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.

from the July 15, 1985 issue of ComputerWorld magazine by Edward Warner Although the IBM Personal Computer AT was greeted by the cheers of corporate users craving speed for their spreadsheets, the machine holds other potential, particularly the ability to run programs in up to 16M bytes of random-access memory (RAM). That potential remains largely untapped, and the situation may not change anytime soon because many important software firms have held off on developing packages specifically for the AT.

from the July 1977 issue of ROM Magazine by Lee Felsenstein “I designed the Sol!” These words are made to be spoken from a pinnacle of technical authority, preferably by a gimlet-eyed Herr Doktor who pursues exact solutions to the nineteenth decimal place and who reigns over a limitless sea of subordinates slaving away over rows of drafting boards. Or they could come from a furry little gopherlike creature with a piece of string for a belt who sleeps all day and occasionally surfaces to deposit a few dog-eared pages of scrawled diagrams with his custodians.

by Otis Wilson from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine Thanks to the developers of the UNIX operating system, and to the research method at AT&T Bell Laboratories, the technical evolution of the UNIX System has been well documented and its history largely understood. From a technical perspective, there just isn’t much argument about who did what when and why things were done the way they were. On the other hand, the “business” history of the UNIX system is largely an oral one, rich in folklore and popularized by the modem press in hopes of finding some explanation for the phenomenon that is the UNIX system.

by Bill Tuthill from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine C is descended from B, which was descended from BCPL. BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) was developed in 1967 by Martin Richards. B was an interpretive language written in 1970 by Ken Thompson (1) after he abandoned a Fortran implementation for the PDP-7. BCPL and B were typeless languages, which may account for the type permissiveness of C. They restricted their scope to machine words and were rather low level.

By August Mohr from the January 1985 issue of Unix Review magazine This is, so to speak, a history of how UNIX evolved as a product; not the “official” history of who was responsible for what features, and what year which milestones were crossed, but the “political” history of how decision were made and what motivated the people involved. Most of the readers of this mazagine are familiar with the system itself, so I don’t want to go into great detail about how the system got to be what it is internally, but rather how it how it got to be at all.

by Gary A. Kildall from the January 1980 issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal 1973… I was sitting quietly at my desk when Masatoshi Shima hurried into my office at Intel and asked me to follow him to his laboratory down the hall. In the middle of his work bench, among the typical snaggle of jumpers, oscilloscopes and multimeters, sat a binocular microscope with spider-leg probes, all of which were subjecting a minute piece of silicon to help­less investigation.

from the October 1994 issue of Byte magazine by PETER H. SALUS New Jersey, in the muggy summer of 1969, was the birthplace of Unix. It was born out of the frustration that resulted when AT&T’s BTL (Bell Telephone Labs) withdrew from the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) project, a joint attempt by BTL, General Electric, and MIT to create an operating system for a large computer accommodating up to a thousand simultaneous users.

from the September 1984 issue of Australian Personal Computer magazine Wayne Wilson, of Blacktown ts a little-known Australian hi-tech hero. He invented the concurrency concept that Australians now buy back from Microsoft and Digital Research. “We also had multi-user before Digital Research, and were the first to offer CP/M windowing" claims Wilson, and his partner, Roger Jones, who were also first to offer 8 and 16 bit running together. You’d think the world would beat a path to the door of AED (Acoustic Electronic Developments) unfashionably-located Blacktown Sydney factory door.

from the April 1986 issue of PCM By Richard A. White An important question these days is what is BASIC’s place in the world of microcomputing? Over the past few years the IBM PC and its compatibles have arrived, followed by a vast outpouring of software of every description. Each machine comes with a BASIC language interpreter on its DOS disk. It is likely that only a small percentage of these interpreters have been loaded for the purpose of doing programming.