[HN Gopher] Vintage Byte Magazine Library
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Vintage Byte Magazine Library
Author : cion
Score : 183 points
Date : 2021-09-28 16:07 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vintageapple.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (vintageapple.org)
| ajmarsh wrote:
| I love the cover art of the early editions. They really were
| things of beauty at least to me.
|
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-11
| ddingus wrote:
| I love them too. Always did. Great art, relevant, thought
| provoking.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I grew up in tech-hostile environment but somehow i got to buy a
| few volumes of byte in the 90s. I remember reading Jon Udell's
| column and for some reason liking his expose of web technologies.
| It is so weird , i even remember certain sentences. It's fair to
| say that I owe him my web 'career'
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| One of my fondest memories of BYTE is why I have the career I
| have today.
|
| It was a how-to discussing making your system more secure against
| a virus (boot-sector/TSR).
|
| It explained how to edit your io.sys, and command.com; so that
| the system would use different files then: config.sys &
| autoexec.bat to boot.
|
| I failed at this task, and learned a very hard lesson about
| backups, but it wasn't as painful as it could have been. Format &
| re-install was rather common back then too (1-3'ish months on
| average)
|
| But I learned that I WANT to hack on my systems. I learned that I
| COULD run MY hardware how I wanted. It opened the world to me.
|
| I do not accept a system as it's presented to me, I must find the
| edge-case and break-out of the conforms that would keep me
| contained.
|
| I also learned about the difference between obscurity and
| security too. And that combined they are greater then the sum of
| their parts.
| twinge wrote:
| The predictions for the future of computing, December 1996, had
| some truly prescient gems. And a few misses.
|
| > We may experience a gradual drift into a surveillance society
| ...
|
| > The merging of cellular phones, portable computers, and
| highspeed networked servers offers many exciting possibilities.
|
| > The Internet will be as ubiquitous in our lives as cable
| television is today.
|
| https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/199612_Byte_Magazine_Vol_2... -
| page 86 in the magazine, page 90 in the PDF
| nunez wrote:
| Looking at some of these, it's kind of sad how it went from a
| deeply technical magazine (the earliest publication had an ad to
| join ACM, and it has several circuit diagrams) to a pop-tech
| supermarket mag (with tons of ads, lots of high-level hit pieces
| (how to get ready for y2k, for example), and A BAJILLIONTY ADS.
| I'm glad that they kept some semblance of technical content
| towards the end.
| ddingus wrote:
| It is sad. Tech pubs ended up on one hell of a grind to stay in
| the game. I am glad for what we did get though. The golden era
| was a tech goldmine!
| Koshkin wrote:
| Many initially interesting publications have suffered the same
| fate. As a more recent example, Ars Technica is getting there.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You're describing the industry.
| gootler wrote:
| archive.org has a lot more and a lot better.
| EarlKing wrote:
| This is well timed. I was actually going over the Internet
| Archive's collection just the other day. It's a bit sad to watch
| the decline in quality as you move through the volumes. Somewhere
| around 1985 - 1986 BYTE shifted towards becoming just another
| magazine hocking hardware/software. It got so bad that some
| issues started to look like a rip-off of Ziff-Davis's PC
| Magazine. Around that point I'm betting a lot of BYTE readers
| left for greener pastures at Circuit Cellar Ink and Dr. Dobb's.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| People complain about ads , but browse any volume and count the
| number of ads (may be easier to count the number of non-ads). And
| you had to pay for that stuff.
| ddingus wrote:
| Remember, paying for that stuff had value in those times.
| People would buy directories and or pay for advice / direction
| from others in the know too.
|
| Was hard to understand all that was going on out there. The ADS
| made more sense in that way than they do now. Sometimes, when a
| specific product was needed, those ADS connected people up in a
| way everyone found to have value.
|
| One thing, perhaps missed today given content marketing, was
| following the ADS to see who did what. New products, old ones
| phasing out, where things were, who, and sometimes pretty good
| reasons why all were found in those ADS. Scanning them was not
| all fluff. (not always fluff I should say, because yeah. There
| was fluff)
| hanche wrote:
| But those ads are static. They have no animated gifs or videos,
| having to rely on typography and still images to catch your
| attention. As a result, they are much less intrusive.
|
| More importantly, they couldn't track you, nor did their
| selection rely on any knowlege of you (besides the fact that
| you were reading byte magazine.)
| datavirtue wrote:
| People like ads in magazines because they are relevant and
| informative of the progress of the industry. I learn nearly
| as much from ads reading "Fine Home Building" as I do reading
| the excellent technical articles.
| amelius wrote:
| I agree with you, except some of the ads were loose inserts
| that fell out when you shook the magazine, which was almost
| as annoying as animated gifs/videos.
| timthorn wrote:
| The ads were really valuable. Back in the day they were one of
| the main ways of learning what was available.
| cpr wrote:
| Nostalgia!
|
| Was an early editor/writer for Byte in the very early days (first
| few issues), though had to back off due to school load (in
| college at the time).
|
| Carl Helmers and Dan Fylstra (founder of VisiCorp (publisher of
| VisiCalc), friend from high school days in San Diego) and I were
| all working at Intermetrics in Cambridge, and got together to
| start Byte, visiting Wayne and Virginia Green (big ham radio
| publisher at the time) in New Hampshire.
|
| I only played a minor role, but it was definitely a lot of fun.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Thank you. I read it for years. In college we had an extensive
| collection that went back many years and I lost count of how
| many hours I spent reading them in the library.
| ddingus wrote:
| Thanks for whatever you did. BYTE, for this small town kid,
| opened up a world of computing!
|
| Great publication. I sure wish we had something similar
| today...
|
| Heck, I would take it printed.
| DannyB2 wrote:
| Download old BYTE magazines from here:
| https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Byte_Magazine.htm
|
| Or higher quality scans here: https://archive.org/details/byte-
| magazine
|
| Or Popular Electronics:
| https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Gui...
|
| Creative Computing: https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yes, American Radio History is one of my favorite sites (to
| hoard from).
|
| Lots more than just Byte and Popular Electronics.
| pcf wrote:
| Many 404 errors for the PDF links. Just FYI.
| aplc0r wrote:
| Though the magazine was largely before my time, I have an art
| print of the cover for the May 1981 [1] issue and it makes me
| smile every time.
|
| [1]
| https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198105_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0...
| jandrese wrote:
| It is incredible what percentage of an issue of Byte was full
| page ads. They should have been paying the readers.
|
| It's also striking to see street addresses in the ads, some of
| which are local to me. One company used to do advanced graphics
| display controllers for computer kiosks in what is now a custom
| cabinets store in a dingy run down strip center.
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9306426,-77.237681,3a,75y,17...
| jjarvis wrote:
| I would love to see a reboot of Byte Magazine even if it only
| came back in digital form.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I still get magazines...mostly for the building trade. Fuck
| digital. There is something about print that makes people get
| their shit together and produce quality content. You can't just
| wing it with some fluffy clickbait and Google ad-sense.
| rchaud wrote:
| A digital-only publication cannot survive without playing the
| same content strategy games as all the other publications out
| there.
|
| A new BYTE would quickly start diluting its value by offering a
| podcast, YT channel, IG/Snap Stories, affiliate links and a
| website slathered with Adsense ads. You'll wonder why they
| bothered rebooting it in the first place.
| ddingus wrote:
| Or... It's subscription only, and maybe those other things
| don't matter so much.
| datavirtue wrote:
| No one can resist adsense. "Yeah let's just skip out on
| that $50k a month, our customers don't want to see all
| those ads." The incintive, like free money for corporate
| stock buybacks, is just irresistible.
| Diederich wrote:
| I've always found the advertisements at least as interesting as
| the actual content.
| cristoperb wrote:
| Here's what's available on archive.org:
|
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?&sort=date
|
| I'm not sure what's missing there, but it sounds like this
| collection fills in some gaps.
| Thoreandan wrote:
| It looks like some content from vintageapple is already donated
| to IA https://archive.org/details/macbooks
| makeworld wrote:
| The ones this collection has should definitely be uploaded.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| From a couple years ago maybe?
|
| Some other Byte mag convos lately:
|
| week ago on cover art
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28607038
|
| Logo language issue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556
|
| another cover archive
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26453783
| blondin wrote:
| thanks for sharing!
|
| just recently re-read the sep, oct, and nov 78 issues on
| implementing tiny pascal. what a cliffhanger! they were like send
| money for the listing of the 8080 machine translator (which is
| what i was most interested in haha)
| Sunspark wrote:
| I miss those days so much. 80s computer magazines were exciting.
| The web is great, but it doesn't have the anticipation of waiting
| for the next issue and then sitting down to dig into it with
| focused attention to see what was fresh and new and to be wowed
| by all the things you couldn't afford. A 20 megabyte hard drive
| for ONLY $1000? That's a good price! Unimaginable luxury, I only
| had floppy disks into the 1990s.
|
| I am someone who used to type in code from a magazine before I
| knew what the SAVE command was. You would never see someone doing
| something like that today.
|
| "In 1983 an average of one new computer magazine appeared each
| week. By late that year more than 200 existed."
|
| 80s computer magazines were thick too! Compute! magazine
| published 392 pages in December 1983.
| dhosek wrote:
| I remember how shocking it was when _SoftTalk_ came out. It
| didn 't have program listings in it!
| rcarmo wrote:
| Well, getting this up on HN certainly re-kindled my nostalgia for
| dial-up connections - the images are loading piecemeal, and the
| table is slowly growing as it's laid out...
|
| But wow, to read Jerry Pournelle's column again.
| datavirtue wrote:
| This reminds me of the unconstrained optimism and ambition of my
| youth. Like Byte, all of that is gone now.
|
| Thank you for the work.
| discreteevent wrote:
| Looking at one of these now I remember how magazines made
| technology very exciting (I don't think it was just because I was
| younger). I think a lot of it was down to the visuals. You just
| won't get illustrations like that on someone's blog. The
| illustrations made the technology seem more real and certainly
| more glamorous.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I don't think it was just because we were younger. I also don't
| think it was just because of the visuals (though those helped).
| I think a lot of it was because things were moving so fast.
|
| The 386 was an astonishing improvement over the 286. But now,
| the next generation Intel chip is... kind of nice, I guess? But
| it's not all that exciting.
|
| Windows 95 was a _massive_ improvement over Windows 3.0.
| Windows 11 doesn 't make many people very excited compared to
| Windows 10.
|
| A 20 Meg hard drive was _miles_ ahead of floppies. But the last
| storage improvement was... nice, but not life-changing.
|
| Hercules graphics was massively better than stock IBM PC
| graphics. The latest graphics card is exciting if you're a
| gamer, I guess, but it doesn't move the needle much for
| everyone else.
|
| And so on. It was eye-opening every month to see what was new.
| It doesn't feel like that any more.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yeah. $10k on a machine that was old hat by the time it got
| dusty and people just kept buying and buying. We will never
| see anything like that again.
|
| I got my hands on well over $20000 worth of computers before
| I was 18 from hand-me-downs. You couldn't hardly resell used
| computers because they were so out of date by that time...the
| reason people got rid of them.
|
| If it had not been for the used computers and all the churn
| (enthusiast grandfather in charge of tech for the family
| business) I would have never laid hands on one and most
| likely would have ended up in construction.
| dhosek wrote:
| I think the HDD vs floppies comparison is more sensibly
| analogized to SSD vs HDD. That was a massive change. I think
| the Apple Silicon vs Intel upgrade is pretty exciting
| (although a lot of that feels like promise of what might be
| coming in the M2 and beyond), but yes, it's definitely a
| different world than it was in the 90s which was probably the
| period of most rapid technical advancement in personal
| computing.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _SSD vs HDD. That was a massive change._
|
| On a tech level, sure. But not something the majority of
| users have even noticed. (Less noise, maybe.)
|
| > _Apple Silicon vs Intel upgrade_
|
| I've had a hard time explaining to someone the meaning of
| this (and why they should care).
|
| So, no, there is no comparison to the level of innovation
| and the general excitement around the computer tech they
| saw back in the 80s.
| dhosek wrote:
| The speed difference is really quite dramatic. When I
| replaced the boot hard drive on my Mac Mini with a SSD
| after it died, it was an immediately obvious increase in
| performance.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| Agree. I started with personal computing in 1983 and what was
| so exciting about that time, I think, was that _each new
| generation of hardware could do something incredibly cool the
| prior generation fundamentally could not_. I remember feeling
| a nearly constant level of excitement about tech, always so
| stoked to see what was coming next and what incredible new
| capability it would bring to the table.
|
| And Moore's Law didn't hurt either, those clock rate
| increases!
|
| Today's tech is amazing, but the progress is mostly
| incremental and that doesn't tend to get the blood pumping.
| ddingus wrote:
| It was screaming fast!
|
| We went from a discussion on how many colors a machine had,
| whether it flogged a speaker for sound, or had an actual
| sound system, to multi-media excellence, and it happened
| QUICK!
|
| I sure enjoyed my trip through those times.
|
| But, there may be more to come!
|
| Custom silicon is on it's way back around the computing
| circle of life. The way I see it, the different options we've
| seen hold fairly stable for a decade or so have all converged
| on similar ground. Differentiation is sometimes more
| contrived than actual, like the software, or form factor of a
| device, maybe it's ports, mean more than the actual computing
| potential it has. Additionally, we've somewhat peaked in
| terms of sequential compute, and things like multi-media are
| fairly ordinary, and of sufficient quality many don't see a
| big distinction between pro efforts and gear and consumer
| grade gear. Or, it just flat doesn't matter.
|
| And now the dam is breaking!
|
| To gain advantage, and also lock customers in, leverage
| mindshare and data, other investments users have or are
| making, custom silicon is looking very appealing now.
|
| On top of that, the bigger players have the resources to do
| the development, more of what people need to know about doing
| it is out there, and tools are more available now to the
| point where mere mortals can play in this game.
|
| A quick look at something relevant?
|
| Consider the Parallax Propeller 2 microcontroller chip. It's
| done on an older process, 130nm I believe. On that process,
| the creator and team managed to get an 8 core, 300Mhz plus
| design with a lot of features. That project took a decade or
| so, and north of a million. While high, that's not out of
| line compared to what it all was just a short time before.
|
| Chips are done, available for people to buy and build into
| projects / products. It's a custom design with particular
| emphasis on real time, parallel or concurrent programming,
| and data streaming, measurement with all I/O pins capable of
| analog or digital operation. For some applications nothing
| will come close. A great example of what can be done now.
|
| The bigger players have all done, or are working on custom
| silicon for one reason or another. AI, network, computation,
| etc...
|
| Soon, we are going to head back to something closer to that
| era. More highly differentiated devices / machines. Maybe
| there is room for the kind of work BYTE did in some form...
|
| But, whether that happens or not, we may well see custom
| silicon push things forward again in dramatic ways.
| pcamen wrote:
| Hey guys, Peter here from vintageapple.org. My server is
| experiencing a bit of a hug of death from this. Please be kind
| and don't try to download everything all at once. I've had to
| apply a rate limit to that site for now to make sure the
| applications I'm hosting continue to work.
| akvadrako wrote:
| Another source for Byte covers is https://pestingers.net/pages-
| images/antique-computers/byte-m...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "Launching" a software product consisted of taking out an ad in
| the back pages of Byte.
|
| Lotus 1-2-3 was considered revolutionary in marketing circles
| because they spend $1M on _their_ launch.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| My dad gave me one from the 70s and I left it as reading material
| in the back seat of my car.
|
| Any time I took coworkers to lunch it was the catalyst to a lot
| of conversation.
|
| It's fun to regularly peer into the past and be reminded of what
| has changed and what hasn't.
| dfphil wrote:
| Back in the 70's I read kilobyte, excuse me, baud. But Byte
| magazine was cool, too.
| pronoiac wrote:
| Aw, I have a copy of the 1988 Byte issue on Lisp that I ought to
| scan and contribute, though probably to the Internet Archive, as
| I'm not sure how to send it in here.
| abecedarius wrote:
| One of their last really good issues, including a version of
| this condensed intro to SICP:
| https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6064/AIM-986....
| (if that's the issue I'm thinking of).
|
| I had stopped subscribing by then because it was getting more
| "consumery".
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Tangential: does anyone know of a comprehensive scan of 1990s
| Wired magazine?
| tyingq wrote:
| I don't know why it these aren't bundled with similar tags or
| in a collection, but this Internet Archive query gets somewhat
| close:
| https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22wired%22%2...
|
| Edit: Better query that seems to mostly get Wired Magazines
| from 1990-1999. 63 of them, so not all of them, but quite a
| few.
|
| https://archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%28wired%201990...
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