the Beeb has a major drawback, a shortage of memory. The ambitious specification, combined with the limited addressing capabilities of the 6502, left it with a maximum of 32K bytes of workspace (only this year upgraded to 64K bytes), and in the higher-resolution graphics modes this can be reduced to a mere 8K bytes. That doesn't get you very far in LISP or Logo. So at the height of its prosperity Acorn set a team to design, in secret, its own processor to replace the 6502. This may seem like an ambitious, even rash, undertaking, but the people on the Acorn team were so wedded to the simplicity and speed of the 6502 architecture that they found it hard to countenance any of the commercially available 16-bit replacements. The BBC operating system is heavily interrupt-driven, and the sluggish interrupt latency of 16-bit chips, such as the Intel 8086 and Motorola 68000, would have meant introducing DMA (direct memory access) hardware and all sorts of other undesirable complications. Acorn did, in fact, adopt the National Semiconductor 32016 as a second processor for the Beeb, but only after first offering a 3-MHz 6502. And so they conceived the idea for the...

Acorn RISC Machine… A, R, M. La arquitectura del chip de tu móvil. O de tu Mac, si tienes uno. Y ahí estáis, viendo, en riguroso directo, su nacimiento. Casi nada.

Y 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.

Y esto habría sido todo… pero el otro día me enteré de la muerte de Stewart Cheifet (hasta el New York Times le dedicó un obituario). ¿Que quién es Stewart Cheifet? No me digáis que no habéis visto nunca su Computer Chronicles. Si Byte es, al menos para mí, uno de los recursos imprescindibles en formato prensa escrita para revisar la historia de la informática, Computer Chronicles es lo mismo, pero en formato vídeo. Los archivos del programa de la PBS, la tele pública de Estados Unidos (lamentablemente en peligro de muerte, gracias a la administración Trump y su alergia a la información de calidad), son un documento esencial si te interesa el periodo de 1983 a 2000. Y como homenaje, y como estas entradas sobre Byte <ironía>no son lo suficientemente largas</ironía>, he pensado que completarlas con el visionado de los programas correspondientes sería, cuando menos, un ejercicio curioso1. Y os dejo aquí los programas de enero del 86…

El 7 de enero el programa arrancaba con… ¡inteligencia artificial!

(¿No os ha encantado el anuncio del patrocinio de Byte? 😅)

No podemos dejar de comentar el copresentador del programa con Cheifet: nada más y nada menos que el malogrado Gary Kildall, creador de CP/M… y de GEM. Hay múltiples universos paralelos al nuestro en que amamos y odiamos a Kildall, CP/M y GEM y no recordamos quién era Bill Gates ni sabemos nada de un sistema operativo llamado Windows.

El Jerrold Kaplan que sale en la primera entrevista, por cierto, trabajaba por aquel entonces con Mitch Kapor, fundó en 1987 Go, dedicada a lo que luego se llamarían PDAs y luego fundaría el primer sitio web de subastas (cinco meses antes de eBay). Not bad. Y también podemos destacar la presencia del filósofo Hubert Dreyfus dudando fuertemente de la expertez de los sistemas expertos de la época :-).

Maravilloso también que los expertos apuntaban que 1986 podría ser el año del reconocimiento del habla 😅.

Después, el día 14, otro tema del que no se habla nada en la actualidad: seguridad informática.

…aunque en aquel momento esto se refería al uso de ordenadores para perseguir delitos, peleándose con catálogos de huellas digitales o usando sistemas de información geográficos, por ejemplo, pero también digitalizando procesos como en cualquier otra organización.

Os recomendaría, eso sí, saltar al minuto 27:30 del vídeo, en el que Cheifet habla de los gráficos de la peli El Secreto de la Pirámide… creador por un «nuevo ordenador gráfico, creado por Industrial Light & Magic, una división de LucasFilm. El ordenador se llama… Pixar».

Y no sigo porque, según esta lista de episodios en la Wikipedia2, el siguiente no se emitiría hasta febrero.

Apa, el mes que viene más (ya decidiremos si solo con Byte o con el añadido de Computer Chronicles).

  1. Un ejercicio curioso que, inevitablemente, no se me ha ocurrido solo a mí: veo que alguien ha montado un computerchronicles.blog y que ya lleva nada menos que los primeros 133 programas revisitados. ↩︎

Byte, diciembre del 85

Toca cerrar el año con nuestra relectura habitual de la revista Byte… de hace cuarenta años. Esta vez, temas de moda… de 2020.

Portada de la revista Byte de diciembre de 1985. El tema es "computer confeerencing", con una ilustración de un conector tipo D con un cable plano... pero en el que los pines del conector son personas sentadas a una mesa.

(Me vais a reconocer que aprovechar un conector tipo D así es, cuando menos, creativo :-).)

Y comenzamos con publicidad, más que por el producto… porque en 1985 ya hacía unos años (pocos, eso sí) que Bill Gates había dicho (o no) que 640 Ks deberían ser suficiente… y ya sabíamos que no.

Anuncio de una ampliación de memoria de dos megabytes, con el eslogan "para aquellas ocasiones en que 640 ks no parecen ser suficientes"

Por cierto. Cuarenta años más tarde, tu ordenador tiene… ¿cuatro mil veces más memoria? ¿Ocho mil?

En la sección «cosas que no son nuevas»…

And Now, Adware In response to the letter by Mr. Tate ("Don't Sell Software. Sell Ad Space," August, page 26) regarding the selling of advertising space in entertainment software: Wow! What a great idea. Adware (that's my term for it) could resurrect the failing home computer industry Let's face it, most home computers are used for entertainment; however, the general public is not usually willing to spend S30 to SI 00 for a game. In general I feel that this attitude applies to all types of home entertainment. Look at how successful television has become simply because you don't have to pay for it to enjoy it (unless you want cable or pay TV, but even that is relatively inexpensive). With Adware you would still have to incur the cost of downloading from the telephone. This same reason also accounts for the to-date unsuccessful home videotex systems. Mr. Tate mentions the advantages of Adware but fails to mention the virtues of the Freeware concept and what Adware could bring to it. I personally do not agree with the idea of selling copy-protected entertainment software commercially. Computers are very good at copying software, and so this fact should be put to good use. Freeware (the free distribution of software by encouraging copying) offers the users a better and more dynamic product. For example. I have a Freeware product that I continue to update as improvements and additions are implemented. When a new release is ready I simply make it available on the Freeware market. You cannot do this economically with a similar commercial product without covering your expenses by raising the retail price. With Adware you could make it a policy to release a new version every few months to insure a dynamic advertising medium. At present the Freeware distribution network is not firmly established, but if the amount of Freeware and the demand for it grew large enough I am sure that regular channels would establish themselves quickly so that everyone could have almost immediate access to the updates. Another benefit of this concept would be...

…y es que el debate sobre los modelos de financiación del software vendría a ser tan viejo como el propio software.

No nos vamos a saltar nunca las tecnologías para mejorar la accesibilidad de los ordenadores:

The Audiodata/IBM PC Keyboard from Frank Audiodata GmbH of West Germany uses tone and speech capabilities to make the IBM PC accessible to blind and visually impaired users. The system generates different tones depending on the type of data at the cursor's screen location. To position the cursor, you use sliding switches that correspond to the horizontal and vertical axes. The vertical switch is on the left-hand side of the Audiodata keyboard, next to the function keys. Moving it from top to bottom yields a series of tones that tells you whether lines are blank or full of text. The horizontal switch is below the space bar. Moving it left and right yields tones that indicate letters, spaces, numbers, and punctuation marks in a line. By moving the switches and listening to the resulting tones, you can tell how many characters of what type are at what position on the screen. The keyboard contains a Votrax SC-01 speech processor, so you can literally have the system read a portion of text out loud. Pressing a button on the vertical switch tells the system to read the line of text that corresponds to its position. Using the vertical and the horizontal switches together, you can have the system read or spell particular words. The Audiodata keyboard works with standard or large-print monitors or with no monitor at all. It comes with a 6-inch add-in card and the system software for S3450.

Vamos a escandalizarnos, eso sí, de los 3450 dólares de la época que costaba el cacharro. Mucho más barato era este prototouchpad (que más que touchpad era un teclado para macros):

Touchpad Accessory for the IBM PC Polytel Computer Products has introduced the Keyport 60. a small rectangular touchpad that fits along the top of the IBM PC keyboard. It has 60 touchsensitive regions that can be programmed as function keys and defined in regular and shift modes, so the Keyport 60 will accommodate a maximum of 120 macro commands. To record a macro, you press the Alt key on your regular keyboard and a touchpad key simultaneously. Any keystrokes that follow are recorded until you press the Alt and touchpad keys a second time. The touchpad package comes with KPEDIT. a fullscreen editor that allows you to edit key definitions. Keyport 60 works with the IBM PC, XT, AT, and compatible personal computers, using the joystick adapter to allow concurrent operation with your regular keyboard It costs 399.

Aquí una cosa que no deja de sorprenderme que no hubiesen añadido antes en la revista. Uno se pasó una parte no negligible de los ochenta tecleando código que venía en diferentes revistas. Con mis nulos ingresos en la época, tiempo bien empleado. Pero el comprador de una revista como Byte muy probablemente tenía recursos económicos como para no verlo así:

Página anunciando un nuevo servicio de la revista: la venta de disquetes con el código incluido en la revista. Puedes optar entre disquetes de cinco y cuatro para IBM PC, Apple II en dos tipos de formato, Commodore 64, Hewlett Packard 125, Kaypro 2 CP/M. dps modelos de TRS-80, Texas Instruments Professional, Zaith Z-100 y Atari. En tres pulgadas y media, los formatos son Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Hewlett Packard 150 y Data General/One. Los precios van de los cinco dólares de un disco de cinco y cuarto en Estados Unidos a los 8 para discos de tres y medio u ocho pulgadas enviados a Asia, África y Australia. También se anuncia Bytecom, "conferencias informáticas entre los lectores de Byte en Europa, unas cuantas BBS fuera de los Estados Unidos.

Y, de regalo, nos dan el ránquin de los ordenadores más populares entre los lectores de la revista en la época. Nótese también, primero, que ahí están los discos de 8″ en formato estándar CP/M, y que los precios, teniendo en cuenta que la operación tenía que ser bastante manual, me parecen bastante razonables.

No pongo captura porque el escaneado de las páginas correspondientes en el Archive no está bien (podéis navegar a la página correspondiente de Byte – a visual archive), pero está bien la sección de libros del número. Comienza con la crítica de Back to BASIC: The History, Corruption, and Future of the Language (se puede conseguir en Amazon, curiosamente), en que los diseñadores de BASIC, al parecer, se quejan amargamente de la cosa en que se ha convertido su lenguaje, veinte años después de su creación, y explican por qué lanzaban en 1985 True BASIC (que exista el dominio y se puedan comprar en él versiones del lenguaje actuales y vintage, y manuales, me ha reventado la cabeza). Explican los autores que BASIC no fue diseñado para ser un lenguaje interpretado, sino compilado, y que esto, sumado a las estrecheces de la RAM de los ordenadores en que se estaba usando en los 80, se habían cargado su diseño. Qué cosas.

Más adelante se critica Ethical Issues in the Use of Computers. De nuevo, la digitalización del Archive está mal, pero se puede acceder al visual archive, para recordarnos que este no es un tema de nuestro siglo XXI, precisamente, y que hace cuarenta años ya nos preocupaban los riesgos de las grandes bases de datos para nuestra privacidad, la brecha digital o la toma de decisiones algorítmicas sobre nuestra salud.

Volviendo al servicio de venta de disquetes con el código de la revista, y en nuestra habitual sección «cosas que no se incluirían hoy en una revista ni por casualidad»…

A SIMPL COMPILER PART 1 : THE BASICS by Jonathan Amsterdam An implementation of a compiler for a simple structured language In this article— the first of a three-part series on the construction of a compiler for a high-level language— 1 will discuss the basics of the compiler. Next month 1 will talk about procedures and functions, and in the third part of the series 1 will describe some of the compiler's extensions. Three of my earlier Programming Projects are prerequisites for this one. "Context-Free Parsing of Arithmetic Expressions" (August, page 138) explains the parsing technique I will be using. "Building a Computer in Software" (October, page 112) describes VM2. the virtual machine for which my compiler is targeted. And "A VM2 Assembler" (November, page 112) details the assembly-language code that the compiler will generate. The SIMPL Programming Language I will be describing a compiler for a language of my own design, called SIMPL. SIMPL, which stands for "SIMPL Isn't Much of a Programming Language," isn't much of a programming language. SIMPLs grammar is given in figure 1. There are a few points that are not described by the grammar. An identifier is any string of letters and numbers beginning with a letter. Unlike most implementations of Pascal, SIMPL is case-sensitive, so the identifiers READ and Read mean different things. SIMPL keywords, like PROGRAM and BEGIN, are capitalized. Comments in SIMPL are delimited by braces ({ }). As in Pascal, character constants are delimited by single quotes, but SIMPL also allows the backslash character ( \ ) to act as an escape. When followed by an n or a t, the backslash denotes a new line (carriage return) or tab; when followed by any other character, it denotes that character. For example, the character constant for the single quote looks like ' \ '. SIMPLs WHILE and IF statements, like those of Modula-2, are explicitly terminated by an END. The AND operator has the same precedence as OR, and both have weaker precedences than those of all other operators, so it is unnecessary to put parentheses around expressions connected by AND and OR. Furthermore, expressions surrounding an AND or OR will be evaluated from left to right, and no more than necessary will be evaluated. For example, in the expression TRUE AND FALSE AND TRUE, the first TRUE will be evaluated and then the FALSE will be...

Y no podemos cerrar la sección sin incluir las interfaces por voz. Si alguien es capaz de viajar al pasado, por favor, tened la delicadeza de no comentarle al autor que a la cosa aún le faltaban unas cuantas décadas.

English Recognition The ultimate in user-friendliness Plain English is hardly ever used to communicate with a computer. This is unfortunate because it can be very effective, and programs that recognize and use relatively complex English sentences have been written for microcomputers. English gives you a variety of ways to express complex actions with a minimum of training and program interaction. Menus, on the other hand, are often highly complex and cumbersome— both for the user and the programmer. Special languages are difficult to learn and to design and implement correctly. Some applications seem to demand a natural-language controlling mechanism (for example, database programs and games). When you design these kinds of programs, it is hard to predict the questions or commands a user might enter. Even in the largest and most expensive custom database systems, there always seem to be questions outside the scope of the programming. However. English has been used successfully to control database programs. The first public success was LUNAR (Lunar Sciences Natural-Language Information System), which allowed scientists to query a large file of physical and chemical data on the lunar rock samples brought back by the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. More recently. Larry Harris of Artificial Intelligence Corporation has been successfully selling a database retrieval system called ROBOT (now INTELLECT) that uses natural English. It runs on IBM machines and licenses for tens of thousands of dollars. R:base CLOUT by MicroRIM. another English-based database-retrieval system, runs on microcomputers, but it's not cheap either. Several game designers have recognized the benefits of using English to communicate with computers and have tried to use it as their controlling mechanism. However, the approach they take seems a bit limited. The games often have trouble recognizing what should be valid directions or questions by the players.

Nos vamos ahora al tema de portada:

AN OVERVIEW OF CONFERENCING SYSTEMS by Brock N. Meeks A guided tour through COM, EIES, PARTI, NOTEPAD, and other systems NUOSO LIVES on the African continent. Exactly where he lives and the name of his tribe is not important; Nuoso is a nonperson. Convicted of a crime against his tribal society, he is forbidden to communicate with his family, his friends, in short, with anyone. His communication cut off, Nuoso quickly withdraws from the village. Eventually he will cease to exist even in his own mind, and he will literally die from lack of communication. Just as people need food, water, and shelter, so they need to communicate. From the earliest days of history, our ancestors sought better ways to communicate. Primitive maps scrawled in the dust gave way to cave paintings, where information retrieval entailed nothing more complicated than remembering the right wall in the right cave. But just as society became more complex, so did the communication needs of the population. Early telegraph links, in Napoleon's time, had signal speeds of about two characters per second. In 1913 vacuum-tube repeaters were introduced to telephony, and a rapid succession of advancements in the world of electronics followed. In 1918 the first carrier system permitted several voice channels to occupy a single pair of wires. The early 1940s saw highcapacity coaxial cables beginning to replace twisted-pair cables. Microwave links emerged in 1946 with the capacity to carry more than 10,000 telephone channels. Today's phone system uses satellite links and will soon use fiber optics. In a hundred years our communication capability has risen from fifteen to a billion bits per second, from two to over a hundred million characters per second. And all for the sake of improving communication with each other. The Birth of Computer Conferencing Early in 1970, political and economic pressures set the stage for the creation of a revolutionary means of communication. In the fall of 1971 the entire economic structure of the United States fell under the control of President Nixon's wage-price freeze. Because of the tremendous need to handle the reporting and information dissemination of the price freeze, the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) commissioned Murray Turoff to create a computerized version of the "conference call." Turoff responded by developing the Emergency Management Information System and Reference Index (EMISARI). The EMISARI system operated as an electronic network linking the ten OEP regional offices. The new price controls created a nationwide demand for information, guidelines, rulings, official statements, and policy clarifications from businesses, labor unions, and administrators. Because EMISARI eliminated the constraints of time and geographic location, the OEP's regional administrators were able to secure time-critical information at their convenience. The instant access of EMISARI allowed Washington to update policy as it happened and gave all involved the opportunity to respond or ask questions— with both...

Sí, era obvio, querida lectora, que no podíamos estar hablando de los Zoom de los 80, sino de los Discords asíncronos (a todo estirar, que más bien son Reddits lo que se menciona) que podían soportar los ordenadores y redes de telecomunicación de la época.

A destacar: (i) no aparece la palabra «Internet» en la pieza y, (ii) os podéis ir a la página 174 para ver una separata sobre los efectos que iban a tener estos sistemas sobre personas y sociedades. Si no me equivoco, por cierto, el firmante estaba, en aquella época, fundando el mítico The Well.

Volvemos a los anuncios. ¿Cuántos años le echábais a Logitech y sus ratones?

Anuncio del ratón Logitech LogiMouse C7

Vale, unas cuantas le echábais al menos cuarenta. Pero… ¿cuántas sabías que Logitech se dedicaba a los compiladores?

Anuncio del Modula-2/86 de Logitech

(Según la Wikipedia, Logitech se fundó en Suiza en el 81 con el objetivo de crear un procesador de texto, y de ahí se pasaron a los «roedores». En 1984 ya los tenían inalámbricos (por infrarojos). El C7 que tenéis aquí arriba era su primer ratón de venta al público. Vosotros también habríais pagado más de doscientos euros (actualizando la inflación) por tener uno, ¿verdad? Lo de Modula-2, parece ser, fue solo una veleidad temporal.)

No me iré sin darle un repasillo a los ordenadores de la época, c

Dos portátiles de la época y sus especificaciones. Ambos pesan 4,5 libras (unos dos kilos). El Tandy 200 tiene procesador 80C85 de 8 bits a 2,4 megahercios, mientras que el NEC PC-8401A tiene un procesador compatible Z80 a cuatro megahercios. El Tandy tiene 24 Ks de RAM, ampliables 74, el NEC viene con 64, expandibles a 96. Tienen pantallas LCD, de 10 por 16 caracteres el Tandy, 80 por 16 el NEC. Ambos tienen módems de 300 baudios. Se destaca que ambos tienen baterías. El Tandy tiene un sistema operativo propio, el NEC es CP/M 2/2. Ambos vienen con suites de software que incluyen procesador de textos y hojas de cálculo.

¿Os habéis fijado que mencionan que ambos pueden funcionar alimentados por su propia batería? (Comentan del NEC, que con cuatro pilas tipo C (¿quién dijo «batería recargable»?) aguantaba un par de horas.) ¿Y que no hablan de ningún tipo de almacenamiento interno? No me molesto en calcular cuánto serían hoy los mil dólares que costaban, pero sí que comentan que el NEC, funcional, se va más bien a más de dos mil… Y también comentaré que la pieza se cierra con un «para qué un laptop» que, dada la tecnología de la época, era una pregunta más que razonable. Oh, los maravillosos ochenta.

Y cerramos con un clásico del software:

The Norton Utilities Tools for recovering data and directories Peter Nortons data-recovery tool really recovers lost data. I've used it successfully dozens of times. Will it save every lost file? No. Unfortunately, there are some kinds of damage that the Norton Utilities can't repair. Can you tell managing before buying the program whether it will help you recover a particular file? The answer to this question has to be inconclusive. There are different kinds of lost data, and sometimes, even when you know how the damage occurred, it is difficult to predict whether it can be repaired. The simplest kind of loss occurs when you delete a file by using the ERASE or DEL commands in DOS. Even though your directory indicates that the file no longer exists, it hasn't really been erased. What's happened is that an instruction prohibiting DOS from writing in certain areas of the disk has been altered. Your data is retained until information is actually written into these sectors. If you change your mind and decide that you need the discarded data after all, the Norton Utilities will reverse the changes made by the ERASE command and your old file will be restored. Certain types of equipment failures can produce more serious data losses. Every DOS-formatted disk contains hidden files called the boot record and the file allocation table; these, together with the directory, are used for managing the data stored on the rest of the disk. If garbled information is entered into these files— a common cause is a disk drive out of alignment— your data may become inaccessible. But sometimes the data files themselves may survive this damage; if so, you may be able to recover some or all of them. Retrieving Lost Data If you plan to use the Norton file-recovery procedure, you should be careful not to write on a disk with a lost file. You'll risk having new data entered in the sectors containing the file you hope to save. Once the old information has been overwritten in this way, it can't be recovered. If you did write on the disk, there's still a chance that the sectors holding the erased file were not the ones that received the new data; this depends on factors like how much free space was on your disk and which version of DOS you're using. So until you actually begin the recovery procedure, you won't know for sure whether the lost file was destroyed. Still, it's best not to take chances. Make it a rule to never write on a disk containing damaged files. Another good idea is to make a copy of your damaged file whenever possible. If you're working with floppy disks, you should use the DOS DISKCOPY command (as opposed to the COPY * . * command); DISKCOPY works by reproducing what's on the source disk exactly, byte by byte, so even deleted data is copied. Carrying out the recovery procedure on a copied version of the damaged file means that if you make a mistake, you'll have a chance to recopy the original and try again. After taking these precautions, you can begin the file-recovery procedures. In general, for simple problems like unintentionally invoking an ERASE command, you can expect the Norton Utilities to retrieve lost files consistently. When a problem is caused by a current spike, static electricity, or a disk drive out of alignment, it's harder to predict how much of a file can be recovered; this is because so many different varieties of error can occur. With many types of errors, the Norton Utilities can often help you salvage something. At times you may be able to recover only portions of a file. This is similar to what happens when the CHKDSK procedure in DOS restores only some of the lost clusters (groups of isolated sectors) in a file. In many cases you can save enough of a file to be able to reconstruct the missing portions with little trouble. But for some files, such as those created with spreadsheet programs, even a small amount of data loss can

Las Norton Utilities del celebérrimo (y actualmente octogenario) Peter Norton llevaban el mercado desde el 82 (y quizás más sorprendente, se lanzarían versiones nuevas hasta 2012).

Como de costumbre, tenéis los archivos de la revista Byte en archive.org, y si queréis, podéis ir avanzando trabajo con el número de enero ¡del 86! Hasta el año que viene :-).

Byte, noviembre del 85

¡Voy tarde! Es diciembre y en la portada de Byte dice que aún es noviembre (sí, de 1985, claro). Anyway, vamos allá, de urgencia, con el repaso a la revista…

La portada de la revista Byte noviembre de 1985. El precio es de tres dólares con noventa y cinco. El tema de portada es Inside the IBM PCs. La ilustración, en blanco y negro, es una figura humana (parece un hombre vestido de traje con un maletín en la mano, frente a un enorme ordenador tipo PC de la época que parece desmontarse en una especie de puzzle tridimensional

Y comenzamos con el que sigue siendo el tema, en 2025, de revistas de informática, entradas de blogs y vídeos de YouTube a tutiplén: utilidades de dominio público:

Public-Domain Utilities Build an extensive software library for free by Jon R. Edwards THE EXTENSIVE public domain collection for the IBM Personal Computer and compatibles is a very valuable resource. It is easily possible to build an extensive software library and incorporate the utilities into your home projects or to save considerable time and effort by installing a RAM (random-access read/write memory)-disk and print spooler. Most programs in the public domain provide source code; you can learn from the code and, more important, you can customize the routines for your own requirements. Undoubtedly, some of the software will fill your needs, and the more obscure programs may simply trigger your imagination. The notion that "free means shoddy" does not necessarily apply to this software. I suspect that most of the free utilities were originally written to fill individual needs and as part of the "hacker ethic" have been shared with the public. The programs adequately fill many needs, and they have a tendency, as the user community modifies and expands them, to become more and more bug-free and sophisticated. Most public-domain programs provide limited functionality, and their user interfaces and documentation are generally less polished than commercial products, but it is amazing how many commercial products do very little more than integrate the capabilities of programs that already exist in the public domain. If nothing else, exposure to these programs will make you more aware of what to look for and expect from the products you buy. And who knows —in the short descriptions that follow, you may find software that's perfectly suited to your needs. At least the price is right. Free Software To the best of my ability, I have concentrated on free, no-strings-attached software and not on shareware or user-supported software. There is, to be sure, a growing amount of shareware for the IBM family, and much of it is excellent (see "Public-Domain Gems" by John Markoff and Ezra Shapiro, March BYTE, page 207), but the products often do not provide source code, and their authors usually request a contribution; most users legitimately feel that the products deserve financial support. Naturally, I cannot guarantee that the software you download will function as you hope it will. I certainly hope you find dozens of interesting utilities here and that your investigations lead you to new and exciting things, but I take no responsibility if the programs you download do nothing or turn your screen inside out. Locating free software is getting easier and easier. There are more users groups, bulletin-board systems (BBSs), and public-domain copying services than ever before, and the...

Cuarenta años más tarde seguimos igual de locos por obtener utilidades gratuitas y seguimos teniendo que explicar que «gratis» no necesariamente es «malo». Es curioso, eso sí, comprobar que en 1985 había que explicar que muchas de las utilidades venían con su código fuente («código abierto» se puso de moda a finales de los noventa, dice la Wikipedia). Y a uno le entran sudores fríos pensando en descargarse software de BBS a través de los módems de la época (por mucho que los programas pesaran entonces una miseria al comparalos con los actuales).

Si hacéis click en la página y seguís leyendo encontraréis utilidades de disco, de memoria, de estatus del sistema, de ayuda para el uso del teclado, de manipulación de texto y de archivos, de control de pantalla, pequeñas aplicaciones, utilidades de impresión, software de comunicaciones o lenguajes de programación (Forth, LISP, Logo). Lo de siempre: hemos cambiado, en cuarenta años, pero no tanto como uno podría imaginar.

Creo que llevábamos un tiempo sin fijarnos en la publicidad:

Diez megas en 8 minutos son algo más de 20 kilobytes por segundo (mi conexión de fibra da fácilmente 50 megabytes por segundo, o bastante más de 20 gigas en 8 minutos, y los puertos USB 3 llegan a los 500 megabytes por segundo) por apenas 180 dólares de la época (460 euros de hoy). Quejaos de que el pen USB os va lento y es caro, va… Y si seguimos con el tema, podemos repasar las velocidades de los discos de la época en general:

Factors Affecting Disk Performance Four major physical factors determine overall disk performance: access time, cylinder size, transfer rate, and average latency. Access time is the amount of time it takes to move the read/write heads over the desired tracks (cylinders). Once the heads are over the desired tracks, they must settle down from the moving height to the read/write height. This is called the settling time and is normally included in the access time. Specifications for AT and XT disk-drive options are shown in table A. A cylinder is composed of all tracks that are under the read/write heads at one time. Thus, tracks per cylinder is the same as the number of data heads in the drive. Cylinder size is defined as tracks/cylinder x sectors/track x bytes/sector. The Quantum Q540, for example, has four platters and eight data heads, while the Vertex VI 70 has four platters, seven data heads, and one servo head. The difference is that the Quantum drive uses an embedded (or wedge) servo, where the servo signal is embedded on the data tracks, preceding the data portion of each sector on the disk. The Vertex drive uses a dedicated servo that requires its own surface. This difference means that the Quantum drive has 8.5K bytes more data available to it before it must seek the next track; if all other factors were equal (which they aren't), the Quantum would be slightly faster in those cases that required reading that "extra" 8.5K bytes. Transfer rate is the rate at which data comes off the disk. It depends on rotation rate, bit density, and sector interleaving. The first two factors are practically the same for all AT-compatible 5!4-inch hard disks, but not for all floppy disks (the AT's spin 20 percent faster than the other PC floppies). Sector interleaving is used to cut down the effective transfer rate. The interleave factor of 6 used on the XT cuts the effective transfer rate from 5 megabits per second to 0.833 megabit per second. Note that embedded servo disks, such as those used in the XT and the AT, actually spin about 1 percent slower than 3600 revolutions per minute (rpm) to allow for the increased density due to the servo. Average latency is the time required for a disk to spin one-half of a revolution. For hard disks, which spin at 3600 rpm, the average latency is 8.33 ms (1/3600 rpm x 60 seconds/minute x 0.5 = 8.33 ms per half revolution). This is due to the fact that after the heads finish seeking and settling, you must wait for the required sector to come under the heads.

¿Lo más rápido de la época? 300 kilobytes por segundo. Y ni siquiera me siento viejo recordándolo… ¿Que a qué precio salían, decís?

Four Hard Disks For Under $1000 Inexpensive help for your disk storage space woes by Richard Grehan IF YOU ARE a peruser of the back pages of BYTE like most of us. you cannot have failed to notice the plummeting prices of hard-disk systems, particularly those available for the IBM Personal Computer. It is commonplace to find a complete subsystem, including hard disk, controller card, and software, for under $1000. The advantages of a hard disk should be obvious: Its speed, convenience, and storage space eliminate most of the agonies involved with managing a large pile of floppy disks. If you're interested in setting up a personal bulletin-board system, the purchase of a hard-disk system should be your top priority. I selected four hard-disk systems from the pages of BYTE and other computer periodicals. My only criterion was that the complete system must cost less than $1000. This article by no means exhausts all the under-$1000 hard disks advertised, but it should give you an idea of some possible trade-offs and troubles if you decide that a hard disk is your PC's next peripheral. Performance and price information is provided in table 1. The Sider The Sider is from First Class Peripherals, a Carson City, Nevada, company. An external drive, it is consequently the easiest of the four to install. This also means that the drive has its own power supply; the only added power burden to your PC is the interface card. Additionally, since the Sider does not replace one of your system's floppy-disk drives (all of the internal drives reviewed install in place of one floppy-disk drive), you lose no functionality when you need to, say, copy one floppy disk to another. Best of all, you are spared the trouble of digging through the technical manuals to discover which switches on the PC's motherboard you have to flip to configure the IBM as a one-floppy system. The Sider comes in a rather large (7 1/2 inches tall, I6 1/2 inches long, and 3 1/2 inches wide) creamwhite molded-plastic housing. The hard disk is mounted on its side, and the mechanism is convection-cooled via the case's slotted top. (This slotted top warrants caution: Small objects and certainly fluids could be unwittingly dropped into the inner workings of the unit, inflicting heaven knows what damage.) Since the unit is taller than it is wide, I experienced a notunjustified fear of knocking it over. A rather stiff but comfortably long cable connects the drive to the interface card. The installation and operation guide that comes with the Sider is a small 31 -page booklet. It is clear and easy to read, obviously written for people with an absolute minimum of hardware knowledge. It includes numerous illustrations of what goes where an

Sí. Menos de mil dólares (más de dos mil quinientos de hoy con la inflación) es «inexpensive». ¿Por qué capacidades? 800 dólares te dan un disco externo (súper llevable: 19 por 42 por 9 centímetros, más o menos; no me atrevo a consultar el peso) de diez megas y que «solo» hace falta encender 30 segundos antes que el ordenador (lo juro, haced clic en la imagen, pasad página y leed). Uno de los internos, el SyQuest (compañía que duraría hasta su bancarrota en 1998), llega a la barbaridad de 30 megabytes #madreDelAmorHermoso. Y si hay que economizar, tenéis el Rodime, que os da 10 megas por apenas 500 dólares. Me los quitan de las manos. Bendita ley de Moore (y familia).

¿Otra cosa que no es exactamente reciente? Dame un problema, no importa qué problema, y alguien te lo resolverá con una hoja de cálculo:

Circuit Design with Lotus 1-2-3 Use the famous spreadsheet to design circuits and print out schematics by John L. Haynes SPREADSHEETS, especially those with graphics, are not just for business applications; they can be of great help to circuit designers or anyone else designing systems that can be described by equations. As an example, let's take a look at the application of one spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3, to one technical problem, electronic circuit design and analysis. We'll look at both digital and linear circuits. Digital Circuits Digital circuits are built from logic building blocks— inverters, NAND gates, flip-flops, etc. We can simulate each of these components with the equations in a cell of a spreadsheet, using the spreadsheet's built-in logical operators shown in figure 1. For instance, in the spreadsheet portion of Lotus 1-2-3, the equivalent of an inverter is the operator #NOT#, structured as #NOT#(A= 1). This structure means the state of the operator #NOT# is not true, or equal to a logical 0, if the state in the parentheses is true. This is equivalent to the output of an inverter circuit whose input is A. Similarly, the model of a NAND gate, #NOT# (A=1#AND#B = 1). is not true if input A and input B are both true. The flip-flop is a bit more complex, since its output depends not only on its input conditions but on the transition of a clock pulse. For simplicity, let's assume that there is a narrow clock pulse that triggers the flip-flop whenever the clock pulse is true— in other words, whenever its logic state is a logical 1. The Q output remains in its present state until the clock is true; it then assumes the state of the input D. The O' output is the logical opposite of Q. These actions are easily simulated using the logical @IF function. It is structured as @IF(AB,C) and means IF A THEN B ELSE C. That is, if the logical condition of A is true, then the function equals B. Otherwise, the function equals C. Setting the variables as @IF(C= 1 , D,Q). we can interpret the state of the function as: If the clock C is true, the state is equal to D; otherwise, it remains Q. The Q' output is handled with the #NOT# operator. Given the ability to simulate logic components with spreadsheet functions and operators, let's now look at how we can use this technique to build a simple digital circuit. The synchronizing circuit of figure 2 is a commonly encountered arrangement. Known variously as an edge detector, a synchronizing circuit, and a digital differentiator, it develops a pulse one clock period long when an external,

Diseño de circuitos electrónicos con Lotus 1-2-3. En serio. No es una inocentada. O sí, pero suprema.

Y recupero mi tema fetiche, «cosas que ni en broma se publicarían hoy en día en una revista generalista»:

One Million Primes Through the Sieve Generate a million primes on your IBM PC without running out of memory by T. A. Peng A POPULAR WAY to benchmark microcomputers is with the Sieve of Eratosthenes. It is a simple and effective method for generating prime numbers. However, if you try to use the Sieve to obtain more than a few thousand primes on your IBM PC, you will soon encounter the dreaded phrase, "Out of memory." You would think, then, that as far as microcomputers are concerned, the Sieve of Eratosthenes would be an impractical way to generate a large number of primes. This is not so. Let me show you how to use the Sieve to generate a million primes on your microcomputer. Listing 1 (written in Microsoft BASIC) illustrates how, with very little memory, you can put 500.000 numbers through the Sieve to obtain all the primes less than 1,000,000. The idea is quite simple. Use an array of flags to represent the first 1000 odd numbers. After the nonprimes among them have been sieved out, reinitialize the array to represent the next 1000 odd numbers. Lines 120 through 140 initialize the array and lines 340 through 360 reinitialize it before you use it for the next 1000 numbers. The largest prime whose square is less than 1,000,000 is 997 and it is the 168th primestarting with the prime 2. To generate all the primes less than 1,000,000, you don't have to use primes larger than 997, This is the reason for line 220 and for the size of two of the arrays in line 110. The loop in lines 240 through 270 flags all numbers less than 1000 that do not yield primes. (We have K = I + nP, so that K + K + 1 = (I + I + 1) + 2nP = P(2n + 1), which is not a prime.) After each loop is executed, the value of K will be greater than 1000 (and K would flag the next number if the size of the array were larger) and this is remembered as K(C). The variable C keeps count of the primes generated with C - 1 as the actual number of primes generated at the end of each loop. Line 390 assures that the value of K lies between 1 and 1000. You need line 460 to give the correct value for the prime Q in line 490. All the variables except C, Q, and R are integer-valued. There is a reason for this. If the program executes correctly, the output of line 540 should read, "999,983 is the 78,498th prime and the largest less than 1,000,000." It is clear how to modify listing 1 to generate all the primes less than 2,000,000 or even 10,000,000, but to get a predetermined number of primes, we need to know a little about their distribution. Specifically, what we need to know is the size of the arrays K and P and the largest prime to be used in the Sieve. And in order to know this, we must have a rough idea of how large the...

La criba de Erastótenes, amigas y amigos. Que, por cierto, no es un algoritmo especialmente complicado de entender (dejamos como ejercicio para la lectora girar la página e intentar entender el código en BASIC de la siguiente página :-)). Ahora me han enrado ganas de comprobar cuánta RAM consume el programita en Python que genera ChatGPT en menos tiempo del que necesitarías para teclear las tres primeras líneas del programa propuesto en la revista… pero no las suficientes como para hacerlo de verdad O:-).

Y para cerrar… la multitarea:

Top View IBM's long-awaited multitasking program makes its debut BY TJ Byers TOPVIEW is a multitasking program that, for $149, enables your IBM Personal Computer to install more than one program in the system. This is different from the window programs that presently claim to accomplish the same thing. When working with windows, you must quit a program before you can begin another. With TopView, however, you don't have to quit either one of them. Both can be resident on the screen— and. more important, in the microprocessor—at the same time. Multitasking TopView's multitasking capabilities allow several programs to run simultaneously (see photo 1). This isn't the same thing as switching between programs without quitting them; it means that you can actually have one program running in the background while using another. Let's say, for example, that you need to calculate a large spreadsheet, and the job will take several minutes. Instead of staring idly at the screen while the computer crunches away, you can banish the spreadsheet to TopView's background mode and proceed to work on another program— the computer will handle both tasks at the same time. While one program is making calculations in the background, the other can be receiving data from the keyboard. You lose no time waiting for one program to finish before you start the other. Multitasking is not a new concept. Mainframe computers have used multitasking for many years to enhance their performance. What is new, however, is putting multitasking capabilities into a personal computer. TopView brings multitasking to the IBM PC using a multiplexing technique known as time slicing. Basically, TopView divides the microprocessor's time into slots during which it switches rapidly from one program to another. The time slices are very short, on the order of milliseconds, and the switching action is not apparent to either the application program or the user, so the programs appear to be running concurrently on the machine. In actuality, they are processed consecutively in very quick order. The procedure gives a single computer the ability to run more than one program at a time. Multitasking is not without its faults, however. While one program is being processed, the others are held in suspension. Consequently, the programs tend to run more slowly. The more programs you have running at the same time, the slower each apparently becomes. A quick benchmark test using TopView to conduct a simple word search of Writing Assistant on an IBM PC AT showed that it took a full 14 seconds to search a typical 3000-word file as...

Y es que, en 1985, que un ordenador personal fuese capaz de ejecutar múltiples programas en paralelo no era exactamente trivial. Tanto no lo era que no resultaba descabellado cobrar 150 dólares por el programa para hacerlo. Aunque te redujese un 75% el rendimiento del software (cosa que solo ibas a notar cuando ejecutases programas intensivos en cálculo, claro, pero eras tú quien tenía que pensar en ello) o se te comiese buena parte de la RAM del ordenador.

Por cierto: las interfaces «de ventanas» de la época no tenían precio (aunque, de hecho, hoy se están poniendo los programas «TUI», en un maravilloso retorno al pasado :-)).

Un par de fotos de los intentos de mostrar varias aplicaciones en pantalla usando una interfaz puramente textual. No me veo capaz de hacer una descripción fidedigna.

En fin, lo dejamos aquí, que vamos tarde. El mes que viene Dentro de unos días (seguramente semanas), más.

Como de costumbre, tenéis los archivos de la revista Byte en archive.org, y si queréis, podéis ir avanzando trabajo con el número de diciembre.

Everything is an AI remix

Llevaba yo tiempo (meses) con una pestaña del navegador abierta en la última versión de ese maravilloso vídeo que es el Everything is a remix…

…con la intención de buscarle la relectura «en tiempos de IA generativa». Y resulta ser que en el último enlace del #67 de Interaccions, la maravillosa newsletter de Sergi Muñoz Contreras, este me descubre que, de hecho, esa relectura ya se la ha hecho su propio autor, Kirby Ferguson. Y después de verla, opino que es de lo mejor que se ha dicho sobre el tema (y es que en muchísimas ocasiones, incluso cuando el discurso se alinea con mis ideas, me parece que la capacidad de argumentación es escasa).

Mi recomendación es que, aunque vieseis alguna de las múltiples versiones del Everything en su momento, la reveáis ahora con calma antes de ver el segundo vídeo.

Y solo añadiré que, siendo uno muy, muy fan del Everything, y estando bastante de acuerdo (pero no del todo) con la relectura, creo que se salta lo que yo llamo «el problema del aprendiz» (que seguro que tiene un nombre mejor): pareciéndome determinados (muchos, incluso, potencialmente) usos de la IA como herramienta (como los propuestos en AI is remixing, por ejemplo) lícitos (estoy obviando los charcos tamaño océano de la sostenibilidad y del respeto a la propiedad intelectual, ciertamente), la IA es un arma de destrucción masiva del proceso de aprendizaje que convierte al aprendiz en maestro, y que eso es algo que me aterra. Creo que lo resolveremos algún día. Pero me aterra.

Scott y Mark y la enseñanza de la programación

Scott Hanselmann es un tipo majísimo, con un podcast muy recomendable (de los últimos episodios, me quedo con el del Interim Computer Museum o el de Anne-Laure Le Cunff, pero el nivel medio es alto). Scott es, además, el vicepresidente de «developer community» de una pequeña compañía llamada Microsoft (cosa que le permitió abrir el código del BASIC de Microsoft para el 6502, que enseñó a programar a mucha gente en el Apple II, y los Commodore PET, VIC 20 y Commodore 64, con el que aprendí yo, y que con eso yo ya le estaría agradecido eternamente).

En Microsoft Scott conoce a Mark Russinovich, cuyo LinkedIn dice que es «CTO, Deputy CISO and Technical Fellow, Microsoft Azure«, pero que igual os suena más (a los que tengáis una edad, os guste la informática y uséis Windows) de SysInternals. Y Scott y Mark tienen otro podcast, muy apañado también, Scott and Mark Learn To…, que en los últimos episodios ha hablado bastante de un producto que vende intensamente Microsoft, la programación con IA generativa. Y de todos esos episodios, me quedo con este fragmento y lo que dice Russinovich hacia el final. Os dejo el vídeo en el momento indicado, acompañado de la transcripción en inglés, primero, y la traducción al español, después.

Solo comentar antes, que…

  • ….hablan de informática, pero aplica a muchos otros campos, si es que no a todos,
  • que no es la opinión más original del mundo, pero está bien que lo diga quien lo dice,
  • que lo de que las universidades no tienen un buen modelo es rigurosamente cierto, pero a ver quién es el guapo o guapa al que se le ocurre una solución que no sea brutalmente intrusiva o imposiblemente cara,
  • y que destaco un fragmento de la conversación, pero que también está muy bien (traducido: alineado con lo que pienso yo, que es un tema que también me toca de relativamente cerca) sobre las empresas y lo que buscan / deben buscar al contratar gente joven, y que en general todo el episodio, y todo el podcast, son bastante recomendables.

Y eso, os dejo con el vídeo, la transcripción y la traducción.

Otro día, más.

Transcripción

(A partir de la transcripción de YouTube, corregida y editada ligeramente por mí para hacerla algo más legible (espero). Las negritas son mías.)

—So as we end… we’re at an inflection point. What should university students that are studying CS right now, sophomores, juniors, seniors, in CS, be thinking about as we are in that point?

— I have a friend that’s got a student in computer science that’s a junior and he said he was talking to them and said asking them, do you use AI and he says, like, yeah a lot of my fellow students are using AI. I don’t use AI, because I want to learn, the hard way.

— I think both is the right answer, though, I feel.

— I think both, but here’s what I’ll tell you right now. I think that universities don’t have a good model, you know, consistent.

— They’re behind. Academia might, but research level academia.

— But not for teaching undergrads. And, actually, I think what is coming into view for me is that you need classes where using AI for certain projects or certain classes is considered cheating. Not to say that you don’t have classes and projects in some classes where the student is told to use AI, but you need to have the main basis for the education on computer science and programming to be AI-less, because that’s the only way the student’s going to learn.

— I’ve been saying «drive stick shift». And I get told that I’m being gatekeepy when I say that.

— I don’t think you are, because there is a great study of three months ago from MIT where they took, um, not students, but they took people in careers, already in the workforce, and they divided them into three cohorts and had them write essays from the SAT, and they had one cohort just do it with their own closed book, just write the essay. They had another cohort that got to use Google, and they had another cohort that got to use ChatGPT, and they looked at their EEGs, and they quizzed them afterwards, right after, and then like a week later, and the results were exactly what you would expect. The people that wrote it could answer questions about what they wrote, even a week later, and their EEGs showed that they were burning a lot of wattage. The people that were using ChatGPT, an hour after they wrote the essay, they couldn’t remember what they’d written.

— That’s the thing. It’s just not even there. That makes me really sad. I very much enjoy using AI to brainstorm, to plan, but then I want to do the writing part. To vibe your way through life has me concerned.

— You lose the critical thinking. And they call this critical thinking deficit, that is what it’s creating…

— Which we already have from social media.

— Yeah, we already have. And if you’re talking about the early and career programmers that we’ve been talking about wanting to hire at a company, you want them to know what a race condition is. You don’t want them to have vibed it and AI is like, «Yeah, a race condition. AI will fix that.» Because at some point, as we’ve said, I think with the limitations of AI and software programming, at least for the foreseeable future somebody needs to know.

Traducción

(Con ChatGPT y revisado por mí. Las negritas siguen siendo mías.)

—Así que, para cerrar… estamos en un punto de inflexión. ¿Qué deberían estar pensando los estudiantes universitarios que estudian informática ahora mismo?

—Tengo un amigo que tiene un hijo que estudia informática, está en tercer año, y me dijo que le preguntó: “¿Usas IA?” Y él respondió: “Sí, muchos de mis compañeros la usan. Yo no, porque quiero aprender por el camino difícil.”

—Creo que ambas cosas son la respuesta correcta, sinceramente.

—Sí, ambas, pero te diré algo: creo que las universidades no tienen un modelo adecuado, coherente.

—Van por detrás. Quizás la academia investigadora sí, pero…

—Pero no en la enseñanza de grado. De hecho, creo que lo que se está haciendo evidente es que necesitamos clases en las que usar IA para ciertos proyectos o asignaturas se considere hacer trampa. No porque no debas tener otras clases o proyectos donde se indique explícitamente al estudiante que use IA, sino porque la base principal de la formación en informática y programación debe ser sin IA, porque es la única forma en que el estudiante realmente aprenderá.

—Yo suelo decir “hay que aprender a conducir con cambio manual”. Y me dicen que eso es una postura elitista1.

—No creo que lo sea, porque hay un estudio excelente de hace tres meses del MIT donde tomaron… no estudiantes, sino profesionales ya en activo, y los dividieron en tres grupos para que escribieran ensayos del tipo de la selectividad. A un grupo le dijeron que lo hiciera sin ayuda, a otro que podía usar Google, y a otro que podía usar ChatGPT. Luego midieron sus electroencefalogramas y los evaluaron justo después y una semana más tarde. Los resultados fueron exactamente los que esperarías: las personas que escribieron el ensayo por sí mismas eran capaces de responder preguntas sobre lo que habían escrito incluso una semana después, y sus elecroencefalogramas mostraban mucha actividad cerebral. En cambio, quienes usaron ChatGPT, una hora después ya no recordaban lo que habían escrito.

—Eso es. Es que ni siquiera está ahí. Y eso me pone muy triste. Me gusta mucho usar la IA para generar ideas, para planificar, pero luego quiero escribir yo. Esa actitud de “vibear”2 la vida me preocupa.

—Se pierde el pensamiento crítico. Y eso está generando un déficit de pensamiento crítico…

—Que ya teníamos por culpa de las redes sociales.

—Sí, ya lo teníamos. Y si hablamos de los programadores jóvenes o principiantes que queremos contratar en una empresa, quieres que sepan lo que es una condición de carrera (race condition). No quieres que lo hayan “vibeado” y que la IA les diga: “Sí, una condición de carrera, la IA lo arreglará.” Porque, como ya hemos dicho, con las limitaciones de la IA en la programación de software, al menos en el futuro cercano, alguien tiene que saberlo.

  1. «Gatekeepy» en el original. En este caso «to gatekeep» sería poner barreras de acceso innecesarias, o «pedir carnets». ↩︎
  2. «Vibear» es mi traducción de «to vibe code«, crear programas a base de prompts a IAs generativas, sin escribir una línea de código. ↩︎