Byte Magazine has bestowed a BYTE Award of Excellence to Microsoft's Bookshelf as the first substantial application of CD-ROM technology. The award is given to products which are distinguished among those evaluated each year through a combination of factors such as exemplary innovation, technical elegance, and outstanding value. It is not just the amount of information included in Bookshelf- quotations, almanac, zip code directory, thesaurus, style manual, etc. but the quality of the user interface and the ease of access from any one of several word processing programs which earned the award for Microsoft. The January, 1989, issue of Byte also identified several other products which had awards bestowed on them, including the Compaq Deskpro 386/25 personal computer, the NEXT Computer, the Toshiba T1000 portable computer, and the TrueScan optical character recognition system.