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Byte Magazine: Future Computers (1981)
- geocrasher 7y agoI wish I had more time to thumb through this whole magazine page by page. Some interesting things I noticed in the first 100 pages or so: A Microsoft CP/M Z80 board for the Apple II; A 5.25" Floppy drive: A BARGAIN at $479 (About $1300 in today's currency) and a full 2 page CompuServe advertisement which included pictures of their data center, complete with major Big Iron.
- rb808 7y agoYeah I noticed CompuServe was just $5/hr, plus your call charges I guess.
- ghaff 7y agoSo something like $10-$15/hr in current currency. And, yeah, depending on if it were a local call, phone charges could add to that considerably. You tended to use scripts and programs to download, work offline, and then upload.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- StanislavPetrov 7y agoIn the mid 80s Compuserve used to cost $6/hr at 300 baud but they would charge you $12 if you connected at 1200 baud.
- ghaff 7y agoI didn't remember the exact numbers but, yeah, you connected at slow speed if you were going to do something interactive like chat and "high" speed if you were just going to download/upload and disconnect.
- philiplu 7y agoSure, but they’ve got the Colossal Cave Adventure game on there, and there’s always one more twisty little passage to explore, and before you know it, you’ve blown through $100 in connect charges, even though you’re a poor college student. Not that I’d know anything about that, I swear! I miss the 80s, too. Such a great time to get in on the ground floor of the technology wave. And spend money I couldn’t afford to spend.
- WalterBright 7y ago> Such a great time to get in on the ground floor of the technology wave. I coulda been a billionaire if I'd done things slightly differently!
- jacquesm 7y agoThere must be quite a few people on HN for who that holds.
- WalterBright 7y agoYup. I was hardly unique in utterly failing to recognize opportunity.
- Koshkin 7y agoBeing Bill Gates, John Carmack or Steve Jobs is not “doing things slightly differently.”
- WalterBright 7y agoIn the 70's, I worked for a small company that made custom single board computers for various customers. In doing so, we had developed all kinds of software for our own use, like assemblers, linkers, debuggers, etc. All first class stuff. I even designed, built, and programmed video drivers for monitors. We had EVERYTHING needed to build an Apple II. Everything except being able to see what was right in front of our face. One of the other employees (Hal Finney, you might have heard of him) wrote a BASIC interpreter that fit in a 2K PROM. We did nothing with it. Never occurred to us that it was worth anything. So what do I do? I go into the compiler business, which paid well, but had zero prospects of big money :-)
- JKCalhoun 7y agoProgram listings the magazine. DIY hardware articles.... I want to live in the 80's again.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoYep, was just reminded of the Heath kit. Always wanted to try but never had the chance.
- WalterBright 7y agoI had an H11. Stupid me sold it.
- ghaff 7y agoAt one point, the editor-in-chief of PC Mag coined something that came to be called "Machrone's Law" that the computer you wanted always cost $5,000 dollars (in then current dollars). This is clearly still possible and more--vis-a-vis the latest Mac Pro. But it used to be very possible to spend something like $10K in today's money to but a pretty basic PC.
- ido 7y agoDepends on what you define as basic, but that price point was always the absolute top of the high end for PCs (albeit not for e.g. UNIX workstations). In my first job (in 2001) some expensive piece of equipment was controlled by a compaq deskpro 386 with a proprietary ISA card + some hardware dongle that only worked on old computers running DOS (wouldn't work on Win9x DOS). My boss at the time told me they spent $10k on that computer alone when they bought it in the 80s but that replacing the equipment it was controlling would cost upwards of a million $, so we had to keep that old PC alive.
- ghaff 7y agoI'm mostly talking quite a while before that. When I bought my first IBM PC clone in the early 80s, it was probably $3K or something like that and it didn't even have a hard drive. (I bought a 5MB hard drive with company money around the same time and it was $5K all by itself.)
- Gibbon1 7y agoI think the general idea was right, except I would put the price at $2500-3000 as the sweet spot. Back then if you spent $5000 on a system you'd be able to buy it for 2/3 that price in six months to a year. Anything less than $1500-2000 was near obsolete.
- tobmlt 7y agoWow - I am surprised and delighted to see an article on recurrence relations with an implementation for Bessel functions. They don't make 'em like this anymore!
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoByte was an unusual mix of hands-on EE with soldering, marketing hype, tinkering-level programming, with occasional undergrad or even grad-level CS. Also thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of ads.
- jacquesm 7y agoThose ads were how you kept current in those days. Between the big computer trade shows there was a gap of 6 to 9 months, the only way the news would trickle out was through the ads and articles and there were many more ads than articles. And they were a great source of inspiration too, if you couldn't afford what was advertised you could at least try to build it.
- ghaff 7y agoLook at Computer Shopper. People actually paid for it even though the editorial content was lightweight at best.
- ghaff 7y agoByte was basically a holdout from the early personal computer hobbyist days and, except perhaps at the end, never really succumbed to becoming a magazine for corporate buyers and users. It was a magazine for all the eclectic stuff someone interested in computers, especially from a hobby perspective, might like to read. So, as you say, you had low-level hardware hacking (Circuit Cellar), a lot of random PC hardware, programming, algorithms, etc. It was always a bit of an odd mix and probably wasn't as "useful" for me as PC Magazine was at the time. But I appreciated the breadth even if some of it was pretty random. Dr. Dobbs occupied a somewhat similar space but pretty much exclusively on the software side.
- rb808 7y agoLooks like inflation makes $1 in 1982 about $2.67 today. https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1982?amount=1 https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1982?amount=1 So the Apple II+ were $4000+ in today's money. Still doesn't make the new Mac Pro look reasonable. :) Those 80 column mono-color screens though, nice.
- scarface74 7y agoThe Mac //fx was $9000 in 1990 - $17200 inflation adjusted.
- sgerenser 7y agoBut that 40MHz 68030 was wicked fast!
- scarface74 7y agoIf you look at the Wikipedia description, it was the Mac Pro of its day. It came with hardware that was rather extreme. I remember the lust I felt over reading about it in Macworld. It had two 10Mhz specialized 65C02 chips just to control IO. I was rocking an Apple //e at the time with a 1Mhz 65C02. Two years later, I got a Mac LCII with a 16Mhz/68030. A year after that, I got a 40Mhx accelerator for it and ran Speedometer to discover at least in the benchmarks, it ran about the same speed.
- brandonmenc 7y ago> So the Apple II+ were $4000+ in today's money. Still doesn't make the new Mac Pro look reasonable. :) A rich hierarchy of professional-grade desktop-ish-sized computers no longer exists because the PC architecture replaced everything. The Mac Pro is the modern equivalent of an SGI workstation or - if we're talking late 1970s, when the Apple II was introduced - maybe a DEC VAX - both of which could cost up to a quarter million dollars. It's actually unbelievable how cheap the Mac Pro is if you think in those terms.
- stan_rogers 7y ago
- sehugg 7y agoThey don't remove hidden lines like that anymore, do they? Nor do they solve Go quite the same way.
- ngcc_hk 7y agoThe pages on programming of Go is a surprise good read.
- themew 7y agoThanks so much for posting this link. The ads in the back pages bring me back to the early 80's and remind me where we came from (acoustic modems, 16K ram) to today. Geez, I feel so old...
- cobbzilla 7y agoPlease turn to page 170 and enjoy the best ad ever published, for game publishing house Crystal Computer. I'd love to play "Galactic Quest" the self-proclaimed "ultimate space adventure" in which "Vegan warships attack and fire in real time simulation" The artwork used in the ad reminds me of concert posters for 80's high school bands.
- mlyle 7y agohttps://www.mobygames.com/game/apple2/galactic-quest/screenshots/gameShotId,965791/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/apple2/galactic-quest/screens...
- mixmastamyk 7y agoDidn’t know that word existed back then. I do remember a console game we joked about called, “advanced communist mutants from space!”
- reaperducer 7y ago"Vegan" in this context means warships from the star system Vega, not self-imposed herbivores.
- DerekL 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Mutants_from_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Mutants_from_Space
- kyberias 7y agoThat issue has a article about "building your own Turing machine".
- kyberias 7y agoCheck out the black-hole diode on page 362.
- andrewstuart 7y agoI picked up a collection of several hundred byte magazines the other day going back to 1984.
- jacquesm 7y agoThat's worth it for the cover art alone.
- zozbot234 7y agoDid you check if all of them are on the IA already? The archive collection seems to have some weird gaps where random issues appear to be missing, while others have been scanned and uploaded multiple times. The metadata are also not perfect for some reason, so it's hard to search for an issue in the whole collection.
- pronoiac 7y agoI think I have a physical copy of one with a bad scan; suggestions on scanning? I'm in San Francisco.
- zozbot234 7y agoThese days you can "scan" magazines and books with great results simply by taking photos of the pages with a high-quality digital camera. (This is a method of "scanning" which used to be reserved for rare and valuable artifacts, but has now become quite feasible in general.) There's even software like Hugin that will help merge multiple photos of a page into a single image, while correcting for distortion.
- ghaff 7y ago>"great results" Sort of. You can get a pretty functional copy by just opening it up on your dining room table. (Though magazines are more likely to stay wide open than books are.) An evenly lit and flat to the spine copy probably requires some sort of copy stand. At times I've thought of buying or making one but concluded it wasn't worth the effort to me.
- jacquesm 7y agoHow many of the companies named in those ads are still around in one form or another? Mine goes back to 1986, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these are still around today.
- GoofballJones 7y agoWell, there was an ad for the Apple II in there. "Now with upper/lower case!"
- GoofballJones 7y agoI really miss Byte. I used to read it all the time. They had many diverse articles in it, not just about computers in general. For instance, Byte was where I first learned about Pixar's Renderman. They also had positive coverage of the Amiga.
- johnnycab 7y agoThe entire archive of Byte Magazine. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine
- montyboy_us 7y agoPg. 211 - Battelle Labs researching Credit Cards with built-in microchips. 1981. Guess sometimes adoption is ... slow
- Gibbon1 7y agoFriend of mine in the mid 1980's did some PCB layout work for some guys that wanted to put RF ID's on products to replace barcodes. The idea was you just roll your shopping cart past a reader station. He said they got it sort of working. Worked but the cost was too high. And the reader RF power was way too high.
- ChrisArchitect 7y agoupvoting for the reminder to revisit all the great Byte cover art -- I mean, there were a lot of giant black floppy disks flying around back in the day!