Byte vol.9 №1 January 1984

Columns
37 Build the Circuit Cellar Term-Mite ST Smart Terminal, Part 1: Hardware by Steve Ciarcia / Thanks to advancing technology, you can construct an intelligent video terminal with just 21 integrated circuits.
53 BYTE West Coast: Beyond the Word Processor by Phil Lemmons I Tomorrow’s text editors may facilitate text composition from the earliest conceptual stages to the analysis of finished documents.
61 User’s Column: Too Many Leads, or What In *;?!#”*? Goes First? by Jerry Pournelle I Jerry covers a lot of territory this month, beginning his journey of a thousand words with a trip to the Circuit Cellar.
Themes
100 1984 and Beyond by G. Michael Vose I The year calls up inevitable associations with George Orwell’s novel of a futuristic, technologically oppressed society and raises questions concerning the present and future significance of technology to our own culture. 104 Reason and the Software Bus by Michael F. Korns I The Reason research project, exploring artificial intelligence, has developed a software bus that may have a significant effect on future software As a hardware bus uses ICs, so the software bus manipulates various program components to provide integration, networking, and multitasking.
122 A General-Purpose Robot-Control Language by Dan Prendergast, Bill Slade, and Nelson Winkless I By bridging the communication gap between people and robots, a plain-language system called Savvy increases the usefulness of these mechanical assistants.
134 1984, the Year of the 32-blt Microprocessor by Richard Mateosian/As manufacturers rush to introduce their 32-bit designs, it’s time to take a look at what these microprocessors are and what they’re good for.
154 Memory Cards: A New Concept In Personal Computing by Mark Mills I Picture a microcomputer without a keyboard, without a power supply, and small enough to fit in your wallet. That’s just one possible application of memory-card technology.
172 Computer-aided Design by Rik Jadrnicek I CAD capabilities on desktop systems can simplify a variety of tasks, from flowcharting to product design, but the choices in hardware and software can be baffling
213 Speech Recognition: An Idea Whose Time Is Coming by George M. White I While the multidisciplinary nature of the technology may slow its advance, speech recognition is well on its way to becoming a major factor in our interactions with machines. 2 26 Using Natural-Language Systems on Personal Computers by Jane Eisenberg and Jeffrey Hill / Artificial intelligence offers possible solutions to the problems of communication between people and computers.
243 Portables—1984 and Beyond: Idea-Processing Software and Portable Computers by David Winer and Peter Winer I When your personal computer leaps off your desktop and into your briefcase, what type of software will accompany it?
251 Beyond the Application Program: A Different Approach to Integrated Software by John Banning I Element managers that implement objects such as spreadsheet tables and paragraphs may supplant the traditional concept of the application program.
Reviews
267 Reviewer’s Notebook by Rich Malloy/This month’s notes touch on Seequa Computer Corporation’s Chameleon Plus and new trends in the printer market.