Compute!'s Gazette was the Commodore 8-bit spin-off of Compute!. It covered mainly the Commodore 64 but also the VIC-20, Commodore 128, and Plus 4 / Commodore 16 depending on the time period. It was published for about 12 years in one form or another. The August 1983 issue includes:
Features
Your First Hour With A Computer - Setting up and trying out your new (Commodore) computer.
Should You Join a Users Group? - A short history of user groups and what to look for if a new one is forming in your area.
A Guide to Commodore User Groups - A list of Commodore related user groups around the country and their contact information.
Games
The Viper - A type-in game for the C64 and VIC-20 in which you control a snake to eat and grow but you must avoid running into your tail.
Cylon Zap - A type-in game for the C64 and VIC-20 in which you must defend your space station from kamikaze spaceships.
Reviews
Vanilla Pilot - A PILOT programming implementation for the Commodore 64 and VIC-20.
Kickman - A conversion of the Bally/Midway arcade game of the same name by Commodore for the Commodore 64.
Frogger - An excellent conversion of the Sega arcade game for the Commodore 64 by Sierra On-Line.
Table of Contents from the August 1983 issue of Compute!'s Gazette
Education/Home Applications
Computing for Kids: Build a Computer Friend - Writing a program that talks back.
VIC/64 Mailing List - A type-in program for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 to store mailing list data.
Computing for Grownups: Revolution in the Nursery - The impact of computers in education and of kids teaching adults this new technology.
Programming
Machine Language for Beginners: The Easy Way - Teaching machine language with an example program. The included type-in program for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 is called RAMTest and tests your Random Access Memory.
Hints & Tips: VIC Title Screens - A short type-in program that creates nice title screens on the VIC-20.
Commodore 64 Hi-Res Graphics Made Simple - Adding commands in BASIC to access the Commodore 64's high resolution graphics mode.
The Four-Speed Brake - A type-in program that allows you to control the speed of the output of the LIST command.
Departments
The Editor's Notes - An overview of this month's issue and a look ahead and some of the new things coming out for Commodore computers.
Gazette Feedback - Letters from readers about Commodore 64 and VIC-20 memory locations, assigning functions to function keys, monitors for the VIC-20, using a 1540 drive with a Commodore 64, using two disk drives with the Commodore 64, using standard cassette recorders with the VIC-20 and Commodore 64, and more.
Compute!'s Gazette Author Guide - A guide for submitting articles and programs to Compute!'s Gazette.
Simple Answers to Common Questions - Questions answered about saving programs and disk errors and entering BASIC programs.
HOTWARE: This Month's Best Sellers - A look at the best selling software for the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 in various categories.
Back cover of the August 1983 issue of Compute!'s Gazette
A few weeks ago, I solicited FEE daily readers for their questions about economics. Pretty quickly I got a question I was pretty certain I’d get eventually. It comes from a man named Warren from Chicago who asks:
“what are the levers used by the Federal Reserve Bank to increase or decrease the money supply?
I know it has something to do with interest rates and bank reserves, but how does it actually take place and who receives all the extra money in circulation to cause the inflation?”
There are several channels that the Federal Reserve can use to create money, but I’m going to focus on the two most relevant ones: open market operations and interest on reserves.
'Printing' Money
The first way the Federal Reserve can increase the money supply is by creating more dollars. It’s not as simple as them printing dollar bills then throwing them out of a helicopter, though.
Instead, when the Federal Reserve wants to create money and put it into the system, it does so through banks. Banks hold several types of assets including treasury bonds. Treasury bonds are IOUs that the government issues in exchange for a loan. You buy a bond with cash today and the government promises to pay you back with interest in the future.
Banks like to hold treasury bonds because they’re viewed as low risk—it’s unlikely the US government will default on debt (any time soon at least). Treasury bonds also have the advantage that they’re relatively easy to sell to someone else to get cash. Economists call this ease of converting an asset into money liquidity.
The Federal Reserve offers to buy these bonds from banks. When the Federal Reserve buys bonds, they have an advantage you and I don’t. They are allowed to print new money to buy the bonds. It’s more likely that the money will be digitally created than literally printed, but the form of the money doesn’t make a difference.
The Federal Reserve acquires government bonds and banks acquire newly created money. The process doesn’t stop there, however. Banks don’t generally like to sit on large piles of money because money doesn’t earn interest (unlike the bonds they just sold to the central bank). So what do banks do with their money?
One thing they can do is make more loans to businesses. The increased supply of funds available to lend out means that there will be more loans available for the same number of businesses. Everything else held constant, this means the price of borrowing (the interest rate) will fall.
Banks can also turn around and buy more treasury bonds if they want to replace some of the bonds sold. This higher bond demand means the government will be able to take on more debt to finance its spending.
Economists call this process of the Federal Reserve using newly created money to buy bonds from private banks an open market purchase.
So how much has the Federal Reserve utilized this tool as of late? Look at this graph:
Figure 1: Treasury Securities Balances Held Outright
Since January 2020, The Federal Reserve has increased its treasury securities from $2.3 trillion to around $5.6 trillion today, an increase of around $3.3 trillion.
The Fed Moves into Housing
A more recent move by the Federal Reserve has been to purchase other types of assets as well. Before 2008, the Federal Reserve owned $0 in Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBSs). Today is a different story.
I won’t go into detail about MBSs (you can read more about them here) except to say they’re another type of financial asset banks hold which are a good bit riskier than treasury bonds. Here is a graph showing how Federal Reserve MBS holdings exploded in 2008 (in an attempt to alleviate the housing crisis) and again in 2020 (in an attempt to curb the negative effects of COVID policies).
Figure 2: Mortgage Backed Securities Held Outright
As you can see, the Federal Reserve acquired around $1.3 trillion worth of mortgage backed securities from January 2020 to today.
“[the] $4.2 trillion increase in federal spending over the two [COVID] years was financed entirely by borrowing from the Fed. Fed holdings of financial assets, mostly Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities of federal housing authorities, increased from $4.2 trillion in February 2020 to $8.8 trillion in December 2021.”
So now we understand how the Federal Reserve creates new money, and who it goes to. Banks are the first recipient, and borrowers or those who sell financial assets banks demand (including the government itself) are the second recipients. And as Warren alluded in his question, this policy indirectly influences the interest rate.
Interest on Reserves
There’s one other important tool for how the Federal Reserve can influence the creation of money. It’s a relatively new policy lever called interest on reserve balances (IORB).
To understand how the Federal Reserve impacts the money supply through IORB, you need to have a basic understanding of our banking system.
Let’s say Warren deposits $1,000 in his bank, FEEbank. What happens to the money then? In the United States, it’s unlikely that the money will sit in a vault. Instead, FEEbank will likely try to make a return on that money by lending some of it out to someone else.
So let’s say Jim comes and asks for a loan of $800 from FEEbank. FEEbank lends out $800 of Warren’s $1000. So how much money does Warren have? Well, when the bank lends out your money, your balance doesn’t go down. Warren can still go withdraw his money so long as the bank can give him deposits they’ve kept from other customers.
If everyone came to get their money at once, the bank would run out of money, but so long as that doesn’t happen, FEEbank doesn’t have a problem.
So now Warren has $1,000 and Jim has $800. There is now $1,800 in the economy compared to $1,000 before. FEEbank created more money!
The process doesn’t even have to end there. Jim can deposit the $800 in another bank, which can lend out a portion to someone else.
This system of banking is called fractional reserve banking because banks only keep a fraction of your deposits as reserves, and they loan out the rest.
So private banks in this system can create money by lending deposits, but what does this have to do with the Federal Reserve?
In 2008, the Federal Reserve adopted a policy of paying banks interest for the money they kept in reserves. So, instead of FEEbank loaning out Warren’s money, the Federal Reserve could offer to pay FEEbank to keep the money in the vault.
The higher the interest the Federal Reserve offers to pay FEEBank, the less likely it is to lend out the money. Why make a risky loan at a 3.5% interest rate if the Federal Reserve will pay you 3.5% for keeping it in the vault? The Federal Reserve is essentially paying banks to not make loans.
Notice, too, this also allows the Federal Reserve to more directly control the interest rate. If the Federal Reserve wants loans to have a 4% interest rate, all the agency has to do is promise to pay 3.9% IORB to not make the loan. In that case, a private borrower would have to offer at least 4% to beat the Federal Reserve.
So if the Federal Reserve wants banks to lend more of their deposits thereby creating more money, all they need to do is lower the IORB. And that’s exactly what they did during COVID.
This policy made it relatively more lucrative for banks to increase lending and, everything else held constant, when the benefits of an action goes up, people will do more of that action.
The result of these policies has been a large increase in the supply of money. Economists measure what counts as money a few different ways, but one of the most commonly used and accepted measures is called M2.
From January 2020 to January 2022, the M2 money supply increased from $15.4 trillion to $21.6 trillion.
That’s a 40% increase in the money supply— unprecedented in recent US history.
Figure 3: M2 Money Supply
More Money, More Problems
As I’ve explained since May of last year, this increase in money supply inevitably led to higher prices across the board (aka inflation). FEE’s Dan Sanchez has explained this in depth as well.
Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve seems to have printed itself into a corner.
Utilizing open market purchases and lowering IORB may have propped up the economy by stimulating lending and investment in 2020, but the chickens are coming to roost. At this point, if the Federal Reserve wants to use its levers to bring inflation down, it’s going to do so by hurting investment opportunities.
As of this month, the IORB has been raised to 3.15%. This means less funds will be available to borrowers. Whether we’re in a technical recession or not right now, it seems unlikely to me the Federal Reserve will be able to bring inflation down without allowing an economic correction to take place.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Printing dollars does not mean there are more sandwiches to go around. And although the Federal Reserve can affect the economy with their levers, they cannot print prosperity.
Peter Jacobsen teaches economics and holds the position of Gwartney Professor of Economics. He received his graduate education at George Mason University.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
This set features various photos of people. While not labeled or dated, they were probably all taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
Ryan Crownholm is a self-described “serial entrepreneur” and the founder of a California-based business called MySitePlan.com. Founded in 2013, the business creates unofficial “site plans” for various clients using publicly available imagery. Hotels and resorts will sometimes use the plans as maps for their guests. Homeowners and contractors often use the plans in their permit applications when they are preparing to make minor changes to a property, such as building a shed or removing a tree.
Over the years, MySitePlan.com has built a strong reputation for itself, and customers are consistently impressed with the quality of the work and the short turn-around times (often within 24 hours).
“I had the first draft within 8 hours and they made changes to accommodate what the city needed. Good service!” writes one recent reviewer. “Amazing service! So incredibly quick! I will recommend this company to anyone in need of a site plan,” writes another.
Crownholm and his customers are certainly happy the business has been successful, but it seems not everyone feels this way. In December 2021, Crownholm was given a citation from the California Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists. The order demanded that he “cease and desist from violating” the law and pay a fine of $1,000.
What was Crownholm’s crime? According to the Board, Crownholm and his company were illegally practicing land surveying without a license. In the Board’s view, “preparing site plans which depict the location of property lines, fixed works, and the geographical relationship thereto falls within the definition of land surveying,” and thus requires a license.
It’s worth noting that MySitePlan.com never claimed to create official land surveys by licensed surveyors. In fact, a banner at the top of their website plainly states, “This is not a legal survey, nor is it intended to be or replace one.”
Now, it’s tempting to say Crownholm should just get a license and move on, but it’s not that simple. Obtaining a land surveying license is an arduous process. In the state of California it requires six years of higher education and practical experience, passing four exams, and earning references from four existing licensees.
So rather than getting a license or shutting down his business, Crownholm has chosen to take the Board to court. On September 29, Crownholm joined with the Institute for Justice to file a federal lawsuit against the Board, claiming that the regulation violates his First Amendment right to free speech.
“California regulators are strangling entrepreneurs, like me, with red tape even though customers are pleased with the valuable services we provide,” Crownholm said. “Prosecuting my company hurts homeowners, contractors, landscapers, farmers, wedding venues and others who depend on my service.”
“California’s regulations go far beyond what other surveying regulators think is appropriate,” said Institute for Justice Attorney Mike Greenberg. “This is yet another example of an established industry using the government to shut down popular, innovative competition. If read literally, California’s laws could harm services everyday people use such as Uber and Google Maps. It would even criminalize drawing a makeshift map on a napkin to help a lost tourist find the way to their destination.”
Image Credit: Institute for Justice
A Mysterious Motive
The question on everyone’s mind, of course, is why? Why would this regulatory board go after an entrepreneur when he’s clearly not in the business of official land surveying?
The simplest explanation is that they’re just really eager to enforce the law to the letter. That seems to be the argument they’re going with. But if that’s the case, why don’t they also crack down on the homeowners and contractors who regularly make identical site plan drawings? As the Institute for Justice press release notes, “California’s own building departments teach [unlicensed] homeowners and contractors how to make the exact same drawings Ryan makes.”
So if litigiousness is the goal, why single out MySitePlan.com?
Perhaps they think he’s taking safety shortcuts, but that makes no sense. There’s nothing dangerous about what he’s doing. Maybe they’re concerned he’s a fraud, and that the quality of his product doesn’t match what he promises? It’s possible, but a quick glance at his glowing reviews ought to set the record straight on that. Maybe they think he’s misrepresenting himself, pretending to have a license when he really doesn’t? Again, that makes no sense. He’s very explicit on the website that he doesn’t do official land surveys.
Perhaps they just think it’s unfair that everyone else has to go through an arduous licensing process while he gets to avoid it despite doing very similar work. That would be understandable, but if it was really just about fairness, wouldn’t it make more sense to push for scrapping the burdens on everyone else rather than imposing those burdens on him?
None of these motives make much sense.
There’s another possible motive, however, and that’s the malicious one. Perhaps the regulators were simply looking to protect licensed surveyors from competition. After all, less competition means higher prices and more business for those who have jumped through the hoops. I’m sure many licensed surveyors weren’t particularly happy to see MySitePlan.com taking away potential clients.
Even assuming the absolute best of intentions, one must admit the decreased competition would be at the very least a convenient side-benefit for the established special-interests.
Oh, and did I mention that the the guy who issued the citation—Richard B. Moore, the Board’s Executive Officer—is himself a licensed land surveyor?
Bootleggers and Baptists
This isn’t the first time entrepreneurs have been impeded by these kinds of regulations. Occupational licensing requirements like this are ubiquitous, not just for doctors and engineers, but also for jobs that have little to do with safety like hair braiding.
Every industry has a similar story. Decades ago there was an accident, maybe a series of accidents, or some fraudulent practitioner. As a result, people pressured the government to “do something,” and the government responded by creating a licensing scheme.
The thinking is pretty straightforward. We make it illegal for someone to practice a trade unless they have a government-approved license, and the government only gives licenses to people who can prove they are trustworthy and capable. Ostensibly, the system protects consumers. But that’s just the official narrative.
Whether by design or by accident, licensing laws also have the effect of limiting competition, resulting in higher prices and fewer options for consumers.
I say “by design or by accident” because it isn’t always clear what the intentions were of the people who promoted these schemes. Though it’s nice to think they were all motivated by an altruistic desire to help consumers, it’s more realistic to see this as a classic “Bootlegger and Baptist” alliance—a phrase that was coined by economist Bruce Yandle in a 1983 paper in reference to the Prohibition era.
The “Baptists” are the true believers. They are motivated, in their desire for government regulation, by genuine—though often misguided—concern for consumers. The “Bootleggers” are the special-interest groups who stand to benefit should these laws pass. The strategy of the Bootlegger is simple and surprisingly effective: simply paint yourself as a Baptist and push for the regulations with altruistic arguments, even though your real goal is to hurt your competitors.
“A carefully constructed regulation can accomplish all kinds of anticompetitive goals,” Yandle wrote, “while giving the citizenry the impression that the only goal is to serve the public interest.”
In 2014, Yandle expanded on his theory in a book titled Bootleggers and Baptists that he co-authored with his grandson Adam Smith (not to be confused with the original Adam Smith). In a review of the book, economist Art Carden summarized the theory rather succinctly.
“Public policies…emerge because a moral constituency (the Baptists) and a financial constituency (the bootleggers) come together in support of the same policies,” Carden wrote.
Quoting the book, Carden notes that special interests looking to pass anti-competitive regulations often seek out “a respectable public-spirited group seeking the same result [in order to] wrap a self-interested lobbying effort in a cloak of respectability.”
Carden goes on to identify occupational licensing in particular as a good example of the Bootleggers and Baptists theory playing out in real life.
The Case against Occupational Licensing
While the drawbacks of occupational licensing laws are difficult to deny, some may still have reservations about abolishing them. If we let just anyone practice these professions, wouldn’t there be a proliferation of fraudulent and dangerous practitioners? Isn’t that why these laws were needed in the first place, to protect us from the evidently disastrous results of free markets?
This is a common line of argumentation, but it’s missing some key nuances. First, it’s important to keep in mind that the mental picture many have of the pre-license market is likely distorted. The special-interest groups pushing for these laws have a strong incentive to exaggerate how bad things used to be; it would be naive to simply take them at their word.
Further, it’s important to remember that people were much poorer back when these laws were first introduced, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the general standard of living—including the quality and safety of services available on the market—was far lower than it is today. The fact that “things used to be bad” is much more a reflection of our ancestors’ relative poverty than an indictment of unregulated markets.
For another point, clearly it’s tragic when people get injured or killed because of incompetent workers, but there is always a trade-off between cost and safety. Sometimes people prefer slightly less safe options (such as workers with less training) because those options are cheaper. And if that’s a risk they want to take, we’re only making them worse-off by taking that option away.
The other thing to consider is that businesses that are downright dangerous or fraudulent get weeded out very quickly. As a business owner, if you don’t provide a reasonable level of quality and safety in your products, you’ll be out of business in no time. Since entrepreneurs know this, they have a strong incentive to avoid hiring dangerous and fraudulent workers. Economists call this the discipline of continuous dealings. This, not licensing, is the reason we can trust most of the businesses we patronize.
Besides, there are plenty of ways to ensure product safety and quality that don’t involve licensing laws. Workers can get voluntary certifications and consumers can look at reviews to help them decide who they can trust. Just think about MySitePlan.com and their reviews we saw earlier. Did you really need them to have a license to know they were a trustworthy business?
What Consumers Really Need
Though government licensing may seem like a good way to protect consumers, the reality is that these schemes unnecessarily restrict competition, with fewer options and higher prices being the inevitable result. In other words, they mostly end up hurting the very consumers they were supposed to help.
The best way to help consumers is to give them lots of choices and a rigorously competitive market. And the way to achieve that is not by protecting established special interests from new players. It’s by letting the Ryan Crownholms of the world compete.
This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Clickhereto sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.
Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
The first photo shows some flowers growing by a house. The next shows a beach. These aren't labeled or dated so it is hard to say where they were taken. It could be a Florida beach. The last two photos look like they were taken on a bay somehwere. Possibly Florida as well. If so, the water level looks high. Maybe an approaching (or recent) hurricane? While not dated, based on the slides themselves and dates of those they are with, these were probably taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
PC World was one of the most popular PC magazines for many years. Like most other computer print magazines, this one ceased publication quite some time ago. The July 1989 issue includes:PC World was one of the most popular PC magazines for many years. Like most other computer print magazines, this one ceased publication quite some time ago. The July 1989 issue includes:
Previews
Pascal Gets Two Object Lessons - Pascal was a popular structured programming language at one point that offered a sort of middle ground between BASIC and C. This article compares Borland's Turbo Pascal 5.5 with Microsoft's QuickPascal.
Reviews
Advanced Word Processors - Familiar Faces, New Features - A comparison of several word processors, including DisplayWrite 4 version 2, Microsoft Word 4.0, MultiMate Advantage II 1.0, Somna Word IV 2.0, WordPerfect 5.0, WordStar Professional 5.0, and XyWrite III Plus 3.54. Microsoft Word and WordPerfect come out on top.
The Best in Forms Software - A comparison of software specializing in creating forms. Products reviewed include FormFiller 2.0, FormSet 1.0, Horizon 1.1, JetForm 1.01, and Perform 1.0.
Data Base Powerhouses Strike a Balance - A comparison of the top four database managers, including DataEase 4.0, dBASE IV 1.0, Paradox 3.0, and R:base for DOS 2.11.
Net Gains in Multiuser Accounting - A review and comparison of seven multiuser accounting packages, including Accpac Plus, Great Plains, Harmony, M.A.S. 90, RealWorld, SBT, and Solomon III.
Table of Contents from the July 1989 issue of PC World
News
Top of the News - Microsoft introduces the PS/2 Model P70 portable computer featuring a 20 MHz 386, 4 MB of RAM, microchannel architecture, a 60 MB hard drive and more for $7695. Also introduced by IBM is the PS/2 Model 55 SX desktop; featuring a 386 SX, 2 MB of RAM, a 30 MB hard drive and more for $3895; Microsoft and Borland introduce new versions of their Pascal software; Quarterdeck awarded patent for displaying windows on screen; Integrated Information Technology introduce Intel compatible math coprocessors; and more.
Industry Outlook - SQL data base servers coming; Zenith sales increase fueled by laptop success; a look at the upcoming i486 processor; IBM and Intel push multimedia with Digital Video Interactive (DVI); and more.
Product Outlook - A look at new and upcoming products, including the Zenith Z-386/25 PC, Solomon III based Profitwise Basic Accounting software, DaynaNet PC and Mac networking solution, Arriba personal information manager, ProCollection and Type Director font software, Mannesmann Tally MT81 and MT905 printers, PrintRite print queue, Laser-Ready templates, Up Your Cash Flow spreadsheet, AutoImport data conversion software, and Network Eye remote control software.
Perspectives
Richard Landry - Designing software for small businesses.
Letters - Letters from readers about avoiding copy protected software, standards, PS/2 problems, SideKick, the Mitsubishi MP 286L laptop vs. the Zenith SupersPort 286, and more.
Table of Contents from the July 1989 issue of PC World (continued)
Features
Buyers' Guide: 38 Tools for Great Writing - A look at various tools that enhance word processors to help the writer. Included is software to help make outlines, reference software (dictionaries, thesaurus, etc.), spell and grammar checkers, group writing tools, file conversion utilities and much more.
Second Look: Hard Disk Utilities Revisited - Tools for taking care of you hard drive and diagnosing and fixing issues, including Disk Technical Advanced 3.0, HTest/HFormat 2.0, Mace Gold, Norton Utilities Advanced 4.5, PC Tools Deluxe 5, and SpinRite 1.2.
Departments
In This Issue - An overview of the current issue.
The Help Screen - Questions answered about passwords, using a Tandy 1000SX in Germany, DOS 4.01 on an IBM PS/2 Model 60, using hard drives in old PCs, and more.
Windows Journal - A look at things missing from Windows.
Consumer Watch - Misleading pricing by The New PC Network, complaints about Fast Micro, Toshiba T1200 problems, and more.
With inflation hitting Americans at the highest level in forty years, the debate over price controls, a policy tool long considered defunct, seems to be reigniting. As prices surge, many prominent economists including Robert Reich, the former US Secretary of Labor, and Todd Tucker, Director of Industrial Policy and Trade at the Roosevelt Institute, have recently come out in favor of government-imposed price controls.
Even the UK’s new conservative prime minister, Liz Truss, announced a plan to fight inflation by capping household energy prices.
Regardless of whom you blame for the inflation, there could not be a worse way of fighting it than with interventionist price-control measures. As any Econ 101 student could tell you, prices naturally settle at the point where supply meets demand in a market economy. But when the government imposes an artificial cap on prices, supply declines and demand increases, creating a shortage. After all, companies are less inclined to create and distribute products if they can’t get a good price for them. In a survey of forty-one academic economists recently conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, sixty-one percent said that price controls like those imposed in the 1970s would fail to “successfully reduce U.S. inflation over the next twelve months.” Just 23 percent of those who responded said price controls could reduce inflation (and all reported lower levels of confidence in their prediction).
For older Americans, the price control debate is nothing new. In August of 1971, President Richard Nixon announced a 90-day freeze on most wages, prices, and rents. It was a short-sighted attempt to combat the rise of consumer prices that had reached their fastest pace since the Korean War. Following Nixon’s announcement, markets rallied, and seventy percent of Americans backed the plan in polls. However, Nobel-Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman predicted Nixon’s plan would end “in utter failure and the emergence into the open of the suppressed inflation.” As predicted, prices soared as soon as controls were lifted, exposing the frailty of government interference with pricing.
Among the many bizarre and tragic consequences of Nixon’s price controls was the appalling specter of farmers drowning millions of baby chicks (or gassing them).
As the price for chickens was controlled, but the price of the grain used to feed them was not, they could no longer be sold profitably. Sadly, this meant that the only way for the farmers to avoid losses was to kill them. This is but one example of the unintended consequences of excessive government intervention that prevents market forces from operating.
When left to their own devices, prices tell us vital information about our economy. They pinpoint scarce resources, indicate consumers’ wants, and drive entrepreneurship and innovation. But when the government attempts to cap prices to “protect” consumers, this information becomes distorted.
On an emotional level, the impulse for price controls is understandable. It’s easy to look at your surging gas station or grocery store bill and long for the temporary relief that lower prices would bring. However, avoiding this misguided extreme will allow for a much clearer picture of the state of our economy moving forward and allow us to focus on responses that will actually bring down inflation.
Aadi Golchha is an economic commentator and writer, proudly advocating for the principles of free enterprise. He is also the host of The Economics Review podcast.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
Compute was a popular multi-format magazine published throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. It was oriented towards the home user and covered the popular computers of the day. The December 1983 issue includes:
Features
The Home Office - How computers can be used to do your job at home.
The Christmas of the Computer? - Christmas 1983 was expected to be a huge year for the home computer industry. In 1983 Coleco introduced the Adam (which failed miserably), Atari introduced the 600XL and 800XL along with a few other models that ended up being cancelled, Commodore slashed prices on the VIC-20 and Commodore 64, the first rumors of the PCJr appear, among others.
Calorie Cop - A type-in program for the Apple II, VIC-20, Commodore 64, TI-99/4A and Color Computer that calculates your calorie output based on activity and other inputs.
Paycheck Analysis - This type-in program for the VIC-20, Commodore 64, PET, Atari 8-bit, TI-99/4A, Apple II, Color Computer and Timex/Sinclair will analyze your paycheck for accuracy and project future take-home pay based on a variety of variables including base salary, cost of living, overtime, various deductions and more.
Education and Recreation
Nightflyer - A type-in game for the Atari 8-bit and Apple II that simulates landing a plane at night.
Space Thief - A type-in two-player game for the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 in which you must smuggle energy pods from your opponent.
Chopperoids - A type-in game for the Atari 8-bit that is sort of a cross between Asteroids and Choplifter.
Reviews
Millionaire - A stock market simulation game for the Atari 400/800, Commodore 64, Apple II and other computers.
The Witness - Another interactive fiction title from Infocom for a wide variety of computers, this one featuring a murder mystery.
MAC/64 - An improved macro assembler for Atari 8-bit computers
Stellar Triumph - A two-player space combat game for the Commodore 64. A bit like asteroids but with two players and without the asteroids. However, the game is very configurable with the ability to change the amount of fule, whether or not the ships have intertia, gravity, and a variety of other parameters.
Table of Contents from the December 1983 issue of Compute!
Columns and Departments
The Editor's Notes - A look at the competition in the computer market in the upcoming year.
Readers' Feedback - Letters from readers about disks, cassettes and temperature tolerances; a shortage of 1541 disk drives for the Commodore 64; viewing 1541 disk drive ROM; Atari XL features; dual joysticks on the TI-99/4A, Atari disk drive RAM requirements; and much more.
Computers and Society: High Tech, High Touch, and 1984 - An interesting perspective on the year 1984 and George Orwell's 1984.
The Beginner's Page: Zones of Unpredictability, Part 2 - Part two of a series on random numbers.
The World Inside the Computer: Winnie the Pooh's Alphabet Adventures - A 4-year old's adventure with a new computer. A pretty detailed look at the NEC Trek/PC-6001A computer and the Disney software available for it.
Learning with Computers - An overview of the book Learning with Logo.
On the Road with Fed D'Ignazio: The Electronic Chalkboards: The BBC and the PowerPad - A look at the BBC computer, particularly for education use. The BBC never really had success in the U.S. Also, a look at the PowerPad which was a large tablet input device that could be used as a touch pad, art tool, or even as a reconfigurable keyboard with overlays.
Friends of the Turtle: A Turtle Resource Update - A look at some of the books and other resources available for Logo and Turtle graphics.
The Journal
SuperBASIC 64 - A type-in program to add 37 new commands to the Commodore 64's built-in BASIC.
List and Scroll for the VIC and 64 - A type-in utility program that formats listings of BASIC programs, e.g. makes each statement appear on a separate line, indents FOR-NEXT and IF-THEN statements, etc.
Commodore Files for Beginners, Part 2 - Part two of a series of articles on files for the Commodore 64. This part covers creating files programatically, checking for errors, reading files programatically, and more.
Art Museum - A Commodore 64 and VIC-20 type-in program that lets you create and save art created with the special graphics characters that are part of the character set and are printed on the keys.
Bitmap Graphics on the 64 - A tutorial on bitmap graphics for the Commodore 64, including how such graphics are mapped in memory.
Atari Screenbyter - A graphics utility that lets you create screen displays in a variety of graphics modes.
Disk Explorer for Commodore - A type-in program that allows you to display a disassembly of the 1541's machine language instructions as well as a hex dump of the RAM and ROM.
The Hidden Pitfalls of Computer Arithmetic - A look at how you can get "wrong" results, including things like rounding errors.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.
The first two photos in this set are not labeled or dated but were probably taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s and appear to be part of some kind of camping trip on a lake or river. The second two photos are from a wedding in the 1950s and were processed in February 1958.
The Gift - processed February 1958
Bride + Father - processed February 1958
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.
