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.

A Spiritual Heir to the Macintosh by Ezra Shapiro from the October 1987 issue of Byte The Canon Cat may be Jef Raskin’s long-sought “information appliance” Editor’s note: The following is a BYTE product preview. It is not a review. We provide an advance look at this new product because we feel it is significant. The Canon Cat is being advertised as a piece of office equipment-the next step beyond the memory typewriter-but there’s some real computer muscle under this feline’s skin.

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.