from the June 1985 issue of Computer Language magazine

By Craig LaGrow

He calls himself a programmer at heart. But as an accomplished science fiction writer, president of a successful software company, technical book author, musician, and runner, P.J. Plauger is certainly a man of many talents.

His friends and work associates know him as Bill — a name he was affectionately given by his older sister three days after his birth. But in any published, professional work, he prefers to use the initials of his real name, Phillip James.

by Henry Bortman and Jeff Pittelkau

from the February 1997 issue of Australian MacUser magazine

The Mac commnunity has been electrified by the announce1nent that Apple’s next OS will be based on NeXTstep technologies. But, if this hybrid OS does not meet our expectations, Power Mac users will soon be able to use a third-party alternative: a strategy we dub ‘Plan Be .’

Apple has its work cut out for itself. After slip­ping the schedule on Copland, its much bally-hooed next-generation operating system (OS), by nearly two years, the company has now cancelled the project entirely and announced an alternative strategy that involves the use of NeXTstep technolo­gies. The hybrid OS sounds good, but it will not ship until 1998.

from the November 1987 issue of PC Tech Journal magazine

An inside look reveals how one company rapidly converted a complex data manager from DOS to the OS/2 environment.

by Steven Armbrust

When Microrim, Inc., became a beta site for IBM’s new Operating System/2 (OS/2) in late 1986, Microrim chairman and founder Wayne Erickson knew immediately what he and his staff had to do. Not only did they have to convert R:BASE System V, Microrim’s largest and most complex database manager, to run under OS/2, but the job had to be done in time to demonstrate a working product when IBM officially announced OS/2. At the time, no one knew how soon the announcement would occur (it came just six months later).

from the June 1, 1987 issue of MacWEEK

by Michael Goodwin

Why is Alan Boyd’s office like a hypertext document? Because it is hard to know where to look first.

There is a high-powered Mac II work-alike (a Levco Prodigy with 4 Mbytes of RAM) driving a big, high-resolution screen displaying a complicated menu of a tour of the National Art Gallery.

Next to that, a color TV monitor (displaying the Annunciation) is hooked to a videodisc player. Across the room there are several bottles of an obscure, single-malt Scotch whisky sitting on a high shelf next to a black motorcycle helmet. On the opposite wall there is a proof copy of the high-gloss, full-color ad for which the motorcycle helmet was bought; it shows a futuristic, helmeted rider, with a color computer display gleaming in his face-shield, over the headline: PREPARE TO ENTER HYPERTEXT.

by Richard Foxworthy, Editor

from the February 1997 issue of Australian MacUser magazine

By now, most readers will have heard the news - Gil Amelio and the crew at Apple Computer spent their Christmas break writing large cheques - totalling $US400 million - to acquire NeXT Software, the company launched by original Apple co-founder Steve Jobs after losing a 1985 power struggle with then Apple CEO John Sculley.

In a twist that will delight many and horrify some, Steve Jobs himself - the single person most responsible for the Macintosh - is part of the deal. He may only have returned to Apple in the guise of a part-time marketing and technology adviser to Gil Amelio, but he’s baa-aack.

from the December 1985 issue of Australian Personal Computer

The Reduced Instruction Set Processor (RISC) era has begun, albeit quietly, and working examples are now appearing on the market. Dick Pountain examines three such processors.

What exactly is a RISC, and why is it a good thing? A reduced instruction set processor, as the name suggests, is one which can execute only a small number of different instructions, compared to the prevailing standards of the day. In computing (as indeed in most walks of life) everything is a trade-off. A RISC processor trades off the number of instructions available to the programmer for speed; RISC processors can execute many times faster than their more complex brethren. When implemented as microprocessors in silicon, RISC designs also save precious space on the chip; smaller chips can be designed and debugged more quickly and cost less to fabricate.

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 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.