from the November 1982 issue of Byte magazine

by Phil Lemmons

Keyboards are meant to let our fingers do the talking, but more often they make us swear aloud. Every manufacturer seems to want its keyboard to be unmistakably different from any other. The only keys that seem to be sacred and immovable are badly placed: the familiar QWERTYUIOP and its companion rows of the alphabet. The Shift and Return keys occasionally stray, and the control keys and function keys wander from one end of the keyboard to the other. Perhaps most puzzling of all, the placement of the cursor keys is not yet standardized in the most logical configuration, with the “up” key above, the “down” key below, the “left” key at the left, and the “right” key at the right. Let’s hope that Chris Rutkowski’s efforts to organize the placement of the most common control functions in sensible groupings will be a major step toward standardization.

from the May 1982 issue of Practical Computing magazine

The mainframe manufacturers are finding that microcomputers - so recently derided as mere toys - are making inroads into their hitherto safe preserves. Clare Gooding examines their contrasting styles, and ponders on how the giant mainframe builders will fare among the quick-witted bandits of the micro world.

Time was when anyone working with computers had a hard time at social gatherings. If you were foolish enough to admit it, the reaction was either “Oh that’s all too technical for me, don’t know anything about it”, or worse, an inundation of stories about payroll computer errors and gas bills for £0.00. Nowadays a more likely reaction is, “We’ve got one of those at work, amazing little machine, we do everything on it”.

from the March/April 1982 issue of Computer Gaming World magazine

by Chris Crawford

You’ve had your computer for some time now. You’ve used it to teach yourself how to program and to handle a few household problems. You’ve also used it to play games. You have noticed that many of the games available for your computer are less than perfect. Soon you begin finding the technical flaws in them, and modifying some of them. The day inevitably comes when you decide that you could have done a better job than the designer. You tell yourself ‘Maybe I should write a computer game.’

from the November 1982 issue of Byte magazine

by Phil Lemmons

Microcomputers are proliferating because they can do so many tasks so well. Each time microcomputers take over another task, they threaten some old technology. As word processors, for example, microcomputers threaten the typewriter. As number crunchers, microcomputers threaten the calculator. Each company whose main product is threatened faces a hard choice: perish or become a computer company. What’s more, such a company must make the right computer on the first try because the fierce competition in the microcomputer market gives few entrants a second chance. The rules permit only one roll of the dice in the game called “You bet your company.”