Etiqueta: Byte

#breBytes Educación en línea, 1986

No puedo cerrar los #breBytes de septiembre de 1986 sin pararme aunque sea un minuto en la editorial de la revista…

EDITORIAL College Credits Through Telecommunications We urge colleges and universities to expand the practice of granting credits for courses taught through computer conferencing. We have become aware of the need for computer-mediated instruction because BYTE's offices are located in a rural area. In order to advance professionally, members of our staff often need to take university courses to increase their knowledge of computer science or engineering. Unfortunately, we have no universities in easy commuting range that offer broad curricula in these fields of study. Some of our staff members have endured long commutes to continue their studies, but work loads are high at BYTE, and few employees can both do their jobs well and undertake regular university studies at distant sites. The Instructional Medium Direct observation has shown us that computer conferencing works as an instructional medium. We have seen tutorial topics spring up in many conferences on BIX. People learn about programming a new machine, for example, from volunteer teachers in distant areas. Sessions have the quality of free and open classroom discussions. The lack of face-to-face contact has not proved to be a hindrance. We also know that instruction by computer conferencing has already worked in a university. The New School for Social Research, through an association with Connect Ed, has already taught graduate courses in media studies. Connect Ed uses the EIES conferencing software developed at the New York Institute of Technology by Murray Turoff. Some members of the BYTE staff visited the New School last year and spoke with students and teachers in the New School/Connect Ed program. All agreed that the system works. In their program, computer conferencing is supplemented by some actual classes. The requirement of occasional classes on campus is much less daunting than a long commute several times each week. From the teacher's perspective, computer conferencing has some advantages as an instructional medium. It is easy to monitor attendance and to measure participation. Questions can be addressed to the whole class or to an individual. Since students can think as long as they wish before replying, dialogue conducted through computers is in some respects easier than spoken conversation. And, of course, shy and quiet people can always have their say in computer conferencing. The loud and aggressive can't drown them out. Examination tools to simplify the administration of exams on-line would not be difficult to create. New Educational Opportunities The use of telecommunications as a means of instruction can enable potential students in rural areas to gain access to outstanding teachers and scholars at major universities. If computer conferencing software is used, students can enjoy discussion and debate with students from different regions and backgrounds. The community of higher education will become accessible from remote areas as never before. Potential students in rural areas will enjoy unprecedented educational opportunities. Moreover, computer conferencing can make many educational opportunities now beyond commuting range available to everyone. Even the opportunities available to those in urban areas will increase. Cost Advantages Sadly, the cost of higher education has now become prohibitive for many people. Instruction through computer conferencing can alleviate this situation by reducing expenses for both the university and the student. Universities will be able to add more students without building more dormitories and classrooms. The student can continue to live at home, incurring no new room and board expenses. This will effectively reduce the student's expenses to the amount of tuition, which can be exactly the same for on-line students as for on-campus ones. With tuition remaining the same, the university will experience no loss of revenue. Combined Study It seems likely that universities will be able to combine on-line instruction with on-campus instruction to provide improved courses. Daily on-line instruction could be supplemented by on-campus instruction— perhaps one or two Saturdays per month. Another intriguing possibility would be letting on-line students compete for on-campus scholarships to complete their studies. On-line interaction with prospective students might also permit both students and universities to make better choices in the admissions process. The Big Step We urge universities to offer credit courses through computer conferencing in order to test the limits of the medium and to learn how best to combine on-line and oncampus instruction. We believe computer conferencing can help preserve and extend educational opportunity in a time of prohibitive costs for many students and many universities. If universities do this, they will open their curricula to millions of potential students— personal computer users everywhere. Through their computers and modems, personal computer users, even those located in rural areas, will gain access to an enormous range of courses. Let's hope that universities and accrediting associations will seize this opportunity to extend educational programs. — Phil Lemmons Editor in Chief

Ya habíamos hablado brevemente de educación en línea en 1986 en el último post dedicado a las Computer Chronicles, de este mismo mes, pero es maravilloso leer cómo, desde la revista, se animaba a las universidades al mundo del online, hablando de ruralidad, formación continua y lifelong learning, entre otros aspectos :-)

#breBytes La familia Motorola 68000

La vida de la familia 68000 de Motorola fue breve (dejó de fabricarse en 1996), pero intensa, siendo el procesador de nuestro adorado Amiga y del Atari ST, pero sobre todo la primera arquitectura sobre la que se construyeron los Macs (y el Lisa antes de eso). Apple se pasó a los PowerPC en 1994, y eso acabó con los 68k. Pero hace 40 años, en septiembre de 1986, la familia 68000 prometía muchísimo: lo suficiente como para ser portada de Byte.

Portada de la revista Byte de septiembre de 1986, dedicada a la familia 68000 de procesadores. Ilustran la portada algunos chips de la familia y pequeñas fotos de un Mac, un Atari ST y un Amiga 1000.

La revista le dedica un buen espacio a las diferentes máquinas 68000 (incluyendo un apartado dedicado a Unix), pero nosotros ya sabemos cuál era la mejor. Y es que, ¿qué otra máquina podía producir gráficos así?

Anuncio a página completa del Commodore Amiga, con una imagen a todo color de una ilustración de la imagen clásica del emperador egipcio Tutankamón.

Y claro, lo que más nos interesa de la sección es esta comparación entre el Amiga y el Mac, aunque está hecha desde el punto de vista del programador:

AMIGA VS. MACINTOSH by Adam Brooks Webber A programmer's comparison of the system calls on two 68000~based machines I HELPED IMPLEMENT the True BASIC language system on the Macintosh. The project has been completed for some time now and we've all recovered our perspective and good humor, but at the time I felt that if I saw that smiling "Welcome to Macintosh" message one more time I would scream. It was in this frame of mind, on my way to see the Amiga for the first time, that I wrote out a list entitled "Why I Hate the Macintosh." That incident led to this article. I have now completed the same project on the Amiga and have many gripes about that machine, too. In this article I compare the system software, of the two machines. Implementing a language system is a good way to get to know a machine. True BASIC is not just a compiler and interpreter, it's a screen editor, a graphics program, and a number cruncher. It makes sounds, it prints, it manipulates files— in short, it uses most of a system's software. My comparison of the Macintosh and the Am\ga is necessarily limited, but I have tried to choose areas that are of general interest and that are representative of the differences between the two machines. These are the user interface, graphics primitives, printers and other devices, multitasking, and memory management. The User Interface The user interface of a system is usually examined from the user's point of view. You ask, "Is it intuitive? Is it powerful? Is it forgiving of error?" as you consider how to communicate with a program. I am interested in another point of view: What does a program have to do to communicate with the user? For some machines, communicating with the user means reading characters from the keyboard and writing text to the screen. Adding windows, menus, and mouse operations makes things more complicated, lust how complicated is shown by the Macintosh user interface software, which determines the structure of every Mac program more or less completely. The program must have a main loop that is executed as often as possible, usually 60 times a second. (One rule of thumb: The quality of system software is inversely proportional to the number of things a program must do "as often as possible.") The main loop checks for events like keystrokes, mouse clicks, and disk insertions and responds to them. Responding to an event is usually a lot of work because the Mac's user interface software provides little assistance. Figure 1 shows, in pseudocode, a simple example of what a program must do to allow a window with a scroll bar to change in size— something that most Mac programs have to deal with. The system software does offer significant help in two areas of user interface: text editing and file access. TextEdit is a subsystem that provides a mechanism for displaying and editing text in a window. (True BASIC doesn't use TextEdit, but only because we have our own internal string-handling procedures.) For...

Nótese, por cierto, que el artículo está escrito por un graduado del Dartmouth College, el lugar de nacimiento de BASIC. La comparación, por cierto, es favorable al Amiga en cuanto a la programación de la interfaz, gestión de dispositivos, multitarea (no es una sorpresa enorme, teniendo en cuenta que el Mac no era multitarea en 1986) y gestión de memoria, y al Mac en lo que se refiere a primitivas gráficas. Pero esto no le salvaría la vida al Amiga, lamentablemente.

Un poco más adelante, en su Chaos Manor Jerry Pournelle seguía enamorado del Amiga y nos hablaba de ese clásico que fue Deluxe Paint (con el que se hizo el Tutankamón de aquí arriba, si no me equivoco, y que ocuparía el lugar en el imaginario que le dedicamos a Photoshop si viviésemos en la línea temporal correcta), pero ya veía los primeros pasos de la muerte de Commodore…

Amiga My top pick of Spring COMDEX was the Amiga. The Amiga did have some problems. For instance, when Ken Sheldon and l approached the Atari booth, they practically ran out to grab us; I stood in the Amiga booth for 15 minutes before anyone spoke to me. Atari software was demonstrated by hackers; most of the Amiga software was demonstrated by clerical employees from Commodore headquarters. None of that really mattered. What was important was that the Amiga booth was jammed. 1 could feel the excitement. It reminded me of the early days of microcomputers. Moreover, once I got past the clerks and secretaries, there were plenty of real hackers. Mike Lehman, who originally wrote Pascal MT+ and was later a vice president of Digital Research, has started a new company called Maxisoft. The product is MaxiPlan, a combination spreadsheet and database with chart capability. MaxiPlan knows how to do a lot of statistical calculations. It will make databases and charts, and it will talk to you through the Amiga's speech synthesizer. You'll spend a while on the manual— this thing is powerful, and the instructions can be complicated— but it's worth the investment. Highly recommended. TDI Software has Modula-2 compilers for both the Atari and Amiga machines. The Atari version is a new release that fixes some problems with the original. Both versions work and should make it simpler to transport programs from Atari to Amiga. Longtime readers know I'm a Modula-2 fan; this is a reasonable implementation, and TD1 is working to make it better. The chief problem is the documentation: TDI needs to give more and better examples of just how to write and compile simple programs. Pournelle's law of software documentation: You can't have too many examples. I wish TDI would learn it. The Amiga is known for its graphics; one of the best graphics programs is Deluxe Paint by Electronic Arts. Alas, they use an obnoxious copy-protection scheme. That's its only real fault; otherwise. Deluxe Paint is glorious. There's just very little you can't do with it. You can color-cycle portions of your drawing, so that waterfalls have running water; zoom in for fine details; and suchlike. It's a lot of fun. EA also has various games, some interesting, some boring. Mindscape is another company that has developed some interesting Amiga software. The Halley Project is a spaceflight game that's part arcade but largely strategic; it helps to know something about planetary astronomy. Activision has a whole bunch of Amiga software, including Music Studio, which 1 haven't much got into but which looks wonderful, and a series of illustrated text adventure games, including Hacker, which some say is the most difficult adventure of that type ever written. In other words, there's a great deal of Amiga software: business, games, educational, programming tools. That, however, wasn't the real hit. What was really impressive was the Amiga Sidecar, a box that turns an Amiga into a 99 percent PCompatible. Moreover, since the Amiga is a multitasking machine, they were able to run PC software as just one job. It was eerie to watch Flight Simulator running as if on a PC and still see the famous Amiga bouncing ball in the background and a word-processing program running in the foreground. The Sidecar has both 8088 and 8087 chips and is supposed to sell for significantly less than a thousand dollars. An Amiga plus Sidecar plus hard disk would be one of the most powerful combinations around, and I had no problem designating that the number one pick of Spring COMDEX. Problems One problem I've had with the Amiga is that while I kept hearing about all the new software for it, I never got any. Commodore's people sent catalogs, while the Atari people sent software. At COMDEX, Bob Pariseau, vice president for software development and one of the original Amiga development team, promised to fix all that. He also arranged to get me a Sidecar as soon as it was available. 1 left COMDEX convinced that the Amiga was likely to be the product of the year. Two weeks later, Commodore laid off nearly 200 people, including Bob Pariseau. There were 55 Amiga people in the West Coast office; 20 were let go. Moreover, many who didn't leave immediately were put on notice; others, seeing the handwriting on the wall, quietly began sending out their resumes. The rumor I hear is that the investment bankers want Commodore to reduce their payroll by 50 percent; given Commodore's financial situation, the company is in no position to argue. The question, then, is whether Commodore has— and can keep— enough high-tech people to support the Amiga properly. Commodore says they can. So do Amiga enthusiasts. Me, I don't know. The situation is made vastly more complicated because many of those laid off were required to sign, as a condition for getting a few more severance benefits, a particularly severe— I would say obnoxious— nondisclosure agreement, the first term of which is that the agreement itself is secret. This has made it very difficult to get a decent picture of what has really happened at Commodore, and as I write this in early June I don't think anyone knows. So. I like the Amiga, and I was much impressed by the enthusiasm of the Amiga people at COMDEX. Of course, even then the Commodore top brass must have known that many of those enthusiasts wouldn't be with the company two weeks later. By the time you read this, we may know the end of the story. I can't say I'm very fond of Commodore's management, but I do wish the Amiga well. It's a heck of a machine.

Y no me voy sin rescatar este anuncio, con el que se lanzaba lo que sería el estándar oro de los monitores durante muchísimos años: los NEC Multisync, capaces de trabajar con básicamente cualquier ordenador de la época, y que en esta, su primera encarnación, era capaz de alcanzar los 800 por 560 de resolución en sus 13 pulgadas :-).

Anuncio de la gama de monitores de tubo NEC Multisync

Un día de estos, más :-).

#breBytes C++

Aprovechando la canícula, seguimos con nuestra versión light del repaso a la revista Byte de hace cuarenta años. Y suerte que nos hemos pasado al modelo light, porque el número de agosto del 86 no venía especialmente fuerte. Pero no puedo saltarme la sección de crítica de libros, porque ahí tenemos uno de los clásicos de la informática, la presentación de C++ por parte del creador del lenguaje, Bjarne Stroustrup. (Si no he buscado mal, la cuarta y última (de momento) edición se publicó en 2011.)

Book Reviews THE C++ PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE Reviewed by G. Michael Vose One of the tenets of evolutionary theory states that changes in the environment cause subtle mutations in an organism that transform it into a new organism. The changing nature of the hardware environment of computers causes an analogous evolution of programming languages. Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming language describes one recent language mutation. Following the example of its parent, Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie's The C Programming language (also known as K&R or the "white" book), this book defines the superset of C called C++. Both books provide multiple chapter tutorials for their respective languages as well as the languages' official reference manuals. Both contain examples and exercises for readers to solve. Stroustrup's book assumes a familiarity with C (referring the beginning reader to K&R) but is nearly 100 pages longer than the white book. C++ adds considerably to the complexity of an already obtuse lexicon. Furthermore, C++ provides the tools to allow an objectoriented approach to programming in C. Evaluating a book like Stroustrup's is difficult because microcomputer implementations of C++ are just becoming available (see the What's New section). I have no concrete experience with the language and no facility for using the tutorial sections of the book. Therefore, the judgments I can make are limited to two areas: Does the book adequately describe the concepts of C++, and do the C++ extensions seem useful? The historical significance of both the book and the language will have to wait for the judgment of some future reviewer. People familiar with C instantly recognize the significance of the name C++. C's increment operator is symbolized using two plus signs (++). The suggestion is that C++ increments the power of the language, and this is certainly true. But for many C programmers, adding new constructs takes a back seat to fixing some of the awkward aspects of the original language. The authors provide some of these fixes. Programmers enjoy using C because of the freedom of expression it provides due to a rich set of operators and great flexibility in declaring and manipulating data types. C++ increases this freedom substantially by offering additional data types and constructs that permit programmers to more easily build complex data structures (a process known as data abstraction). The emphasis in C++ is on types and structure.

Y me tenéis que reconocer que es divertido leer la crítica de un libro en la que el revisor te dice cosas como que C++ suma considerablemente a la complejidad de un léxico ya obtuso (no seré yo el que le lleve la contraria, pero pegarle así a C…), para a continuación explicarte que evaluar el libro es complicado en ausencia de implementaciones de C++ (vamos, sin haber probado el lenguaje), y después explicar qué es eso de los objetos en programación (la orientación a objetos, como paradigma, data de finales de los cincuenta (del siglo pasado), pero no se había prodigado mucho hasta la llegada de C++ y sus diferentes «primos» (por mucho que Smalltalk ya llevase unos cuantos años corriendo por el mundo)). No está mal, por cierto, permitirse darse el lujo de darle una collejita a nada más y nada menos que Stroustrup (en aquel momento no era la leyenda que es hoy, claro) por permitirse el lujo de usar palabras como «clase» antes de definirlas. Ni dudar (razonablemente, dada la juventud y novedad de la cosa) del éxito de un lenguaje que, cuarenta años más tarde, se disputa la segunda posición del ranking de lenguajes de TIOBE con «papá C».

Se publica la crítica, por cierto, dentro de un número dedicado a la programación orientada a objetos (ya os decía que el tema comenzaba a popularizarse en aquella época) en el que escribe, entre otros, el creador de Objective C, el lenguaje de desarrollo para Apple hasta nada más y nada menos que 2014.

Si queréis seguir hojeando el número, en la misma sección de libros se critica también el Mind Over Machine del filósofo Hubert Dreyfus y su hermano Stuart, algo menos famoso pero aún así profesor emérito en Berkeley, que se dice pronto. El libro argumenta (siempre según la crítica) que nunca tendremos una verdadera inteligencia artificial porque los ordenadores carecen de intuición. La historia no se repite, pero rima, dicen. El crítico también se fija en un capítulo dedicado a los temores sobre la implantación de la IA en la educación. 1986.

Y también se puede recomendar, creo, pero para valientes, el discurso del recientemente fallecido Tony Hoare (ya premio Turing por aquel entonces), Mathematics of programming. Por aquello de incidir en que lo que se publicaba en los ochenta en revistas generalistas de informática tenía en muchas ocasiones un nivel estratosférico, entre otras cosas.

En fin. Algún otro día, más, pero como muy pronto, en septiembre.

#breBytes El Commodore 128

Dijimos hace nada que dejaríamos de hacer nuestras lecturas mensuales de la revista Byte de hace cuarenta años, pero que amenazábamos con buscar alternativas. Isma señalaba en los comentarios lo que básicamente tenéis aquí abajo, y que a mí también se me había pasado por la cabeza: ya que el ejercicio de lectura en sí lo voy a seguir haciendo, no obligarme a hacer la entrada mensual y exhaustiva, pero, si aparece alguna noticia que me apetezca destacar, pues recogerla por el procedimiento habitual.

Y siempre hemos tenido la norma de que si aparece Commodore, lo recogemos…

The Commodore 128 Personal Computer System The Commodore 128 personal computer includes 128K bytes of RAM and uses two microprocessors, a Z80 and a 6502-compatible chip, the 8502, which supports bank-switched memory. The C-128 includes dual video outputs, a four-voice sound synthesizer, 80-column RGB text output with its own independent 16K of video RAM (supporting 640 by 200 pixel resolution), and the 40-column VlC-11 chip, which supports 320 by 200 pixel high resolution sprite graphics. On power-up, the C-128 enters the "native" or C-128. mode, which uses the 8502 processor, switchable between a 1- and 2-megahertz clock speed. The mode accesses the 128K of RAM using bank-switching techniques and allows you to use BASIC 7.0, an advanced BASIC In C-64 mode, you obtain full compatibility with the Commodore 64 but without access to any of the C-128's advanced features. Alternatively, you have a 2-MHz Z80based CP/M machine that supports bank-switched CP/M version 3.0 (CP/M Plus). C-64 Mode In C-64 mode. I had no trouble loading and running all my C-64 programs, including heavily copy-protected ones. There are three ways to switch to C-64 mode: In C-128 mode, you can type GO 64: you can hold down the Commodore logo key while powering up; or you can put a C-64 ROM cartridge in the expansion port. Note that you cannot leave the C-64 mode— the slight changes in the operating system necessary to implement the exit would reduce compatibility with the C-64. Note also that in C-64 mode, you will not normally be able to access any of the C-128's improved features, such as 80-column video output or high-speed disk drive usage with the 1571 drive. There are only three slight differences between the C-64 mode and an actual C-64. The VIC-II video graphics chip has two extra registers. #47 and #48 (at locations 53295 and 53296). Register 47, a keyboard control register, uses 3 bits (the 5 highest bits are unused) to scan the extended key matrix. C-128 mode uses the register to read the numeric keypad, outboard cursor keys, Help, Tab, and other special function keys. To maintain full compatibility, the C-64 mode does not read the registers, but you could write code to read these keys even in C-64 mode. Register 48 simply contains one bit that selects 1- or 2-MHz clock speeds. You can run many programs in C-64 mode at a 2-MHz clock rate, but you will not be able to access the VIC-II video chip; therefore, the screen will be blank. Additionally, the C-128 cannot communicate with its companion disk drive at this higher clock speed. The modem port and the sound chip do function properly when the system is running at 2 MHz. The third difference results from having two 64K-byte RAM banks. If you power up in C-128 mode and select bank or I, that will be the bank of RAM that the C-64 uses. Of course, this "difference" has no effect on compatibility with a stock C-64. I have experienced no incompatibilities, and I am completely satisfied with the C-64 mode, but I have heard that one program. Commodore's International Soccer, does not function properly because of incorrectly read...

¿Iba perdida Commodore en el 86? Pues el Amiga y sus 16/32 bits ya llevaban una buena temporada en el mercado, pero el 64 seguía vendiendo de manera mas que considerable, y alguien tuvo la idea de crear un «monstruo» con doble CPU, heredero del 64 pero con unos masivos 128 Ks de RAM y el doble también de velocidad de procesador, hacerlo compatible con el 64 hasta ser un 64 si se le pedía con un mínimo de amabilidad (G0 64, eran las palabras mágicas) y, por si dos ordenadores en uno no fuesen suficiente, un modo CP/M, cuando el CP/M seguía siendo un sistema operativo más que interesante.

Sobre el papel, una idea muy interesante: una máquina capaz de ejecutar la infinidad de soft que se había desarrollado para el 64 y para las máquinas CP/M, y de ir más allá con el 128. En la práctica, Commodore no vendió ni una máquina más que si hubiese seguido con el 64, nadie del mundillo CP/M le prestó la más mínima atención, y el software desarrollado para el 128 fue, redondeando un poco… absolutamente ninguno. Y todo ello costó un dinero en desarrollo y le quitó parte del poco marketing que se podían permitir las eximias cuentas de Commodore al Amiga, que ya no iba muy fino en su batalla con Macs y PCs. Commodore no moriría hasta mediados de la década de los 90, pero la cosa ya no pintaba bien :-(.

Byte, junio del 86

Creo que es hora de cerrar etapa. Comenzamos a releer la revista Byte ahora hace casi dos años, en julio del 84, y con esta van 24 entradas dedicadas a 24 números de la revista, y hasta yo comienzo a tener un cierto cansancio del repaso mensual (me puedo desdecir en caso de reclamación por aclamación, pero creo que coincidiremos en que podemos cerrar el ciclo ya, ¿verdad?). Pero no creáis que vamos a abandonar la nostalgia así como así: notaréis que no incluimos la minisección de Computer Chronicles desde el mes de marzo. Pues no es porque se me haya olvidado (por una vez, y sin que sirva de precedente), sino porque, como comentamos en su momento (¡no me estáis atentos!), el programa cerró la temporada a final de marzo de 1986, y no volvió a emitirse hasta el inicio de la siguiente temporada, allá por septiembre del mismo año. Y sí, amiga lectora, amenazamos con repasar mensualmente las Computer Chronicles de la temporada 86/87 a partir de septiembre. (Y me reservo el derecho de seguir leyendo la revista y destacar alguna pieza de vez en cuando O:-).)

Y cerrados los temas organizativos, vamos allá con nuestro último Byte.

Portada de la revista Byte de junio de 1986. El tema de portada es ordenadores y música. La ilustra un teclado de piano de longitud infinita en que las teclas negras son microchips

Cuánto voy a echar de menos estas portadas de Robert Tinney… (Veo, por otro lado, en archive.org, que se van a hacer más infrecuentes, y que apenas durarían hasta mayo de 1988. Otro motivo para ir cerrando etapa.)

Abrimos número con la editorial y el estándar informático en vigor más antiguo que yo recuerde, que lleva en danza desde nada más y nada menos que 1983. Eso no iba a impedir, naturalmente, esa lacra que son los formatos propietarios…

Music and MIDI Have you noticed the stir going on in the electronic music industry? Take keyboard synthesizers. A significant drop in price has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in capability and sound quality, opening the doors of musical exploration to multitudes of newcomers. We've also seen computer technology claim new territories in music through the advent of MIDI (musical instrument digital interface), a data communications protocol that lets you join synthesizers and computers into small networks for composition or performance. MIDI has stimulated the entire music industry by providing a standard for hardware and software to be used for the production of music. Creativity, efficiency, and productivity are enhanced by the development of computer-based tools aimed at the mystical process of music generation. The current specification for MIDI has been in existence for four years. It came about through the cooperation of music synthesizer manufacturers around the world, notably those from Japan and the United States. Essentially, a large group of manufacturers got together and decided to add serial data channels to all future electronic music instruments so that events generated on one instrument could be played on remote instruments connected via the MIDI cable. Layers of sound, for example, can be produced from a single keyboard controller by driving multiple sound modules equipped with MIDI inputs. By inserting a personal computer into the middle of all this sound generating equipment, composers can record and manipulate scores much as word processors do text. The Good News So we now have a data communications standard for moving music event data between a computer and sound-generating hardware. We can buy instruments from different manufacturers and interconnect them at once. Older versions of music synthesizers, having no compatibility to any other device you might be using, were doomed to eventual obsolescence as newer products were released to replace them. Now it's different— what you get tomorrow can be integrated with what you have today, and it's reasonable to consider building an elaborate system over a period of budget-controlled time. A variety of good MIDI software is now available. We find software that can act as a kind of digital tape recorder for music data; programs that edit, store, and retrieve libraries of synthesizer voice parameters; and software that can display, print, and edit scores rendered in traditional music notation. It's a heyday for musicians of all persuasions. Or is it? The Bad News While the MIDI specification goes a long way toward unifying the tasks necessary to the production of music, it does not suggest any format for the storage of MIDI data files. Thus, developers of music software are on their own to adopt a structure for disk files containing MIDI performance data created by the software. And that is precisely what has happened during the development of today's MIDI music software: Each program on each computer produces a data file that cannot be instantly read by any other combination of hardware or software. Furthermore, few, if any, file-converter utilities are available to assist transportation of data between environments. (Of course, there is always the issue of differences among the underlying DOS formats for individual computers.) A Data File Standard Utility programs that convert music files from one manufacturer's product to another must be seen as only an interim measure. A better approach would see all the important players get together (in a fashion similar to the one that led to the MIDI 1.0 specification) and hack out a target format for file interchange. If software developers could produce a musical equivalent of the DIF standard used for database files in the business world, users operating in different computer and synthesizer environments would benefit immensely from expanded access to the large body of music data now being stockpiled. This tactic would also let existing products "speak'' to future programs designed to use the target file format. A number of obstacles present themselves when attempting to derive a convenient, universal method of organizing music data files. That's not to say that no one is trying. Besides continuing development on the academic level at universities like Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and MIT, commercial concerns like Roland and Electronic Arts have worked hard in an effort to establish useful guidelines toward the goal of increased music data sharing. In its own way, each organization has faced hurdles, including: • Some computers have a lot more memory, speed, and display resolution than others. How can a file produced on a more powerful computer be rendered on a less capable machine? What should a minimum configuration consist of? • Should graphic data for displaying common music notation or some derivative be included with MIDI performance data? Since both types of data might exist independently, and, given that some software does not recognize both, should these two kinds of data be kept in separate, parallel files? • Should we go further and attempt to design a full-blown operating system for music that could be ported to various computer architectures? This is ambitious but could produce long-term benefits. Naturally, other important points need to be ironed out. At this time, we invite software and hardware developers to plug in their irons. The success of the MIDI standard offers hope for a standard for file interchange. At the moment, the consumer is getting shortchanged by the inability to move data between music processing programs. The audience for computer music software is growing larger and more sophisticated, and it's up to the leaders in music technology development to provide software standards. We at BYTE want to encourage all concerned to investigate the work already done and then have a series of formal conferences involving a variety of sources. It's not going to be easy, but it has to happen (and soon, too, because I have a lot of music data on IMSAI-8080 cassettes waiting to be uploaded to my Amiga). —Roger Powell, Contributing Editor

El producto del mes era esta descripción-que-no-review del Macintosh Plus, que introducía la altísima tecnología de ser capaz de acceder a las dos caras del disquete (doblar la capacidad de cada disquete no es poca cosa), pasaba a un mega de RAM y añadía SCSI para conectar discos (hablan de discos capaces de transferir 320 kilobytes –el énfasis es suyo– por segundo). A cambio, Apple es Apple, se caían de la configuración MacPaint y MacWrite, que pasaban a costar 125 dólares de nada. Teniendo en cuenta que el Plus salía a 2600 dólares de la época (unos 8500 actuales, actualizando la inflación), no sé yo si a Apple le venía de aquí.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION by Phillip Robinson The Macintosh Plus It has more memory, double-sided disks, and an SCSI interface Editor's note: The following is a BYTE product description. It is not a review. We provide an advance look at this product because we feel that it is significant. A complete review will follow in a subsequent issue. The Macintosh introduced personal computer users to technology that has now become commonplace: bitmapped displays, 3 /2-inch floppy disks, and iconic desktop environments. The Macintosh Plus adds welcome double-sided drives, a megabyte of RAM, an industry-standard SCSI interface, a numeric keypad, and a larger, faster ROM of operating system routines. The Mac Plus is also much faster than the 512K Mac, partly because of new software routines and partly because of the additional RAM. One feature that the 512K Macintosh had— free MacWrite and MacPaint software— is missing from the Mac Plus. Both programs are available separately for $125 apiece. System Description Most of the technical details in BYTE's February 1984 description of the original, skinny (128K-byte) Macintosh are still apt descriptors for the Mac Plus. It is a desktop, 7.8336-MHz 68000based microcomputer in a small-footprint case containing a built-in 3Viinch floppy disk drive and a 9-inch diagonal, bit-mapped, monochrome display of 512 by 342 pixels. It doesn't have any expansion slots, and it...

Nos paramos unas páginas más adelante para una rara avis, un anuncio de un ordenador MSX en Estados Unidos:

Anuncio a doble página de un ordenador de Yamaha, en elegante color negro. Se trata de un MSX, como reconocerá un lector español, entre otras cosas, porque hay un cartucho conectado al ordenador. El ordenador tiene un lector de disquetes de 3,5 externo, un ratón, y se puede ver que está conectado a una disquetera. También podemos ver una impresora, imprimiendo una partitura musical

Notará la lectora que MSX solo aparece en el texto del cuerpo del artículo, porque la marca, en Estados Unidos, apenas era reconocida. Nótese también el marcado acento musical, destacando la síntesis FM, el software musical y el soporte de MIDI.

En la sección cosas-que-no-aparecerían-hoy-en-una-revista… ¡curvas de Hilbert!

HILBERT CURVES MADE SIMPLE by Michael Ackerman This one-subroutine BASIC program uses only global variables IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in fractal shapes, you are probably familiar with the Hilbert curve. It was among the first of many wild but "self-similar" shapes that astonished mathematicians around the turn of the century. Hobbyists have discovered the beauty of David Hilbert's creation, and several have written programs to draw it on the high-resolution screens of personal computers. Unfortunately, most of the programs that produce the curve are quite complicated. The demonstration program that comes with the Apple Pascal system contains a procedure that itself contains two more procedures. I had a difficult time following the program's logic. Niklaus Wirth, author of the Pascal and Modula-2 programming languages, includes a Hilbert curve program in his book Algorithms + Data Structures Programs (Prentice-Hall, 1976). While this program is easy to understand, it contains four procedures that call each other again and again. 1 decided that there had to be a simpler way to...

Atención, por cierto, a la firma del artículo: alguien que se estaba licenciando… en historia, claro.

Y, en el apartado quién-ha-escrito-este-artículo… Robert Moog. Sí, ese Robert Moog. Hablando de síntesis digital, claro:

DIGITAL MUSIC SYNTHESIS by Robert A. Moog The many different shapes of the waveform of the present MUSIC IS ONE of the most information-rich (wide-bandwidth) forms of human communication. A compact disk, for instance, uses nearly 1.5 megabits per second to faithfully transmit a stereo recording, as opposed to the several hundred bits per second needed to transmit a written message as fast as you can read it. Only video, the faithful transmission of which requires over 50 megabits per second, has a significantly higher information density. Music is also a highly structured form of human communication. The hierarchy of a piece of music may be as deep as that of the federal bureaucracy: Notes, phrases, lines, sections, and movements are carefully arranged to heighten and clarify the intent of the music. These two general properties of music, wide bandwidth and complex structure, happen to match the information-handling capabilities of today's personal computers. In addition to the personal computer's wide bandwidth (or high speed) and information-organizing and -processing capabilities, you can access a growing list of instruments, accessories, and components designed specifically to produce musical tones in response to high-level digital instructions. These devices owe their existence to rock 'n' roll, the consumerization of digital audio, and dramatic advances in LSI (large-scale integration). They employ a wide variety of sound-producing techniques, each with its own set of features and limitations. This article discusses the general attributes of musical sound and how to produce it, the capabilities of specific sound synthesis techniques, how musicians are using these techniques, and what you can expect the future to bring to digital music. The Properties of Musical Sound Music is an arrangement in time (and, to a lesser but still important extent, in space) of a collection of sonic events generally called notes. This is actually a subjective description of music. We hear individual notes only because our ears and mind pick acoustic information apart into events that we perceive to be distinct. What actually exists outside our ears is an ongoing series of vibrations of the air. The graph of air pressure versus time is the waveform, an unbroken pattern, present even in the quietest of soundproof rooms. The ratio between the height of a sound waveform that you can barely hear and one that is so loud that it begins to hurt is about one to a million. That's about 120 decibels. Music, speech, and other normal sounds occur in the upper 60 dB of your hearing range. You can describe any waveform that tends to repeat as a collection of frequency components, each one of which has a sine waveform. This is the spectrum of a sound. Thus, any sound has two complementary, equivalent representations: its waveform and its spectrum. The waveform is the sound's time-domain representation; the spectrum is its frequency-domain representation. Together they are capable of fully describing a sound. The relation of the waveform to the spectrum is...

Y siguiendo con el tema musical de la revista, algo que ni me sonaba: fractales musicales. Ilustrados (sonificados, mejor, sí) con código en BASIC para el MSX de Yamaha de hace tres capturas. En 1986 lo de los fractales era una cosa tremendamente nueva: el libro de Mandelbrot, The fractal geometry of nature, se había publicado apenas en 1982.

MUSICAL FRACTALS by Charles Dodge and Curtis R. Bahn Mathematical formulas can produce musical as well as graphic fractals FRACTAL GEOMETRY has exerted a strong influence on a remarkable variety of disciplines in recent years. The sciences are using fractal structures to study a diverse range of phenomena from turbulence to bone structure. In the arts, fractal geometry provides computer graphics with unprecedented possibilities for creating a new universe of visual forms, many of which have an astoundingly realistic, natural look. In music, you can employ the same principles to take advantage of a panoply of new relationships. In The Fractal Geometry of Nature (see reference 1), Benoit Mandelbrot is careful to point out that the realistic and natural-appearing fractal graphics are not modeled on photographs of nature; rather, they are graphics of mathematical relationships that come surprisingly close to resembling occurrences in nature. So it is with examples of computer-aided composition. They do not sound like rock, or bebop, or symphonies. Rather, they embody abstract relationships that assume the characteristics of certain kinds of music. There are a number of parallels between computer graphics and computer music. Discussions about fractals and computer graphics usually distinguish between the high-resolution pictures made on powerful institutional computers and those made at home. The same schism exists between highest-quality sound synthesis and home synthesis. This article discusses some of the basic techniques of computer-aided musical composition and includes some programs for generating musical fractals on home computers. [Editor's note: The programs WHITE. BAS, BROWN. BAS. lOVERF.BAS, VARIATN.BAS, and RANDOM. BAS are written in MSX BASIC using MUSIC MACRO commands for the Yamaha CX5-M music computer. Their source code is available for downloading from BYTEnet Listings at (617) 861-9764. They are also available on disk [see page 445). | The output of the software shown in this article is a list of commands for the computer's internal synthesis hardware rather than actual music. Other details can be found in the text box "About the Programs" on page 196. A Longstanding Relationship Since the time of ancient Greece, Western music has embodied propor- tions and abstract numerical relationships. There are many examples. A famous motet of 1436, Nuper Rosarum Flores by Guillaume Dufay, uses the same relations of tempo between its sections as the ratios in size between parts of the Florentine cathedral for whose dedication it was composed. Numerology played a part in certain choices of elements in some of the religious music of |. S. Bach. In our own era, Bela Bartok, the great Hungarian composer and folk music expert, used the Fibonacci numerical series to govern pro...

Sin haberle dado al código en BASIC, no sé yo si se tratará de la cosa más armónica del mundo. Buscando algo más sobre el tema, en 1987, la revista Nature publicaba una carta, Is there such a thing as fractal music? Y una búsqueda rápida en Scholar muestra que se sigue escribiendo sobre el tema.

Y un par de cosillas más de hardware para cerrar. Primero, al Atari ST, que seguía avanzando…

The Atari 520ST by Eric Jensen A good engine for bit-mapped graphics at an attractive price The Atari 520ST is a very appealing machine. It is a good engine for bit-mapped graphics, with a good user interface and an attractive price. Still, the review machine had too many rough edges to serve as my primary machine. It is far from portable. A two-drive system put seven boxes on my tabletop and required four wall outlets. The processor and each disk drive have separate power supplies and the four power switches are inconvenient. I don't like leaving the power supply plugged in while its output is turned off. It draws some power, and I worry that the system will be susceptible to power-line glitches even while turned off. The practical solution seems to be to use a switched outlet box. Hardware The hardware appears clean. The 8-MHz clock rate (a bit faster than either Macintosh's or Amiga's) probably translates to about half a million typical instructions per second. There is no other special display support hardware, and none is needed for windowing applications. The display appears to be properly interleaved with the processor so that they do not have to wait for each other. The display generator is an interesting compromise. For the monochrome display, it fetches a word of data and shifts it out a bit at a time to determine the color for 16 successive pixels. For the color displays, it fetches either two or four words in sequence and shifts out a bit of each to develop a color lookup-table index. Again, there are 16 shift cycles before the next words must be fetched. Thus you have neither the situation in which all the bits describing one pixel are in one word, nor that in which the most significant bits for all pixels are contiguous in memory. As long as this arrangement is hidden under GEM— as it should be for almost all users— this is fine, but there are a couple of cases in which it could be inconvenient. If you were to use multiple planes of memory (with a degenerate color map) to represent multiple overlayed images, then the images would be inconveniently intertwined. If you have to mask out an irregular region in a picture, then you have to know not only the number of words in a scan line but also the spacing between words, which may not be the same in the image and the mask. The 512K bytes of RAM is enough for most programming, although the operating system for the reviewed machine used more than 200K. | Editor's note: The latest production units for the 520ST and 1040ST have TOS in ROM.| In addition, the screen uses at least 32K more. The displays are very crisp and clean, with enough resolution to draw pictures of good quality. The 12-inch screens provide almost twice the area of the 9-inch Macintosh screen. The SMI 24 monochrome monitor provides a 640- by 400-pixel display. This allows 22 lines of 110 characters in the directory font, or 20 lines of 77 in the standard font used in BASIC windows (allowing window borders), which is enough to do a fair job of emulating a dumb terminal. There are about 77 dots to the inch horizontally by 65 vertically, which is fine enough resolution to make the jagged edges of diagonal lines fairly unobtrusive. You can run the SCI 224 color monitor in two modes (640 by 200 pixels with 4 colors or 320 by 200 pixels with 16 colors). The lower resolution mode is the operating system's initial choice. This keeps the aspect ratio of icons the same as on the monochrome monitor and simply doubles their sizes. The jagged edges are noticeable here but not particularly offensive. I was very impressed by the lack of colored "shadow" edges on

…y después, que el viejo hardware se resistía a morir, y como muestra este botón en que se revisan interfaces MIDI… para el Apple II y para el Commodore 64 (🥹).

Four MIDI Interfaces by Roger Powell and Richard Grehan MIDI interfaces for the Commodore 64, IBM PC, Macintosh, and Apple II family Let's assume you have a personal computer and you want to connect it to a MIDIequipped keyboard or other instrument. One of the first things you will need is interface hardware to send your MIDI signals through your computer. The MIDI specification requires a current-loop serial interface operating at 31,2 50 bits per second, so it is going to take something more than just retrofitting an RS-232C port. In this article, we will look at four MIDI interfaces currently available for some of the most popular microcomputers. The TDS-AP for the Apple 11+/ lie and the TDSC-64 for the Commodore 64 are from Syntech Corporation. The MPU-401 for either the IBM PC or the Apple 11 machines is from RolandCorp. The MIDIMAC for the Macintosh or Mac Plus is from Opcode Systems. The interfaces all include at least a high-speed UART with some sort of clock-generation circuitry, a buffered output stage, and an optoisolated input stage. (The MIDIMAC is an exception; it requires no special UART, since the Macintosh's serial ports can operate well above the speed required by MIDI.) However, most of the interfaces we'll look at in this article add extra features such as drum machine trigger signal outputs and tape synchronization inputs and outputs. Of course, if you are an Atari ST owner, you are probably reading this with a bit of smugness, because the Atari ST has built-in MIDI ports. TDS-AP Syntech Corporation's TDS-AP is a MIDI interface on a board that plugs into the Apple II+/IIe. It includes a pair of DIN jacks— one for MIDI in and one for MIDI out— as well as five mini phone jacks: tape in, tape out, foot-switch, clock out and start/stop. The tape-in and tape-out jacks allow for synchronization with a tape deck. If you have a multitrack tape recorder, you connect the tape-out signal to a line-in signal on a track of your tape machine; this track will become the click track. You then program whatever MIDI software you're running to output a sync tone and record this on the click track. Now connect the line-out signal from the click track to the tapein port on the MIDI interface, and the sync tone that you have just recorded becomes the master clock for the system when you begin to record onto the other tracks of your tape recorder. You can opt for some hcmds-off event control by attaching a footswitch to the TDS-AP's footswitch jack. For example, we tested the interface with multitrack recording and sequencer software that enabled us to halt the recording process by pressing the space bar or footswitch. If you have both hands busy on a synthesizer's keyboard, it's much easier to operate a footswitch than an Apple II's space bar. The clock-out and start/stop lines of the interface can be used to drive a drum machine. The clock-out line connects to the clock-in line of the drum machine, and pulses on this line control the machine's tempo. The start/ stop line— just as its name implies— provides trigger signals to begin and halt whatever sequence you have programmed into your drum machine. Of course, you could also use the clock-out and start/stop lines to control a sequencer. The clock-out and start/ stop lines add features that may not be immediately apparent. Not only do they permit you to control drum machines that are not equipped with a MIDI interface, but they provide a direct control path to a drum machine that might otherwise be at the end of a line of daisychained MIDI devices (and would therefore suffer from signal-transmission delays). They also alleviate the problem that arises if you don't have enough MIDI-thru connectors available and are unable to hook the drum machine into the MIDI circuit at all. The TDS-AP's documentation is a small 10-page pamphlet filled mainly with simplistic diagrams showing how to connect the interface to a tape deck, a drum machine, and a sequencer (they presume you already know how to connect the MIDI ports to whatever musical instrument you're using). We were happy to find an elaborate description of the procedure you must go through to create a click track. We rate the documentation as adequate: It provides you with

Pues eso. Hasta aquí nuestro repaso a la historia de la informática de consumo de mediados de los 80. Con un poco de suerte (falta decidir si buena o mala, claro 😬), volvemos en septiembre con más Computer Chronicles.

PS Por cierto, por la más pura casualidad me he encontrado esta entrada de obm de 2008… en la que me leía una revista de 1998. Esto mío viene de largo. A lo ¿mejor? ¿peor? es crónico y todo.