Lmst

Both Willow and #USVideo advertise their products as if reasonably knowledgeable people who aren't computer experts can use them. We make no doubt at all that this is true, but it's not simple. It’s going to take time. As Roberta says, before you can #genlock, you have to understand what genlocking is all about; and you only think you know that.

First came the# Willow manual: she reports that in 12 pages of text, there was not one single sentence that she understood, Part of it is the terminology, but some of it is the English: she’s not at all sure some of the sentences actually say what Willow thinks they say. The USVideo manual wasn’t a lot better. (j p) #Byte #ByteMagazine #Anno1990

But I'll break this off at Koko’s behest. #Koko (born 1971, with a potential span of more than 50 years) is the world’s most studied gorilla, and bids fair to be its most pampered Mac user.

She has an American Sign Language vocabulary of over 600 words. The pet of the #GorillaFoundation, she uses “a standard #MacII enclosed in a special gorilla-proof housing,” constructed of ½-inch polycarbonate for bolting to the floor of her trailer.

Apple's #Vivarium Program has even designed a customized inch-thick touchscreen “to withstand, the 2,000 pounds of force an excited gorilla can potentially generate.”

The problem, you see, is that angry or excited gorillas tend to “run full speed and backhand the object of anger,” and Koko's arm-swing is comparable to “a 10-pound shotput traveling at 100 miles per hour.” No wonder Project Koko helped the team to “a better understanding of human-computer interfaces.”

Some users do get _mad_. (h k) #Byte #ByteMagazine #Anno1990

The standard #IBM operating system #MVS (for Multiple Virtual Storage), was cranky and primitive. While you could run it from a terminal, a lengthy session with MVS might leave _you_ feeling like a punched card. (t y) #Byte #ByteMagazine #Anno1990

However, this study has also revealed how difficult it still is, even with state-of-the-art object-oriented technologies, to design and build components that are both useful and genuinely reusable, to, document their interfaces so that consumers can understand them, to, port them to an unceasing torrent of new hardware platforms, to ensure that recent enhancements or ports haven't violated some preexisting interface, and to market them to a culture whose value system, like that of the colonial gunsmith, encourages building everything from first principles to avoid, relying on somebody else's work. (b j c) #Byte #ByteMagazine #Anno1990

The bad news is that some of DR DOS 5.0 is written in C; and the primary programming is being done in England. I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location. (j p) #DigitalResearch #Byte #ByteMagazine #Anno1990

As early as 1946, #ArthurKoestler said that the sufficient condition for the destruction of totalitarian Communism would be the free exchange of ideas in the Soviet Empire. Distributed computing power automatically brings the free exchange of ideas. The small computer is the ultimate in samizdat (self-publishing) capability. It is literally impossible to prevent people with small computers from communicating with each other, nor is it possible to censor what kinds of informatiion they exchange. (j p) #Byte #ByteMagazine #Anno1990

Incidentally, their high profits were disclosed when one of the partners loyally paid his Party dues from his earnings, writing a check for 92,000 rubles to an institution that paid him 130 rubles a month... (j p) #Byte #ByteMagazine #Anno1990 #Moscow

Repórter Retro 119

https://retropolis.com.br/2025/10/22/reporter-retro-119/

#ReprterRetro #8BitGuy #AcessoRemoto #AdrianBlack #AMD #AppleII #Arcade #Archie #ArsTechnica #AtariPortfolio #AtariSt #Brasil #ByteMagazine #Commodore128 #CP400 #CP500 #Cyberdeck #DartmouthCollege #DEC #DiegoRetroGames #Embratel #epcom #expert #ExplainingComputers #FeiraInternacionalDeInformtica #fliperama #FranklinAce #gradiente #Hackaday #Homebrew #hotbit #IBM #IBM5100Portable #internet #Laptop #Linux #MesopGames

Until the problem is attacked at that level, international users will be forced to make do with ad hoc solutions. Not that we need more standards; the existence of YAT (Yet Another Standard) would only make the problem worse. We just need to change our mindset from "I can do it better" to "We can do it together." (b s) #Internationalization #Unicode #Byte #ByteMagazine #Anno1990

The first attempts to solve this problem have involved huge, specially designed keyboards with hundreds of keys. Some early designs came from Multitech, a multinational high-tech company headquartered in West-Germany. In 1987, Multitech changed its name to Acer and moved its headquarters to Taipei, Taiwan. Suddenly, finding ways to make Chinese computing easier became a necessity! (b s) #Byte #ByteMagazine #Anno1990 #Acer

Verzögerungsleitung, mal ganz ohne Quecksilber. #Byte #ByteMagazine #Anno1990

Figure from a Byte article, showing "a proposed serial memory system", sending data by laser to the moon, and loop the reflected result.

"Figure 2: a modulated laser beam uses space as a recording medium, obtaining very high data rates in a volatile memory"

And once you've centered your attention on that Multiplan Life game, lo, "spreadsheet" has receded to the status of metaphor. You next realize that in buying Multiplan software, you acquired a way to think about manipulating symbols in space, never mind what its designers thought it was "for". (h k) #Byte #ByteMagazine #Anno1989

The OED contains close to 540 megabytes of text and tagging information. (e g) #Byte #ByteMagazine #OxfordEnglishDictionary #Anno1989

Somebody built a searchable and browsable BYTE magazine archive with all single pages on one single web page. I think, this is a very nice way of visualising a magazine archive. Enjoy: https://byte.tsundoku.io
#vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #bytemagazine #byte