The 486sx versus the AM386'40 lab analysis has revealed a surprise winner. In anticipation of the hot news planned for
August about the new, version 5.0 of MS [X)5, Byte'sJune news this time gives us an exciting analysis of the Intel-cPu-486,
which surprise! - delivers an inferior performance to the older and cheaper 40-MHZ AMD 386!
There is no more exciting reading than Byte. the slightly more elitist competitor to PC Magazitle. consumer guide to the development of the latest things in pcs. A manual for all our secret wishes and never-to-be-fulfilled desires.
What could be more exciting than a first glance into an even more revolutionary Windows program. with an even more colourful and classical choice of letters. with sure enough a 4' dimensional spread sheet graphic program that connects stepwise discrimitlatlt analysis with survival analysis and Taguchi experimetltal design?
Can you really imagine ever having lived without the
scanner and the printer. without the LAN and the WAN. without PASCAL and c+ +. without Notebooks and Palmtops. without the AIX Alternative? If anyone on the editorial staff of Byte can. it's Hugh Kenner. Kenner is the only one in this company of
digital junkies who can give you the feeling. after reading the
sometimes more than 500 pages-worth of monthly instalments. that the world of yesterday still exists. His column usually appears at the back of the magazine. It is a moment of sanity after the market of project a..alyses. states of the arts. features. reviews and others. vying for attention in a strange mixture of neophilia. curiosity. the drive to consume. and desperately scraped
together technical innovations. Kenner is an old acquaintance of mine. an extremely unconventional literary theorist who brought Samuel Beckett and the bicycle onto one conceptual level and forged them into a new coalition. There is no one who better succeeds in tracing the Celtic influences in the work of the classical Irish writers.
What he does here in Byte hardly differs from his work in literary criticism. He now unleashes his skilful letter play on the
numbermasters. In the July issue he talks about the dazzling life of the Indian autodidact Ramanujan. who by chance got his hands on G. S. Carr's Sytlopsis of Elemetltary Results itl Pure atld Applied Mathematics at the age of sixteen and understood its contents as ifby intuition. wrote its writer a letter. suggested some additions and improvements. and was invited to England to expound on his ideas. A perfect moral tale for the not-sobright guy who imagines himself something of a Ramanujan in his computer world. The master of free interpretation. of the literary spielerei. amidst the computer junkies who make up the audience for his narratives nowadays.
With Kenner as your guide. you can read Byte as an abandoned variant on the literary tradition of the avant-garde of the first half of our century. and the jargon of the computer world as bearer of a stray literary code.
translation LAURA MARTZ