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.

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. It’s JefRaskin’s first machine since he left Apple, where he headed the original Macintosh development team., And, as you might expect from this pedigree, the Cat takes an innovative approach to computing in the business environment.

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.”