User interface
The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine from the human end, whilst the machine feeds back information that aids the operators' decision-making process. Examples of this broad concept of user interfaces include the interactive aspects of computer operating systems, hand tools, heavy machinery operator controls, process controls; the design considerations applicable when creating user interfaces are related to or involve such disciplines as ergonomics and psychology. The goal of user interface design is to produce a user interface which makes it easy and enjoyable to operate a machine in the way which produces the desired result; this means that the operator needs to provide minimal input to achieve the desired output, that the machine minimizes undesired outputs to the human. User interfaces are composed of one or more layers including a human-machine interface interfaces machines with physical input hardware such a keyboards, game pads and output hardware such as computer monitors and printers.
A device that implements a HMI is called a human interface device. Other terms for human-machine interfaces are man–machine interface and when the machine in question is a computer human–computer interface. Additional UI layers may interact with one or more human sense, including: tactile UI, visual UI, auditory UI, olfactory UI, equilibrial UI, gustatory UI. Composite user interfaces are UIs that interact with two or more senses; the most common CUI is a graphical user interface, composed of a tactile UI and a visual UI capable of displaying graphics. When sound is added to a GUI it becomes a multimedia user interface. There are three broad categories of CUI: standard and augmented. Standard composite user interfaces use standard human interface devices like keyboards and computer monitors; when the CUI blocks out the real world to create a virtual reality, the CUI is virtual and uses a virtual reality interface. When the CUI does not block out the real world and creates augmented reality, the CUI is augmented and uses an augmented reality interface.
When a UI interacts with all human senses, it is called a qualia interface, named after the theory of qualia. CUI may be classified by how many senses they interact with as either an X-sense virtual reality interface or X-sense augmented reality interface, where X is the number of senses interfaced with. For example, a Smell-O-Vision is a 3-sense Standard CUI with visual display and smells; the user interface or human–machine interface is the part of the machine that handles the human–machine interaction. Membrane switches, rubber keypads and touchscreens are examples of the physical part of the Human Machine Interface which we can see and touch. In complex systems, the human–machine interface is computerized; the term human–computer interface refers to this kind of system. In the context of computing, the term extends as well to the software dedicated to control the physical elements used for human-computer interaction; the engineering of the human–machine interfaces is enhanced by considering ergonomics.
The corresponding disciplines are human factors engineering and usability engineering, part of systems engineering. Tools used for incorporating human factors in the interface design are developed based on knowledge of computer science, such as computer graphics, operating systems, programming languages. Nowadays, we use the expression graphical user interface for human–machine interface on computers, as nearly all of them are now using graphics. There is a difference between a user interface and an operator interface or a human–machine interface; the term "user interface" is used in the context of computer systems and electronic devices Where a network of equipment or computers are interlinked through an MES -or Host to display information. A human-machine interface is local to one machine or piece of equipment, is the interface method between the human and the equipment/machine. An operator interface is the interface method by which multiple equipment that are linked by a host control system is accessed or controlled.
The system may expose several user interfaces to serve different kinds of users. For example, a computerized library database might provide two user interfaces, one for library patrons and the other for library personnel; the user interface of a mechanical system, a vehicle or an industrial installation is sometimes referred to as the human–machine interface. HMI is a modification of the original term MMI. In practice, the abbreviation MMI is still used although some may claim that MMI stands for something different now. Another abbreviation is HCI, but is more used for human–computer interaction. Other terms used are operator interface terminal; however it is abbreviated, the terms refer to the'layer' that separates a human, operating a machine from the machine itself. Without a clean and usable interface, humans would not be able to
Lotus Software
Lotus Software was an American software company based in Massachusetts. Lotus is most known for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, the first feature-heavy, user-friendly, reliable and WYSIWYG-enabled product to become available in the early days of the IBM PC, when there was no graphical user interface. Much in conjunction with Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates, Lotus released a groupware and email system, Lotus Notes. IBM purchased the company in 1995 for US$3.5 billion to acquire Lotus Notes and to establish a presence in the important client–server computing segment, making host-based products such as IBM's OfficeVision obsolete.. On December 6, 2018, IBM announced the selling of Lotus Software/Domino to HCL for $1.8 billion dollars. Lotus was founded in 1982 by partners Mitch Jonathan Sachs with backing from Ben Rosen. Lotus's first product was presentation software for the Apple II known as Lotus Executive Briefing System. Kapor founded Lotus after leaving his post as head of development at VisiCorp, the distributors of the VisiCalc spreadsheet, selling all his rights to Visi-Plot and Visi-Trend to Visi-Corp.
Shortly after Kapor left Visi-Corp, he and Sachs produced an integrated spreadsheet and graphics program. Though IBM and VisiCorp had a collaboration agreement whereby Visi-Calc was being shipped with the PC, Lotus had a superior product. Lotus released Lotus 1-2-3 on January 26, 1983; the name referred to the three ways the product could be used, as a spreadsheet, graphics package, database manager. In practice the latter two functions were less used, but 1-2-3 was the most powerful spreadsheet program available. Lotus was immediately successful, becoming the world's third largest microcomputer software company in 1983 with $53 million in sales in its first year, compared to its business plan forecast of $1 million in sales. In 1982 Jim Manzi — a graduate of Colgate University and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy — came to Lotus as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, became an employee four months later. In October 1984 he was named President, in April 1986 he was appointed CEO, succeeding Kapor.
In July of that same year he became Chairman of the Board. Manzi remained at the head of Lotus until 1995. In December 6, 2018, IBM announced the selling of Lotus Software/Domino to HCL for $1.8 billion dollars. As the popularity of the personal computer grew, Lotus came to dominate the spreadsheet market. Lotus introduced other office products such as Ray Ozzie's Symphony in 1984 and the Jazz office suite for the Apple Macintosh computer in 1985. Jazz did poorly in the market. In 1985, Lotus bought Software Arts and discontinued its VisiCalc program. In the late 1980s Lotus developed a file management and indexing utility. In this period Manuscript, a word processor, Lotus Agenda, an innovative personal information manager which flopped, Improv, a ground-breaking modeling package for the NeXT platform, were released. Improv flopped, none of these products made a significant impact on the market. Lotus was involved in a number of lawsuits, of which the most significant were the "look and feel" cases which started in 1987.
Lotus sued Paperback Software and Mosaic for copyright infringement and misleading advertising, unfair competition over their low-cost clones of 1-2-3, VP Planner and Twin, sued Borland over its Quattro spreadsheet. This led Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, to found the League for Programming Freedom and hold protests outside Lotus Development offices. Paperback and Mosaic went out of business; the LPF filed an amicus curiae brief in the Borland case. In the 1990s, to compete with Microsoft's Windows applications, Lotus had to buy in products such as Ami Pro and Threadz, which became Lotus Organizer. Several applications were bundled together under the name Lotus SmartSuite. Although SmartSuite was bundled cheaply with many PCs and may have been more popular than Microsoft Office, Lotus lost its dominance in the desktop applications market with the transition from 16- to 32-bit applications running on Windows 95. In large part due to its focusing much of its development resources on a suite of applications for IBM's new OS/2 operating system, Lotus was late in delivering its suite of 32-bit products, failed to capitalize on the transition to the new version of Windows.
The last significant new release was the SmartSuite Millennium Edition released in 1999. All new development of the suite was ended with ongoing maintenance being moved overseas; the last update release was 2014. Lotus began its diversification from the desktop software business with its 1984 strategic founding investment in Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates, the creator of its Lotus Notes groupware platform; as a result of this early speculative move, Lotus had gained significant experience in network-based communications years before other competitors in the PC world had started thinking about networked computing or the Internet. Lotus brought Lotus Notes to market in 1989, reinforced its market presence with the acquisition of cc:Mail in 1991. In 1994, Lotus acquired Iris Associates. Lotus's dominant groupware position attracted IBM, which need
Apple Lisa
Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple, released on January 19, 1983. It is one of the first personal computers to offer a graphical user interface in a machine aimed at individual business users. Development of the Lisa began in 1978, it underwent many changes during the development period before shipping at US$9,995 with a 5 MB hard drive; the Lisa was challenged by a high price, insufficient performance, insufficient software library, crash-prone operating system, unreliable Apple FileWare floppy disks, the immediate release of the cheaper and faster Macintosh — yielding lifelong sales of only 100,000 units in two years. In 1982, after Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project, he appropriated the existing Macintosh project, which Jef Raskin had conceived in 1979 and led to develop a text-based appliance computer. Jobs redefined Macintosh as a cheaper and more usable version of the graphical Lisa. Macintosh was launched in January 1984 surpassing Lisa sales, assimilating increasing numbers of Lisa staff.
Newer Lisa models were introduced that addressed its faults and lowered its price but the platform failed to achieve favorable sales compared to the much less expensive Mac. The final model, the Lisa 2/10, was modified as the high end of the Macintosh series, the Macintosh XL. Considered a commercial failure but with some technical acclaim, the Lisa introduced a number of advanced features that would not reappear on the Macintosh for many years; these include an operating system with a more document-oriented workflow. The hardware overall is more advanced than the Macintosh, with a hard drive, support for up to 2 megabytes of RAM, expansion slots, a larger, higher-resolution display; the main exception is that the 68000 processor in the Macintosh is clocked at 7.89 MHz and the Lisa's is 5 MHz. The complexity of the Lisa operating system and its associated programs overtaxes the slower processor enough that users perceive it to be sluggish; the workstation-tier price and lack of technical application library made it unviable for the technical workstation market.
Though the documentation shipped with the original Lisa only refers to it as "The Lisa", Apple stated the name was an acronym for "Locally Integrated Software Architecture" or "LISA". Because Steve Jobs's first daughter was named Lisa Nicole Brennan, it was inferred that the name had a personal association, that the acronym was a backronym invented to fit the name. Andy Hertzfeld states the acronym was reverse engineered from the name "Lisa" in late 1982 by the Apple marketing team, after they had hired a marketing consultancy firm to come up with names to replace "Lisa" and "Macintosh" and rejected all of the suggestions. Hertzfeld and the other software developers used "Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym", a recursive backronym, while computer industry pundits coined the term "Let's Invent Some Acronym" to fit the Lisa's name. Decades Jobs would tell his biographer Walter Isaacson: "Obviously it was named for my daughter." The project began in 1978 as an effort to create a more modern version of the then-conventional design epitomized by the Apple II.
A ten-person team occupied its first dedicated office, nicknamed "the Good Earth building" and located at 20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard next to the restaurant named Good Earth. Initial team leader Ken Rothmuller was soon replaced by John Couch, under whose direction the project evolved into the "window-and-mouse-driven" form of its eventual release. Trip Hawkins and Jef Raskin contributed to this change in design. Apple's cofounder Steve Jobs was involved in the concept. At Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, research had been underway for several years to create a new humanized way to organize the computer screen, today known as the desktop metaphor. Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC in 1979, was absorbed and excited by the revolutionary mouse-driven GUI of the Xerox Alto. By late 1979, Jobs negotiated a payment of Apple stock to Xerox, in exchange for his Lisa team to receive two demonstrations of ongoing research projects at Xerox PARC; when the Apple team saw the demonstration of the Alto computer, they were able to see in action the basic elements of what constituted a workable GUI.
The Lisa team put a great deal of work into making the graphical interface a mainstream commercial product. The Lisa was a major project at Apple, which spent more than $50 million on its development. More than 90 people participated in the design, plus more in the sales and marketing effort, to launch the machine. BYTE credited Wayne Rosing with being the most important person on the development of the computer's hardware until the machine went into production, at which point he became technical lead for the entire Lisa project; the hardware development team was headed by Robert Paratore. The industrial design, product design, mechanical packaging were headed by Bill Dresselhaus, the Principal Product Designer of Lisa, with his team of internal product designers and contract product designers from the firm that became IDEO. Bruce Daniels was in charge of applications development, Larry Tesler was in charge of system software; the user interface was designed in a six month period, after which, the hardware, operating system, applications were all created in parallel.
In 1982, after Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project, he appropriated the existing Macintosh project, which Jef Raskin had conceived in 1979 and led to develop a text-based appliance computer. Jobs redefined Macintosh as a cheaper and more usable Lisa, leading the project in parallel and in secret, subst
Tiling window manager
In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more popular approach of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects that tries to emulate the desktop metaphor. The first Xerox Star system tiled application windows, but allowed dialogs and property windows to overlap. Xerox PARC developed CEDAR, the first windowing system using a tiled window manager. Next in 1983 came Andrew WM, a complete tiled windowing system replaced by X11. Microsoft's Windows 1.0 used tiling. In 1986 came Digital Research's GEM 2.0, a windowing system for the CP/M which used tiling by default. One of the early tiling WMs was Siemens' RTL, up to today a textbook example because of its algorithms of automated window scaling and arrangement, iconification. RTL ran on X11R2 and R3 on the "native" Siemens systems, e.g. SINIX, its features are described by its promotional video. The Andrew Project was a desktop client system for X with overlapping window manager.
MacOS X 10.11 El Capitan released on September 2015 introduces new window management features such as creating a full-screen split view by holding down the full-screen button in the upper-left corner of a window. The built-in Microsoft Windows window manager has, since Windows 95, followed the traditional stacking approach by default, it can act as a rudimentary tiling window manager. To tile windows, the user selects them in the taskbar and uses the context menu choice Tile Vertically or Tile Horizontally. However, the wording of these options is misleading. Choosing Tile Vertically will cause the windows to tile horizontally but take on a vertical shape, while choosing Tile Horizontally will cause the windows to tile vertically but take on a horizontal shape; these options were changed in Windows Vista to Show Windows Side by Side and Show Windows Stacked, respectively. Windows 7 adds the ability to drag windows to either side of the screen to create a simple side-by-side tiled layout, or to the top of the screen to maximize.
The Windows 8 GUI introduced a new basic tiling window manager. In Windows 10, users are able to tile Windows by quarters; the first version featured a tiling window manager because of litigation by Apple claiming ownership of the overlapping window desktop metaphor. But due to complaints, the next version followed the desktop metaphor. All versions of the operating system stuck to this approach as the default behaviour. Bug.n – open source, configurable tiling window manager built as an AutoHotKey script and licensed under the GNU GPL. MaxTo — customizable grid, global hotkeys. Works with elevated applications, 32-bit and 64-bit applications, multiple monitors. Stack – customizable grid, global hotkeys and/or middle mouse button. Supports HiDPI and multiple monitors. Plumb — lightweight tiling manager with support for multiple versions of Windows. Supports HiDPI monitors, keyboard hotkeys and customization of hotkeys. In the X Window System, the window manager is a separate program. X itself enforces no specific window management approach and remains usable without any window manager.
Current X protocol version X11 explicitly mentions the possibility of tiling window managers. The Siemens RTL Tiled Window Manager was the first to implement automatic placement/sizing strategies. Another tiling window manager from this period was the Cambridge Window Manager developed by IBM's Academic Information System group. In 2000, both larswm and Ion released a first version. Awesome — a dwm derivative with window tiling and tagging, written in C and configurable and extensible in Lua, it was the first WM to be ported from Xlib to XCB, supports D-Bus, pango, XRandR, Xinerama. Dwm — allows for switching tiling layouts by clicking a textual ascii art'icon' in the status bar; the default is a main area + stacking area arrangement, represented by a = character glyph. Other standard layouts are a single-window "monocle" mode represented by an M and a non-tiling floating layout that permits windows to be moved and resized, represented by a fish-like ><>. Third party patches exist to add a golden section-based Fibonacci layout and vertical row-based tiling or a grid layout.
The keyboard-driven menu utility "dmenu", developed for use with dwm, is used with other tiling WMs such as xmonad, sometimes with other "light-weight" software like Openbox and uzbl. i3 — a built-from-scratch window manager, based on wmii. It has vi-like keybindings, treats extra monitors as extra workspaces, meaning that windows can be moved between monitors easily. Allows vertical and horizontal splits, parent containers, it can be controlled from the keyboard, but a mouse can be used. Ion — combines tiling with a tabbing interface: the display is manually split in non-overlapping regions; each frame can contain one or more windows. Only one of these windows fills the entire frame. Larswm — implements a form of dynamic tiling: the display is vertically split in two regions; the left track is filled with a single window. The right track contains all other windows stacked on top of each other. LeftWM — a tiling window manager based on theming and supporting large monitors such as ultrawides. Qtile — a tiling window manager written and extensible in Python.
Ratpoison — A keyboard-driven GNU Screen for X. StumpWM — a keyboard driven offshoot of ratpoison supporting multiple displays that can be customized on the fly in Common Lisp, it uses Emacs-compatible keybinding
Computer program
A computer program is a collection of instructions that performs a specific task when executed by a computer. A computer requires programs to function. A computer program is written by a computer programmer in a programming language. From the program in its human-readable form of source code, a compiler can derive machine code—a form consisting of instructions that the computer can directly execute. Alternatively, a computer program may be executed with the aid of an interpreter. A collection of computer programs and related data are referred to as software. Computer programs may be categorized along functional lines, such as application software and system software; the underlying method used for some calculation or manipulation is known as an algorithm. The earliest programmable machines preceded the invention of the digital computer. In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard devised a loom that would weave a pattern by following a series of perforated cards. Patterns could be repeated by arranging the cards.
In 1837, Charles Babbage was inspired by Jacquard's loom to attempt to build the Analytical Engine. The names of the components of the calculating device were borrowed from the textile industry. In the textile industry, yarn was brought from the store to be milled; the device would have had a "store"—memory to hold 1,000 numbers of 40 decimal digits each. Numbers from the "store" would have been transferred to the "mill", for processing, and a "thread" being the execution of programmed instructions by the device. It was programmed using two sets of perforated cards—one to direct the operation and the other for the input variables. However, after more than 17,000 pounds of the British government's money, the thousands of cogged wheels and gears never worked together. During a nine-month period in 1842–43, Ada Lovelace translated the memoir of Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea; the memoir covered the Analytical Engine. The translation contained Note G which detailed a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine.
This note is recognized by some historians as the world's first written computer program. In 1936, Alan Turing introduced the Universal Turing machine—a theoretical device that can model every computation that can be performed on a Turing complete computing machine, it is a finite-state machine. The machine can move the tape forth, changing its contents as it performs an algorithm; the machine starts in the initial state, goes through a sequence of steps, halts when it encounters the halt state. This machine is considered by some to be the origin of the stored-program computer—used by John von Neumann for the "Electronic Computing Instrument" that now bears the von Neumann architecture name; the Z3 computer, invented by Konrad Zuse in Germany, was a programmable computer. A digital computer uses electricity as the calculating component; the Z3 contained 2,400 relays to create the circuits. The circuits provided a floating-point, nine-instruction computer. Programming the Z3 was through a specially designed keyboard and punched tape.
The Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer was a Turing complete, general-purpose computer that used 17,468 vacuum tubes to create the circuits. At its core, it was a series of Pascalines wired together, its 40 units weighed 30 tons, occupied 1,800 square feet, consumed $650 per hour in electricity when idle. It had 20 base-10 accumulators. Programming the ENIAC took up to two months. Three function tables needed to be rolled to fixed function panels. Function tables were connected to function panels using heavy black cables; each function table had 728 rotating knobs. Programming the ENIAC involved setting some of the 3,000 switches. Debugging a program took a week; the programmers of the ENIAC were women who were known collectively as the "ENIAC girls." The ENIAC featured parallel operations. Different sets of accumulators could work on different algorithms, it used punched card machines for input and output, it was controlled with a clock signal. It ran for eight years, calculating hydrogen bomb parameters, predicting weather patterns, producing firing tables to aim artillery guns.
The Manchester Baby was a stored-program computer. Programming transitioned away from setting dials. Only three bits of memory were available to store each instruction, so it was limited to eight instructions. 32 switches were available for programming. Computers manufactured; the computer program was written on paper for reference. An instruction was represented by a configuration of on/off settings. After setting the configuration, an execute button was pressed; this process was repeated. Computer programs were manually input via paper tape or punched cards. After the medium was loaded, the starting address was set via switches and the execute button pressed. In 1961, the Burroughs B5000 was built to be programmed in the ALGOL 60 language; the hardware featured circuits to ease the compile phase. In 1964, the IBM System/360 was a line of six computers each having the same instruction set architecture; the Model 30 was the least expensive. Customers could retain the same application software; each System/360 model featured multiprogramming.
With operating system support, multiple programs could be in memory at once. When one was waiting for input/output, another could compute; each model could emulate other computers. Customers could upgrade to the System/360 and ret
Byte (magazine)
Byte was an American microcomputer magazine, influential in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage. Whereas many magazines were dedicated to specific systems or the home or business users' perspective, Byte covered developments in the entire field of "small computers and software," and sometimes other computing fields such as supercomputers and high-reliability computing. Coverage was in-depth with much technical detail, rather than user-oriented. Byte started in 1975, shortly after the first personal computers appeared as kits advertised in the back of electronics magazines. Byte was published monthly, with an initial yearly subscription price of $10. Print publication ceased in 1998 and online publication in 2013. In 1975 Wayne Green was the editor and publisher of 73 and his ex-wife, Virginia Londner Green was the Business Manager of 73 Inc. In the August 1975 issue of 73 magazine Wayne's editorial column started with this item: The response to computer-type articles in 73 has been so enthusiastic that we here in Peterborough got carried away.
On May 25th we made a deal with the publisher of a small computer hobby magazine to take over as editor of a new publication which would start in August... Byte. Carl Helmers published a series of six articles in 1974 that detailed the design and construction of his "Experimenter's Computer System", a personal computer based on the Intel 8008 microprocessor. In January 1975 this became the monthly ECS magazine with 400 subscribers; the last issue was published on May 12, 1975 and in June the subscribers were mailed a notice announcing Byte magazine. Carl wrote to another hobbyist newsletter, Micro-8 Computer User Group Newsletter, described his new job as editor of Byte magazine. I got a note in the mail about two weeks ago from Wayne Green, publisher of'73 Magazine' saying hello and why don't you come up and talk a bit; the net result of a follow up is the decision to create BYTE magazine using the facilities of Green Publishing Inc. I will end up with the editorial focus for the magazine. Virginia Londner Green had returned to 73 in the December 1974 issue and incorporated Green Publishing in March 1975.
The first five issues of Byte were published by Green Publishing and the name was changed to Byte Publications starting with the February 1976 issue. Carl Helmers was a co-owner of Byte Publications; the first four issues were produced in the offices of 73 and Wayne Green was listed as the publisher. One day in November 1975 Wayne came to work and found that the Byte magazine staff had moved out and taken the January issue with them; the February 1976 issue of Byte has a short story about the move. "After a start which reads like a romantic light opera with an episode or two reminiscent of the Keystone Cops, Byte magazine has moved into separate offices of its own." Wayne Green was not happy about losing Byte magazine so he was going to start a new one called Kilobyte. Byte trademarked KILOBYTE as a cartoon series in Byte magazine; the new magazine was called Kilobaud. There was competition and animosity between Byte Publications and 73 Inc. but both remained in the small town of Peterborough, New Hampshire.
Articles in the first issue included Which Microprocessor For You? by Hal Chamberlin, Write Your Own Assembler by Dan Fylstra and Serial Interface by Don Lancaster. Advertisements from Godbout, MITS, Processor Technology, SCELBI, Sphere appear, among others. Early articles in Byte were do-it-yourself electronic or software projects to improve small computers. A continuing feature was Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, a column in which electronic engineer Steve Ciarcia described small projects to modify or attach to a computer. Significant articles in this period included the "Kansas City" standard for data storage on audio tape, insertion of disk drives into S-100 computers, publication of source code for various computer languages, coverage of the first microcomputer operating system, CP/M. Byte ran Microsoft's first advertisement, as "Micro-Soft", to sell a BASIC interpreter for 8080-based computers. In spring of 1979, owner/publisher Virginia Williamson sold Byte to McGraw-Hill, she became a vice president of McGraw-Hill Publications Company.
Shortly after the IBM PC was introduced, in 1981, the magazine changed editorial policies. It de-emphasized the do-it-yourself electronics and software articles, began running product reviews, it continued its wide-ranging coverage of hardware and software, but now it reported "what it does" and "how it works", not "how to do it". The editorial focus remained on home and personal computers). By the early 1980s Byte had become an "elite" magazine, seen as a peer of Rolling Stone and Playboy, others such as David Bunnell of PC Magazine aspired to emulate its reputation and success, it was the only computer publication on the 1981 Folio 400 list of largest magazines. Byte's 1982 average number of pages was 543, the number of paid advertising pages grew by more than 1,000 while most magazines' amount of advertising did not change, its circulation of 420,000 was the third highest of all computer magazines. Byte earned $9 million from revenue of $36.6 million in 1983, twice the average profit margin for the magazine industry.
It remained successful while many other magazines failed in 1984 during economic weakness in the computer industry. The October 1984 issue had about 300 pages of ads sold at an average of $6,000 per page. From 1975 to 1986 Byte covers featured the artwork of Robert Tinney. Thes
MS-DOS
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, some operating systems attempting to be compatible with MS-DOS, are sometimes referred to as "DOS". MS-DOS was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s and the early 1990s, when it was superseded by operating systems offering a graphical user interface, in various generations of the graphical Microsoft Windows operating system. MS-DOS was the result of the language developed in the seventies, used by IBM for its mainframe operating system. Microsoft acquired the rights to meet IBM specifications. IBM re-released it on August 12, 1981 as PC DOS 1.0 for use in their PCs. Although MS-DOS and PC DOS were developed in parallel by Microsoft and IBM, the two products diverged after twelve years, in 1993, with recognizable differences in compatibility and capabilities. During its lifetime, several competing products were released for the x86 platform, MS-DOS went through eight versions, until development ceased in 2000.
MS-DOS was targeted at Intel 8086 processors running on computer hardware using floppy disks to store and access not only the operating system, but application software and user data as well. Progressive version releases delivered support for other mass storage media in greater sizes and formats, along with added feature support for newer processors and evolving computer architectures, it was the key product in Microsoft's growth from a programming language company to a diverse software development firm, providing the company with essential revenue and marketing resources. It was the underlying basic operating system on which early versions of Windows ran as a GUI, it is a flexible operating system, consumes negligible installation space. MS-DOS was a renamed form of 86-DOS – owned by Seattle Computer Products, written by Tim Paterson. Development of 86-DOS took only six weeks, as it was a clone of Digital Research's CP/M, ported to run on 8086 processors and with two notable differences compared to CP/M.
This first version was shipped in August 1980. Microsoft, which needed an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer hired Tim Paterson in May 1981 and bought 86-DOS 1.10 for $75,000 in July of the same year. Microsoft kept the version number, but renamed it MS-DOS, they licensed MS-DOS 1.10/1.14 to IBM, who, in August 1981, offered it as PC DOS 1.0 as one of three operating systems for the IBM 5150, or the IBM PC. Within a year Microsoft licensed MS-DOS to over 70 other companies, it was designed to be an OS. Each computer would have its own distinct hardware and its own version of MS-DOS, similar to the situation that existed for CP/M, with MS-DOS emulating the same solution as CP/M to adapt for different hardware platforms. To this end, MS-DOS was designed with a modular structure with internal device drivers, minimally for primary disk drives and the console, integrated with the kernel and loaded by the boot loader, installable device drivers for other devices loaded and integrated at boot time.
The OEM would use a development kit provided by Microsoft to build a version of MS-DOS with their basic I/O drivers and a standard Microsoft kernel, which they would supply on disk to end users along with the hardware. Thus, there were many different versions of "MS-DOS" for different hardware, there is a major distinction between an IBM-compatible machine and an MS-DOS machine; some machines, like the Tandy 2000, were MS-DOS compatible but not IBM-compatible, so they could run software written for MS-DOS without dependence on the peripheral hardware of the IBM PC architecture. This design would have worked well for compatibility, if application programs had only used MS-DOS services to perform device I/O, indeed the same design philosophy is embodied in Windows NT. However, in MS-DOS's early days, the greater speed attainable by programs through direct control of hardware was of particular importance for games, which pushed the limits of their contemporary hardware. Soon an IBM-compatible architecture became the goal, before long all 8086-family computers emulated IBM's hardware, only a single version of MS-DOS for a fixed hardware platform was needed for the market.
This version is the version of MS-DOS, discussed here, as the dozens of other OEM versions of "MS-DOS" were only relevant to the systems they were designed for, in any case were similar in function and capability to some standard version for the IBM PC—often the same-numbered version, but not always, since some OEMs used their own proprietary version numbering schemes —with a few notable exceptions. Microsoft omitted multi-user support from MS-DOS because Microsoft's Unix-based operating system, was multi-user; the company planned, over time, to improve MS-DOS so it would be indistinguishable from single-user Xenix, or XEDOS, which would run on the Motorola 68000, Zilog Z8000, the LSI-11. Microsoft advertised MS-DOS and Xenix together, listing the shared features of its "single-user OS" and "the multi-user, multi-tasking, UNIX-derived operating system", promising easy
