Sunday, June 2, 2024

Byte (March 1987)

While Byte would basically become just another PC magazine towards the end of its life, in the mid to late 1980s it was still covering a variety of systems. The March 1987 issue includes:

Features

Product Preview: The Commodore A2000 - A detailed preview of Commodore's Amiga 2000. This machine offered much greater expandability over the original Amiga 1000 and also optional PC compatibility.

Product Preview: Turbo BASIC - A preview of this compiled version of BASIC.

Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar: Build a Trainable Infrared Master Controller - Instructions for building a programmable universal remote.

THEME: Image Processing

Probing Space by Camera - A history of image processing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Digital Image Processing in Art Conservation - Various photographic and image processing techniques can help preserve art and even discover previous versions of paintings.

Introduction to Image Processing Algorithms - This image processing tutorial includes code examples.

_{Table of Contents from the March 1987 issue of Byte}

Review

A Trio of 8-MHz PC AT Compatibles - A review of three PC AT clones including the NCR PC8 (starting at $3895), The Victor V286 (starting at $2195), and the QIC AT-Plus 1800 (starting at $1295).

AT&T's TrueVision Image Processing Systems - TruVision is a software package for digitizing and manipulating video images.

Four Laser Printers - A review of four laser printers (really five) including the Canon LBP-8 A1 and A2 ($3000 and $4300), BDS Model 630/8-E ($3495), QMS Kiss ($1995), and Quadram QuadLaser ($4495).

PC Scheme: A Lexical LISP - Scheme was what they used to teach my intro to Computer Science class long ago, though I'm sure it wasn't PC Scheme version 2.0 reviewed here. It wasn't THAT long ago.

Concurrent PC DOS - Version 5.0 of a multitasking DOS system that lets you run more than one DOS program at a time.

Kernel

Applications Only: Status Report - The author reviews Ragtime for the Mac (a combination of spreadsheet, word processor and page layout application), and Write Now (a word processor for DOS). He also discusses which apps he uses most.

BYTE U.K.: Taking Control - Devices which allow computers to be used as controllers are discussed including the Scorpion single board computer, RTX Robot Arm, and Martello which is a FORTH development system.

_{Table of Contents from the March 1987 issue of Byte (continued)}

Best of BIX

Amiga - Printer driver problems (and some solutions) plus slow circle/ellipse routines in Aztec C.

Atari ST - A discussion of the Atari ST disk format and determining the status of shift/control/alt keys.

IBM PC and Compatibles - Techniques to prevent accidentally formatting your hard drive and more.

Apple II/Macintosh - Speeding up compile times on the Mac, BLOADing a text file in DOS 3.3, accessing a clock through ProDOS on the Apple IIgs, and booting from a RAM disk on the IIgs.

Departments

Editorial: The Enigma of the Amiga 2000 - An intro to the Amiga 2000; the BYTE Information Exchange exceeds 12,000 users prompting an upgrade to the existing 1986 era Arete supermicrocomputer that runs it; and more.

Microbytes - University of California uses Ped-Pak genetic management software to help endangered animals; Synaptics Inc. plans neural net chips; Atari plans 32-bit Atari ST workstations; Common LISP evolving to support object-oriented features; and much more.

Letters - Letters from readers about text editing standards, CRT safety, type of sorts, text compression, ZBasic, and more.

_{Back cover of the March 1987 issue of Byte}

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