Like the Good Hardware Guide (here, here and here), this 1991 publication was an attempt to produce a book listing all the most important products on the market. Yes, one book. Can you imagine trying to do that now? These are just the items I wrote – my mate Steve Gold covered far more, and there may have been other… Read more »
This is the third part of my contributions to the Good Hardware Guide, published in 1991. This sections covers printers, scanners, a couple of modems, monitors (and one graphics card) and other peripherals. These include CR-ROM drives which were seen as exotic then – as compared to today when they’re regarded as obsolete. That happened quickly, didn’t it? The Miracom Courier… Read more »
This the second part of my contributions to the Good Hardware Guide published in 1991. The fact that this list of laptop PCs is much shorter than the desktop ones is probably significant. Laptops were still ruinously expensive in 1991 and, from a performance point of view, still significantly compromised when compared to their desktop brethren. Macs & Desktop PCs Laptops… Read more »
My old mate Steve Gold got me into this. If memory serves, the editor of this book, Richard Jones, had some kind of wheeze as to how this publication was going to be packaged and distributed. It was ultimately published by Kogan Page in 1991. But the truth is I’ve forgotten most of the details of this project, other than… Read more »
This article originally appeared in Micro Decision in 1990. Back then, we thought of software bugs as annoying. But that was a pre-Internet era. Now we know bugs to be dangerous, as they are the material with which malware works. Yet while software bugs today undermine our security, can we honestly claim that software is actually any less buggy? Probably yes…. Read more »
Wordstar 2000 Plus was the third version of the widely hated word processor. The reaction to the original Wordstar 2000 was similar to the one that greeted New Coke. Well, actually no, it was different… New Coke and the original Coke were just slight variations on of vile, corrosive sugared water. Wordstar 2000 was actually a very capable piece of… Read more »
At the risk of making this sound like another “kids today don’t know how lucky they are” post, let’s talk about disk swapping. If you don’t know what that is, you’re lucky. It would be depressing to even attempt to calculate how many hours of my life I’ve spent sitting in front of a computer feeding floppy disks into and… Read more »
On its publication in 1985, The Hacker’s Handbook was a sensation. It seemed to legitimise an activity that many of us had been engaged in for a while – the (mostly) innocent exploration of online computer systems. We now live in an age of connectedness. Our phones, our TVs and even our fridges are just nodes on a giant network. Email… Read more »
Portable computers were still relatively exotic beasts when Olivetti launched the Quaderno – an XT machine in an A5 form factor. The netbook fad was still some time off. Putting a label on this machine wasn’t that easy. ‘Palmtop’ is, I think, how Olivetti chose to classify it, but it was a bit big for a palm. But just look at… Read more »
It’s a mystery as to why I was commissioned to write a review of the Cambridge Computer Z88 around a year after it was released. The Z88 came out in 1987 and I wrote this piece for Practical Computing in 1988. The Z88 was typical of the products of Clive Sinclair. It provided a tantalising glimpse of what technology might achieve –… Read more »
This feature was written for Micro Decision magazine in 1990. I was lusted after a Mac but it would be a few more years before I could afford one. Back in those days, PC manufacturers used to give computers to journalists on ‘long-term loans’ quite readily, but Apple was rarely so forthcoming. IBM PS/1 & Apple Mac Classic It’s unusual, perhaps… Read more »
This piece was written for Which PC? when the Amstrad PPC first came out in 1988. I can still recall to this day how the Amstrad creaked and groaned. This was probably the cheapest-feeling computer I’ve ever encountered. And as for powering it from 10 C-size batteries – holy crap. Given the lousy battery life – you’d have to carry around… Read more »
Googling something has become a reflex action for many of us. We expect Google (or Bing or … what’s that other one called?) to provide an answer. And we expect that answer to be free. It wasn’t always thus, as I was reminded when trawling through an archive of old articles. Occasionally, alongside the article itself, I’ve found some of… Read more »
This piece was written for Personal Computer World – I presume in 1989 when WordStar 5 appeared. Note the bit about needing 512K of memory – you have been warned! I also discovered from some text I’d originally included at the beginning that my old Telecom Gold (aka BT Gold) address was 10074:MIK031. This was, of course, in the days when ordinary… Read more »
Another old article dragged from the archives, and again with an aviation theme. This one was written for Pilot magazine in the UK and was published, I would guess, in 1991 (I got my Private Pilot’s Licence in 1990). I still occasionally pine for the old days of the Bulletin Board System (BBS) and CIX. And yes, I’m aware that there… Read more »