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BYTE Magazine
- wedesoft 8y agoThanks a lot for sharing this!
- skookumchuck 8y agoThis is fantastic, but I'm curious why it isn't more complete. 1988 has only 4 issues. Surely those copies aren't hard to obtain.
- enf 8y agoLooks like there may have been some DMCA takedowns, judging from what some of the missing URLs like https://archive.org/details/BYTE-1988-03 https://archive.org/details/BYTE-1988-03 display.
- kyberias 8y agoPage browsing is horribly broken.
- culot 8y agoSeems to work well for me in Firefox.
- curtis 8y agoI probably learned as much from BYTE as I did from my CS classes in college.
- CamperBob2 8y agoI know I did. I went to the university library one afternoon to look up an article by Lebling and Blank on interactive fiction in the December 1980 issue of Byte, but I got distracted looking at decades' worth of archives of everything from Popular Electronics to Playboy. Ended up killing the whole afternoon in the magazine archive. They eventually dimmed the lights to indicate that the library was closing in a few minutes, so I figured I'd better quit messing around and copy the article I was originally after. Couldn't find it, so I asked a librarian. "Oh, we had to drop that subscription. Budget cuts, you know," was the response. Didn't see much point in the whole college thing after that. They had their priorities, and I had mine.
- jkestner 8y agoLong before copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow was a thing, I was copy-typing code from Byte. Made a cool spiders game that blew my mind with use of PEEK and POKE.
- cyberferret 8y agoOne of my favourite magazines from years ago. One of the first magazines that I actually treated as a book, and not because of its thickness. I used to relish spending the entire month slowly going through the magazine page by page and learning so much.
- protomyth 8y agoBYTE's language issues were always amazing (Smalltalk, Lisp, Modula-2). I also love Byte Magazine Volume 10 Number 13 - Computer Conferencing for an interesting set of articles on ways computer conferencing might go that never happened. I wonder about bringing back some of these ideas given the current social media landscape.
- sizzzzlerz 8y agoOne of the most influential magazines from the early days of personal computing.
- kjhughes 8y agoLoved BYTE growing up -- a great hacker's magazine. Robert Tinney's covers were amazing: https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+tinney+byte&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+tinney+byte&tbm=isch
- leejoramo 8y agoI have always felt that Jerry Pournelle’’s Chaos Manor and Steve Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar were highly influential on the whole idea and style of blogging. The way of writing about technical topics based on personal experience from one’s passion is at the heart of good blogging.
- bryan11 8y agoAgreed, Jerry Pournelle’’s Chaos Manor was always great.
- MegaDeKay 8y agoJerry Pournelle I could have easily lived without. He had piles of his hardware and software given to him, and he had high level access into various companies when he had a problem because of his position at Byte. Couldn't relate, and never understood why people enjoyed his articles that much. OTOH, Steve Ciarcia was like a god to me. The variety and scope of his projects was crazy. I built his BASIC-52 controller board (point to point wiring FTW!) and hung a 2x16 LCD display and SPO256-AL2 speech synthesizer off of it. I marvelled at his "parallel processor" Mandelbrot generator. Every month was one amazing design after another, and I credit him as one of the people that sent me on my path to my EE degree.
- southern_cross 8y agoOne thing I liked about Jerry Pournelle was that whenever he reviewed something he usually gave a blow-by-blow description of all of the problems that he ran into and how he worked around them. Some folks gave him grief about this, but I could relate because I often ran into exactly the same problems that he did. Meanwhile other reviewers usually either glossed over this stuff or just ignored it completely, lest they offend the vendor or Microsoft or whoever. This gave unsuspecting users the impression that installing and running this stuff was a piece of cake, when in fact it could be a real nightmare.
- analog31 8y agoCiarcia helped inspire my career. I was in high school, had learned programming, but was also interested in electronics, math, physics, etc. I got an internship at a computing center, where the work just seemed terribly boring. Of course one person's boredom is another person's excitement. But "programming with solder" was exactly the thing that pulled it all together for me.
- diego_moita 8y agoMy favourite number, that I kept for years later, was from September/1990. It had interviews with everyone that was "important" back then (Gates & Allen (MS), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Doug Engelbart (mouse & GUIs), Tony Hoare (quicksort), Brian Kernigham, Donald Knuth, Bob Metcalfe (Ethernet), Philipe Kahn (Borland), Bob Noyce, Dennis Ritchie (C), Bjarne Stroustroup (C++), Wolfram) predicting the future. None of them predicted the Internet. [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chronofallacy 8y agoDefinitely a gem. Here's a bit on Kapor founding the EFF, while law enforcement compares hackers to rapists: Lotus founder Mitch Kapor and several industry colleagues have formed an organization they say will fight to ensure the Bill of Rights covers computer-based communication and electronic information. The purpose of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (California, MA), is to combat violations of civil liberties, Kapor says, as well as educate government policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and the public about computers. The EFF has taken heat from some members of the industry because they see it as simply a "hacker defense fund," and some law enforcement officials are not necessarily in favor of it. "It's as if NOW started a foundation to come to the assistance of [people charged in] rape cases," says Don Ingraham, chief of the high-tech crime team and an assistant district attorney for Alameda County in northern California. "We don't know what to think of it." He says he doesn't understand why the computer industry would defend people trying to break into their systems.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- peapicker 8y agoDo you mean none of them predicted the web? We were already calling it the internet when I started college in 88 and after all, it ran on TCP/IP(the latter stands for Internet Protocol) which ARPANET adopted in 1983.
- joezydeco 8y agoBYTE kept up on industry developments way better than any other mainstream magazine of the era. They were covering SIGGRAPH when nobody else was. For a middle school kid to know about Pixar's hardware architecture? That was pretty unique.
- donaldihunter 8y agoI grew up reading BYTE and Your Computer https://archive.org/details/yourcomputer_magazine https://archive.org/details/yourcomputer_magazine
- kohala 8y agoI like the headline for the issue from September 1992: Is Unix Dead? Soon Unix will face its most powerful adversary to date: Microsoft Windows NT. Will Unix Survive?
- sbjs 8y agoIf AWS didn't use Linux for servers and Apple chose to buy BeOS instead of NeXT, would Unix be around as prominently as it is right now?
- mark-r 8y agoIt certainly wouldn't be as prominent, and the ecosystem wouldn't be as rich. But it would still exist - the things that people like about it would still be there, and it had momentum before those things you mentioned.
- supernovae 8y agoFunny people credit AWS or Apple... Neither really convinced people unix was worth it in such a way that Sun Solaris did. Too bad they collapsed and oracle of all places snagged 'em.
- dboreham 8y agoYou mean SunOS -- Solaris is quite new.
- supernovae 8y agoSolaris superseded SunOS in 1993 and let's be honest, Solaris 2.6 is when Sun "shined". most of us linux beards just see it as a linear progression until oracle murdered it.
- joe_the_user 8y agoUnix-type servers have always dominant as web servers and this alone made is so a substantial portion of CPUs in the world boot with such kernels even in the 90s I think. With Unix-like-oses having some inherent advantages over Windows, and the successful open source model making Linux and BSD free and in constant development, in hindsight the extension of Unix-like-oses to more and more domains seems inevitable. The only thing standing in the way of a Unix/Linux future really was the potential of microkernel OSes but over many years, these have failed to live up to their hype (GNU began development of HURD before Linux was announced). I mean, Google using Linux internally and using it for the development of Android seem like more obvious breakout moments to me. But there many such moments says to me that no one of them mattered that much.
- discreteevent 8y agoI couldn't afford to buy every issue. But when I did I read it cover to cover. It's hard to believe now, but apart from Byte and Dr Dobbs there just wasn't any other source for tech news where I lived (at least for someone who was half programmer - half build your own pc/local network)
- ngcc_hk 8y agoReally the only source here in Hong Kong in 1980s. Nothing else compared.
- css 8y agoThe only magazine I grew up with was MacAddict; was it normal for magazines to routinely be over 300 pages (and mostly full of ads)? Edit: they have archived MacAddict too: https://archive.org/details/macaddict?&sort=date https://archive.org/details/macaddict?&sort=date
- supernovae 8y agoyeah, you should have seen computer shopper magazine in its hayday.
- spc476 8y agoI know that the magazine (The Rainbow Magazine) that was dedicated to the computer I had (the Tandy Color Computer) was easily over 250 pages during its heyday (mid-80s). And it's not like the Color Computer was one of the more popular computers like the Atari 400/800, Apple ][ or Commodore-64.
- vijucat 8y agoLove it. I grew up reading these. Somehow, they made their way to Hyderabad, India, and were sold on the roadside [1] for mere rupees, but had the top 20% of the front cover torn off. I never got that...Maybe a way to prevent re-sale in the US? Anyway, 13-year old me absolutely loved BYTE and PC Magazine from the US and a bunch of Sinclair ZX Spectrum assembler and BASIC books from the UK ("Shiva's friendly micro series"). I used to wait for Sunday to go a-book hunting: a couple of MAD magazines and a BYTE magazine made for a perfect weekend in 1988 :-) I remember my grandfather's chagrin when he heard that I wanted to spend money on an IBM PC-XT clone rather than a Panasonic VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) [2]. What IS a computer, anyway?? A foolish, expensive toy, pah! He wasn't entirely wrong, of course :-) I went nuts authoring an Editor in raw machine code, writing TSRs, and trying to hack the higher levels of Montezuma's revenge's by fiddling with it's machine code for a couple of years. 1. https://www.whatshot.in/hyderabad/forgotten-book-bazaars-of-hyderabad-c-2664 https://www.whatshot.in/hyderabad/forgotten-book-bazaars-of-... 2. "The price of Christmas past: £599 for a VHS recorder": https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/19/price-christmas-past-boots-catalogue https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/19/price-c...
- enf 8y agoWhen the cover is missing, it usually means a book or magazine was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher for a refund.
- antod 8y agoAssuming it worked the same in India, magazine sellers 'returned' unsold copies by sending back just the cover titles to the distributor instead of the whole thing. You were buying the unsold 'returns'.
- ape4 8y agoIt was great when almost the entire industry was in one magazine.
- guard0g 8y agoBrings back fond memories! Have to dig out my cassette drive...
- 8bitsrule 8y agoBah. By far the cooler 'hacker's magazine' (as someone put it) was Transactor. Available at the same source! https://archive.org/search.php?query=transactor https://archive.org/search.php?query=transactor Byte was so ... conventionally-oriented. "A friend to all is a friend to none." Scrambled ... or benedict?
- reaperducer 8y agoJust minutes ago I was reading the November, 1975 issue of Byte. The cover splash is about someday in the futuristic future when we’re all driving around in flying cars and eating meal pills, you may possibly be able to buy calculators and computers in a STORE! Crazy!
- whitten 8y agoAnother great magazine that helped me get up to speed on computers was Kilobaud Magazin. I guess it's name is kinda dated in the days of Gigabaud transmissions, as a kilobaud was 1024 bits per second, or 128 bytes per second. Anyway, you can review Kilobaud Magazine on Internet Archive using the URL : https://archive.org/search.php?query=Kilobaud https://archive.org/search.php?query=Kilobaud
- HocusLocus 8y agoWow I remember Kilobaud April 1979, that introduction to Quicksort with examples in BASIC, copying it down to carry around with me in a little notebook. Shell-Metzer was also popular at the time. I had a TRS-80m1(Z80) and Kilobaud was like a bible.
- 8bitsrule 8y agoPublisher Wayne Greene (good guy) had actually started Byte magazine (sordid details) ... but Kilobaud (as Wikipedia notes) was definitely for more technical readers ... down-to-metal hardware and software wisdom. (I only recently parted company with ish's #1 and #2.)
- JoeDaDude 8y agoAlong these lines, who remembers Algorithm magazine? Published by computer scientist and author A. K. Dewdney. It only ran for a couple of years in the mid 90's. [1] is the only reference I've found. If anyone has issues, please contact me. [1] http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/StreetTech/Algorithm.html http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/StreetTech/Algorithm.h...
- zuminator 8y agoBYTE was great, sort of a microcomputing version of the more upmarket mini-/mainframe Datamation magazine. But as a hobbyist I was more drawn to Creative Computing [1] and the even funkier Compute! [2] magazine in its exclamation point heyday. 1. https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing 2. https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine
- jlc 8y agoOh man! I forgot all about Creative Computing. I loved Compute! and Compute!’s Gazette and Byte though.
- ChrisGranger 8y agoI was a big fan of Compute! and Compute's! Gazette as well. There were also Ahoy! And Ahoy!'s AmigaUser: https://archive.org/details/ahoy-magazine https://archive.org/details/ahoy-magazine
- vram22 8y agoCUJ (C User's Journal, but it covered C++ too) and DDJ (Dr. Dobb's Journal) were great too. Not sure about CUJ, but DDJ stopped a few years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/C%2B%2B_Users_Journal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/C%2B%2B_Users_Journal Both of them used to have really solid programming content for quite a while. BYTE, IIRC, became much commercial and ad-oriented in its later years, with less of quality tech content for makers, and more of product reviews and such, instead.
- vram22 8y ago>but DDJ stopped a few years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal#End https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal#End http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-dr-dobbs/240169421 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-dr-d...
- dosy 8y agoWhat particularly interested me was this August 1981 ad for "Palantir" business software. From page 31: https://vgy.me/YYyBSg.jpg https://vgy.me/YYyBSg.jpg
- southern_cross 8y agoI was a Byte subscriber at the time, and IIRC one of its last issues (which I can't seem to find in the archive) had a big article which compared Unix to Windows and came to a pro-Unix, anti-Windows conclusion. I was quite surprised at this because at the time the industry had reached a point where you dare not say anything against Microsoft, otherwise you would feel the full wrath of Bill Gates. And I remember thinking to myself "Wow, I bet Bill is really going to be unhappy about this!" So it came as no real surprise to me when in short order Byte was bought up and then just abruptly shut down.
- jim_lawless 8y agoI started reading Byte in the mid-80's, while at tech school. It was a great source of information on all kinds of computing subjects. It began to lose it's attraction (for me) when they stopped publishing source code. I still have a paper copy of Volume 5, number 11. The Huffman encoding article showed a very creative way of recursively writing out the code-tree for static Huffman encoding. I can't remember which issues they're in, but a couple of other memorable articles include a fast CRC32 calculation which introduced the table-lookup to speed up the process that quickly became the norm. The other article that I really enjoyed was the Circuit Cellar article where Steve Ciarcia had locked himself out of his house with brownies baking in the oven. He was going to have to break in to his burglar-proof house before the brownies began to burn and his high-tech smoke-detection system would automatically call the fire department. If I remember right, there's a picture of Steve in soldier gear, complete with a bandolier with IC chips where bullets would normally have appeared. It was a great magazine.
- vram22 8y ago>I still have a paper copy of Volume 5, number 11. The Huffman encoding article showed a very creative way of recursively writing out the code-tree for static Huffman encoding. I remember reading that article in an old copy of BYTE that I picked up at a used book shop. The article was really good. It was early in my career and I remember being thinking what a cool algorithm it was, and felt good that I could understand how it worked. IIRC, the author's name was Jonathan Amsterdam.
- jim_lawless 8y agoYes it was! They have the issue at the archive: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05
- vram22 8y agoGreat, thanks. Will check it out.
- vram22 8y ago
- walrus01 8y agoIt is really interesting looking at older ads from 1993, how much home PC/workstation stuff has dropped in price. A fairly ordinary Gateway 2000 486DX2/50 desktop PC with 8MB of RAM, adjusted from Dec. 1993 to today's date for inflation ( https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm ) is $5200 US dollars. At that time it's kind of a mid range offering since Gateway and others were also selling much more costly 486DX2/66 and Pentium 60/66 MHz machines. Today for $5200 (sans monitor) you can build one hell of a beast of a Threadripper machine with factory-overclocked GTX1080 Ti, probably 1TB of Samsung NVME M.2 SSD, etc.
- pcurve 8y agoyou are right. I think that was part of the appeal. Even though I didn't have a PC nor could I afford one as a teenager I religiously read these computer magazines cover to cover including all the ads. in fact I enjoyed reading ads more.
- unicornporn 8y agoSo, this is obviously still in copyright. Pointing the light at these items in the archive should be a sure way to make the copyright trolls aware and eventually have them removed from there?
- sehugg 8y agoNotable article from BYTE May 1977: "The Apple-II System Description" by Stephen Wozniak (http://ethw.org/w/images/0/03/The-Apple-II-by-Stephen-Wozniak.pdf http://ethw.org/w/images/0/03/The-Apple-II-by-Stephen-Woznia...)
- abecedarius 8y agoHard to measure up to that one, but Abelson & Sussman's from 1988 (iirc) article-length compression of SICP made a strong impression on me.
- gglitch 8y agoDrat - that issue (Feb 88, according to Sussman's CV at https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/gjs.html https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/gjs.html) doesn't seem to be in the archive.
- abecedarius 8y agoHere's a pdf: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5468189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5468189
- cpr 8y agoI was a minor figure in the starting of Byte back in, what 1974? Can't remember the year. I worked with Carl Helmers (original editor, who had a hobbyist micro newsletter already going, dealing with 8008's, etc.) and Dan Fylstra (a friend from high school days in San Diego, later founder of Visicorp, publisher of Visicalc, the first "killer app" in the PC world) at Intermetrics in Cambridge (Fresh Pond), a gov't consulting firm. Carl and Dan and I went up one summer day to Wayne Green (ham radio magazine publisher)'s place in New Hampshire and hashed out the basics. I only wrote a couple of articles, helped with editing, and then school hit (I was starting junior year, I think) and I faded out. (Was also working more than full-time at Intermetrics (much more fun than school) while also attending Harvard full-time.) But it was fun while it lasted...
- cpr 8y agoI knew Dan from systems hacking in high school ('72?) on the IBM 360 out at San Diego State (no idea how I got involved there). Lynn Brock was the head of the systems group there, and Henry Burgess was involved as well. Dan went on to found Visicorp after MIT and Harvard Business School, Lynn worked with him there to make VisiOn, a much ahead-of-its-time windowing OS for the PC, which eventually brought down VisiCorp, and Henry ended up at Microsoft as Gates's right-hand man for years. Odd group.
- peterkelly 8y agoSkimming through these today is the first time I've ever found the ads just as interesting to read as the articles themselves.
- Jenz 8y agoI wish someone could revive this.
- darren_ 8y agoInteresting reading these in the light of excessively intrusive advertising on websites being one of HN's favourite dead horses to beat. I'm reading the smalltalk issue and the introductory editorial has a hyphenated word split over a two page ad spread plus a half page ad on the page it finishes on. Which is also opposite a full page ad. (the next two pages are ads)
- protomikron 8y agoI wanted to mention the same thing, it is littered with ads. However I remember reading some gaming related magazine way back in the early 2000s and there were also many ads (and still are I guess), so it's not a BYTE specific thing, but print-media in general.
- jonhendry18 8y agoThose ads are how they could publish a 500 page monthly magazine for $2.50. And at the time, the ads were to some extent also useful information about the industry, in a period where there wasn't much available.
- gglitch 8y agoImportant difference between ads that can see you and those that can’t.
- ehudla 8y agoA prescient issue that I think is missing from the archive was the one on the work at Xerox on ubiquitous computing. It stuck in mind my mind when I first read it, and I am reminded of it from time to time when I reach for my iPhone.
- ehudla 8y agoToo bad Dr Dobbs isn't also available.
- transfire 8y agoThe Amiga issue. I held on to that one forever. Also learned Prolog from Byte magazine. Really miss that mag.
- ffdixon1 8y agoI grew up on Byte magazine. Love the covers and the articles on programming. My parents had bought me a TRS-80 Model I with Level III Basic and learned programming by typing in programs (and then debugging them) from Byte and other magazines. Did anyone ever type in the Scott Adams Treasure Island adventure game from the December 1980 issue? https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12
- gglitch 8y agoIn another universe I’m mining these for ideas for retrofuture/cyberpunk rpg and short fiction ideas.
- chasingthewind 8y agoI took a look at the IBM PC issue from Fall 1984. One of the first quotes that made me smile was this: "But the euphoria of a faster disk drive and seemingly limitless disk space eventually gives way to the realization that you can fill up even 10 megabytes sooner than you think." [0] Especially if you read back issues of byte at ~200mb per PDF :D [0] https://ia800701.us.archive.org/1/items/byte-magazine-1984-09/1984_09_BYTE_09-09_Guide_to_the_IBM_PCs.pdf https://ia800701.us.archive.org/1/items/byte-magazine-1984-0...
- JabavuAdams 8y agoOh wow! I I actually forgot about BYTE. BYTE and Dr. Dobb's Journal are what made me who I am.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoThe thing I remember from that era was most of what I read about in Byte being out of reach financially. The open source movement has made software much more accessible. If I want to learn to program in Go or Haskell I don't need to start by reaching for my wallet.