Byte (October 1983)

Byte (October 1983)

Byte was probably the best general computer magazine of its time. It had a long publishing run starting in the 1970s and continuing into the 1990s. This issue is from October 1983 and includes:

Cover Story

• Product Preview: The HP 150 - The HP-150 somewhat unique machine. It ran MS-DOS but was not PC compatible. It was also one of the first computers with a touch screen (though it was optional). It was fairly powerful for its time. It used an 8088 CPU but it ran at 8 MHz instead of the 4.77 MHz of the IBM PC.


• An Interview: The HP 150's Design-team Leaders - An interview with Jim Sutton and John Lee, the leaders of the design team for the HP 150.

Columns

• Build the Micro D-Cam Solid-State Video Camera, Part 2 - The second part of a series on building a digital camera. This part covers serial interfaces for the Apple II and IBM PC and software for the Apple II.


• BYTE West Coast: Shaping Consumer Software - Trip Hawkins of Electronic Arts talks about how he judges software and the programmer as an artist.
• User's Column: New Computers, Boards, Languages and Other Tidbits - Items covered include Modula-2/86, Problem Knowledge Coupler (medical software), Kaypro 4, Osborne Executive, and more.

_{Table of Contents from the October 1983 issue of Byte}

Themes

• The Unix Operating System - An overview of the Unix operating system.


• The Unix Tutorial, Part 3: Unix in the Microcomputer Marketplace - A look at licensed Unix OS versions as well as look-alikes and work-alikes (Linux would fall under this category though that wouldn't exist for nearly another decade).


• Unix and the Standardization of Small Computer Systems - A look at the history of Unix and how it helped to standardize software and hardware of "small systems" (i.e. workstation and mini-computers).


• A Tour Through the Unix File System - A tutorial on the Unix file system.


• The Unix Shell - A look at both the command interpreter and programming capabilities of the Unix shell.


• Unix as an Application Environment - A look at how Unix compares to other operating systems in terms of development tools and end user applications.

Reviews

• The NEC Advanced Personal Computer - This machine was designed to run CPM/86 so essentially this is a 16-bit CP/M machine with 128K RAM and two 8-inch floppy drives. I don't know if it was clear at the time but CP/M would shortly disappear from the market in favor if PC compatibles. The 8-inch disk format wouldn't really be around much longer either.


_{Review of the TRS-80 Model 4}
• Radio Shack's TRS-80 Model 4 - My high school was still using TRS-80 Model IIIs and 4s to teach BASIC programming at least through the early 1990s. These machines were Z80 based and had their own DOS. The Model 4 could also run CP/M software. With two 5.25" floppy disk drives and 128K of RAM a Model 4 cost about $3000.


• The Morrow Micro Decision - The Osbourne 1 and Kaypro II were considered to be the main competition for the Morrow Micro Decision. It is a Z80 based CP/M computer with 64K of RAM and 5.25" floppy drive that starts at $1200.


• The Microneye - A digital camera with a 256x128 sensor that could interface with various computers via an RS-232 Interface. It worked at least with the Apple II, IBM PC, Commodore 64, and Color Computer.


• The M68000 Educational Computer Board - A single board computer with a 4 MHz 68000 CPU, 32K RAM, and various ports and interfaces for $495. This board fits in a Heathkit H-19 terminal.

Features

• Photographics Animation of Microcomputer Graphics - A technique for generating stop motion animation using a computer to generate the images and a video camera.


• The Fourth National Computer Graphics Association Conference - A look at the latest graphics hardware and software.


• Echonet, Part 2: The Compiler - Part two of a multipart series on Echonet, a programming language/system. This part covers the compiler.


• Computer Crime: A Growing Threat - This article looks at real-life computer crimes and some of the requirements for a secure system. Most crimes at this point involved unauthorized access. A comparison is drawn between the fictional War Games (great movie) and a real-life incident several months before that movie was released in which several teenagers gaines access to the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.


• Mainframe Graphics on a Microcomputer - Techniques for saving mainframe graphical output via a terminal program and converting them for display on your home computer...assuming you have high resolution graphics capabilities.

_{Table of Contents from the October 1983 issue of Byte (continued)}

Nucleus

• Editorial: A Challenge to Education - Radio Shack's "America's Educational Challenge" initiative.


• MICROBYTES - The latest news including the first 256K DRAM chips, memory and other componenet shortages, Telelearning electronic university, Texas Instruments and Times reduce prices on their computers, Interland announces a $400 per device Ethernet link, and more.


• Letters - Letters from readers about Word Tools for the IBM PC, double-spacing with Wordstar, searching in Wordstar, and more.


• User to User - Questions answered about copy protection and privacy, cache RAM, public key encryption, and more.


• Ask BYTE - Questions answered about joysticks for the PC, Apple disks, sharing a color monitor with multiple systems, developing games for the Atari 2600, and more.

_{Back cover of the October 1983 issue of Byte}

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Tips & Tricks (Spring 1994)

Tips & Tricks (Spring 1994)

I suppose the Tips & Tricks was the closest thing to a successor to VideoGames & Computer Entertainment that there was. Many of the same people were involved. However, while VG&CE was my favorite magazine while it was still around, I don't think I ever bought an issue of Tips & Trick. While I sometimes enjoyed that type of content, my main interest was in news and reviews type stuff. This is the premiere issue of Tips & Tricks from Spring 1994 and it includes:

Strategy

• General Chaos - A squad based overhead action game from Electronic Arts for the Sega Genesis.


• Double Switch - A full motion video game from Sega for the Sega CD that is along the lines of Night Trap.


• Mortal Komba - Mortal Kombat debuts on home systems for the Super NES, Genesis, Game Boy and Game Gear. This guide helps with all of them.


• Mortal Kombat II - Some tips and tricks for the Mortal Kombat II arcade game.

_{Table of Contents from the Spring 1994 issue of Tips & Tricks}

Departments

• Power Up! - An introduction to a brand new magazine along with a glossary of terms including tip, trick, easter egg, bug, combo, and boss.


• Readers' Tips - Tips from readers for Clay Fighter (Super NES) and Street Fighter II Turbo (SNES).

_{Table of Contents from the Spring 1994 issue of Tips & Tricks (continued)}

Tips

• Genesis Tips - Tips for Battletoads/Double Dragon, Micro Machines, Pink Goes to Hollywood, Flash Back, Mortal Kombat, Aladdin, Sunset Riders, Jungle Strike, Shinobi III, and Ecco the Dolphin.
  
• Sega CD Tips - Tips for Stellar-Fire, Double Switch, Microcosm, The Terminator, and Sonic CD.


• Super NES Tips - Tips for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters, Battletoads / Double Dragon, Super Nova, Pink Goes to Hollywood, Battlemaniacs, Cacoma Knight, Tom & Jerry, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, WWF Royal Rumble, and Taz-Mania.


• Jaguar Tips - Tips for Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy.


• NES Tips - Tips for Battletoads / Double Dragon and Batman Returns.

_{Back cover of the Spring 1994 issue of Tips & Tricks}

Read more: https://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress/index.php/2023/12/25/tips-tricks-spring-1994/

Compute!’s Gazette (November 1987)

Compute!’s Gazette (November 1987)

There were a few big Commodore 64 related magazines in the U.S. Compute!'s Gazette was one of them. For whatever reason, it's not one that I saw at the stores I normally went to for such things (for me it was RUN and Commodore Magazine I saw frequently). However, Compute!'s Gazette was a long running magazine that was published well into the 1990s. The November 1987 issue would have been out near the height of the popularity of the Commodore 64. This issue includes:

Features

• Computers at Work - Examples of how people use there Commodore 64s and Commodore 128s in the real world. Examples here include publishing periodicals, monitoring log production for log homes, farm management, running an antique business, managing a thoroughbred horse boarding and training farm, customer database for a water filtration equipment company, and more.

Reviews

• Lt. Kernal Hard Disk Drives - Hard drives were expensive luxuries in for the Commodore 64/128. The Lt. Kernal was one of the more popular options and included an external 20 MB drive for $900. Hard drives on Commodore 8-bit computers seem to have been used mostly by BBS operators.


• Jeremy Silman's Guide to Chess Openings and 50 Classic Chess Games - A computerized chess tutorial system focusing on opening moves plus an analysis of 50 chess games from the past.


• Maniac Mansion - One of the best point and click adventure games for the Commodore 64...or any system.

Games

• Litterbug - A type-in game in which you must collect trash and avoid giant insects.


• The Gumball Rally - A type-in two-player game for the Commodore 128 in which you must make more money than your opponent by buying and selling gumballs.

_{Cover of the November 1987 issue of Compute!'s Gazette}

Education / Home Applications

• Sketch Pad - A type-in drawing program for the Commodore 64.


• Computing for Families: Holding a Hi-Tech Yard Sale - Tips for selling your old computer hardware and software at a yard sale.


• Fraction Practice II - A type-in educational program that teaches fraction multiplication and division.

Programming

• Subprograms for the 64 - A type-in program that helps you create "subprograms" in BASIC. Basically, these are standalone BASIC programs that act as subroutines.


• SpeedScript 128 Date and Time Stamper - A type-in program in enhance the SpeedScript 128 word processor by adding date and time stamps to your documents.


• Renumber - A type-in program that will renumber your BASIC programs.


• Sprite Monitor - A type-in program that will search for sprites in memory and save them to disk.


• Barricade Buster: Accessing the 128's 80-Column Screen - A type-in program designed to help you use the Commodore 128's 80-column screen in your own programs. Includes an example game.

Departments

• The Editor's Notes - An overview of the current issue along with the introduction of two new assistant editors.


• Gazette Feedback - Letters from readers about joysticks produced by Amiga, a calculated GOTO routine for the Commodore 128, collision detection of sprites, loading programs from within other programs, searching for prime numbers, keeping time in BASIC, and more.


• Horizons: The Beast with Two Brains - A look at using CP/M on the Commodore 128 on its second CPU which is a Z80. The primary CPU used for Commodore compatible stuff on the Commodore 128 is the 8502 (a 6502/6510 derivative).

_{Cover of the November 1987 issue of Compute!'s Gazette}

Read more: https://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress/index.php/2023/12/15/computes-gazette-november-1987/

Chicago’s Solution to Its Failing School System: Stop Grading Schools on Performance

In 1987, U.S. Education Secretary Bill Bennett famously traveled to Chicago, where he ruffled feathers by telling a closed-room group that the Windy City’s school system was “the worst in the nation.”

Local parents and educators bristled at the charge, which resulted in an awkward New York Times story. But decades of data would subsequently prove that Mr. Bennett was basically correct: Chicago’s schools were a total mess.

The city’s own accountability report card would later demonstrate that huge majorities of students in the city’s worst schools—75 percent in elementary and 95 percent in high school—failed to meet the state standards.

Things hardly improved during the pandemic, even though the Chicago Public School (CPS) system was spending roughly $28,000 per student (partly thanks to federal bailout cash).

“Just 30% of Black students meet or exceed reading standards in the third grade, and the number falls to 14% for 11th graders, according to data from the Illinois State Board of Education,” The Chicago Tribune pointed out last year.

Chicago schools clearly aren't getting the job done, but political leaders in the city have discovered a solution to the problem: stop grading schools.

“I personally don’t give a lot of attention to grades,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said during a recent interview. “How do you grade a system, when the system has not fulfilled its basic obligation of providing an equitable system that speaks to the needs [of students].”

Mr. Johnson went on to explain a better way to evaluate Chicago’s school system.

“My responsibility is not simply to just grade the system, but to fund the system,” he said. “That’s how I’m ultimately going to grade whether or not our public school system is working: based upon the investments that we make to the people who rely on it.”

This isn't mere idle chatter.

Earlier this year, the Chicago Board of Education scrapped its school rating policy, which was designed to rate schools on a range of performance goals, including how students performed on state tests.

WBEZ, an NPR-affiliated Chicago radio station, reported that Chicago’s system had been criticized for “relying too heavily on test scores and unfairly branding schools,” adding that the “new accountability policy veers away from any rating.”

One can see why leaders in Chicago favor grading schools by the amount of money they receive versus the academic performance of students.

Data from the Illinois State Board of Education show that not one student in the 22 schools analyzed in a widely read report can read at grade level. In 18 of those schools, there wasn't a single student who demonstrated proficiency in math or reading. (Despite this, some of these schools were given the rating “commendable.”)

Again, this is the state of Illinois’ own data.

If you grade these schools by funding, it’s a different story, of course. Per-student funding at Chicago Public Schools is now approaching $30,000 ($29,400, according to WBEZ). That is nearly double the national average ($14,347), according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Just like that—simply by grading schools by the funding they receive instead of their actual performance—CPS goes from one of the worst school districts in the United States to one of the best.

We all know this is no way to judge schools, of course. Accountability matters, and it’s hard to think of a worse solution than simply sending more and more money to failing systems and demanding less accountability for how that money is spent.

Indeed, it's this paradigm that has brought us the failed, bureaucratic education system America sees today.

More than 30 years ago, John Hood, the author and president of the John W. Pope Foundation, explained why the government was wholly unsuited to teach America’s students, and predicted U.S. schools would continue to decline despite steadily increasing government spending:

“When every call for fundamental change in American education is rebutted not by arguments about student achievement but by arguments focusing on race, class, social mixing, and other social concerns, it is difficult to imagine real progress.

"When teachers spend much of their day filling out forms, teaching quasi-academic subjects mandated from above, and boosting student self-esteem (as contrasted with serf-respect, which is earned rather than worked up), learning is difficult if not impossible.”

Mr. Hood had gleaned the same truth the famous educator John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) had learned.

Mr. Gatto, the Teacher of the Year in New York State in 1991 and author of "Dumbing Us Down," understood it wasn't “bad teachers” or a lack of funds responsible for America’s failing schools. It was the system itself, which was built on coercion, bureaucracy, and obedience instead of actual learning, discovery, and collaboration with families.

“Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships—the one-day variety or longer—these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of ‘school’ to include family as the main engine of education," he wrote.

"If we use schooling to break children away from parents—and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850—we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.”

Mr. Gatto wrote these words more than 30 years ago. And though I wouldn't have described U.S. schools as a “horror show” in 1992 (I was only 13), I certainly would today.

Despite an objective decline in U.S. schools, which has resulted in a mass exodus of students, politicians seek to continue pumping more and more money into struggling schools.

This wouldn't have surprised Mr. Gatto, who observed years ago that the primary purpose of schools in modern America was no longer education (if it ever was).

“We must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands,” he wrote.

Years ago I would have brushed off Mr. Gatto’s words as fanciful hyperbole. I don’t today.

Moreover, I think it’s become abundantly clear that the greatest obstacle to educational reform is the government itself—and politicians who want to grade schools by how much money they receive from taxpayers instead of whether students are actually learning.

This article originally appeared on The Epoch Times.

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Editor at Large of FEE.org at the Foundation for Economic Education.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Chicago’s Solution to Its Failing School System: Stop Grading Schools on Performance

PC World (February 1985)

PC World (February 1985)

PC World was one of the most popular magazines dedicated to IBM PC and compatible computers. I thrived in the 1980s and 1990s and survived well into the second decade of the new century. However, like pretty much all computer magazines, this one eventually died as a result of the Internet. The February 1985 issue includes:

Getting Started

• Strategies for Sharing Resources - A multi-user system with multiple terminals or a LAN may be a better alternative to simply buying more PCs when your business needs to expand.

Community

• The Organization LAN - The necessity of networking when dealing with a multitude of PCs.

Review

• Six Leading LANs - A comparison of the six leading Local Area Network solutions, including Netware/S-Net (Novell), EtherSeries (3Com), Omninet (Corvus Systems), PLAN 3000 (Nestar Systems), PCnet (Orchid Technology), and Net/One (Ungermann-Bass).


• The Multiuser Dimension - An alternative to a LAN was a multi-user system with IBM PCs basically used as smart terminals. This article looks specifically at the North Star Dimension which supported 12 workstation, ran a custom OS and was compatible with MS-DOS 2.11.


• Breaking Ground in Construction - A review of Software Shop, an accounting package specialized for the construction industry.

_{Table of Contents from the February 1985 issue of PC World}

PCjr World

• Color on Command - A look at the Palette command provided on cartridge BASIC for the IBM PCjr. This was a command designed to allow for easily changing colors or even doing simple animations.

A Drive to Succeed - The PCjr was limited in a variety of ways compared to the PC. However, there were several add-ons that were made by third parties to improve the situation. This article looks at one such product, the "Drive Two Enhancement Package" from Rapport. This package includes a second disk drive, a parallel printer port, a clock/calendar with battery backup, and an optional 128K-384K memory expansion. It also increases compatibility with PC software.

State of the Art

• A New Focus on Data Management - A look at PC/Focus, a "fourth generation" computer language (Focus) for the PC. It's main advantage seems to be making data management easier.

Hands On

• Untangling Networks - A guide to finding the Local Arean Network product that will work best for you.

_{Table of Contents from the February 1985 issue of PC World (continued)}

Departments

• Davin Bunnell - An interesting story in which a user planted stolen credit card numbers on a BBS without the sysops knowledge. The phone company somehow discovered this through its own BBS snooping software and notified the police. The poor guy who ran the BBS had is computer confiscated (stolen) and was charged as an accessory to the crime. An argument is presented here as to whether the BBS operator is equivalent to a newspaper publisher or simply providing a communications medium. This argument has come up more recently with social media but as you can see, it's nothing new.


• Letters - Letters from readers about indexes of old articles, a tip for entering a date in Lotus 1-2-3 that auto updates, the PCs chess playing skills, Sargon III, and more.


• PC World View - Microsoft debuts the Microsoft Press International Publishing Consortium through which it will publish various books around the world; the usage of personal computers in political campaigns increased greatly in 1984...most of the time, those using computers won; a prototype IBM PC AT was stolen from an IBM lab in Palm Beach County, Florida. The thief was not caught; IBM announces its own local area network product; and more.


• The Help Screen - Questions answered about using RAM disks.


• Compatibles Update - AT&T releases a video display adapter, image capture board, and other products for "AT&T and compatible computers"; Zenith awarded contract for 30,000 Tempest certified Z-150 PCs; Ford Aerospace buys $1.5 million worth of Seequa PC and XT desktop computers which will go to NASA engineers in Houston; the IRS field-tests GRiD Compass portable computers; and more.


• From the Software Shelf - First impressions of various software including Macro-Toolkit for Lotus, SideKick Version 1.10A, A>Cook: The Complete Computer Recipe System, PC Abstracts, and Textra.

_{Back cover of the February 1985 issue of PC World}

...and more!