4 ms·
I 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 a
by jim_lawless 8y ago
I 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>IIRC, the author's name was Jonathan Amsterdam. Googled his name and found this video by a person with that name, may be the same person whom I mentioned above. He worked at Google on cloud client libraries for Go. Queued to watch later. GopherCon 2017 - Lightning Talk: Jonathan Amsterdam - Errors as Side Notes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wW2U9SGKKI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wW2U9SGKKI Update: I just watched the video, it's very short, and the tool he describes seems useful for understanding new Go code. I won't describe what it does - go watch the video (pun intended).
- jonhendry18 8y agoCircuit Cellar is still around. It was owned by a Dutch company for a while but Ciarcia bought it back.