4 ms·

Wow - 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 ago
  Byte 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 ago
    Those 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 ago
      Look at Computer Shopper. People actually paid for it even though the editorial content was lightweight at best.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    Byte 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.