8 ms·
Vintage Byte Magazine Library
- Waterluvian 5y agoMy 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.
- cpr 5y agoNostalgia! 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 5y agoThank 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 5y agoThanks 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.
- tomcam 5y agoBYTE was amazing. Feel proud of what you helped create. I met Wayne in the mid 2000s and had him on my radio show multiple times. Amazing character. I miss him.
- georgeecollins 5y agoThank you! As a boy you inspired me and set me on a great career.
- watersb 5y agoI learned a huge amount, just reading BYTE cover to cover in seventh grade. I still treasure those, although now I enjoy them on a tablet computer. It's how I got into this. Such great times. Thanks.
- jqcoffey 5y agoI know we’re a small community overall, but I’m really (probably naively) surprised that a publication like Byte is no longer viable. The Linux whatever’s, PC whatever’s and Mac whatever’s, and even Communications of ACM and the equivalents just aren’t the same thing.
- drunkenmagician 5y agoNostalgia indeed. I was a long time Byte subscriber, and along with Dr Dobbs, it was my 'source of truth' for tech news. I've spent far to long reminiscing today over these Byte issues, ah the memories, a real blast. Now back to work ;(
- aplc0r 5y agoThough 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_06-05_Software_Piracy.pdf https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198105_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0...
- jandrese 5y agoIt 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,170.04h,75.71t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sBpPe34Kb6vtEHkzeLWtLUA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9306426,-77.237681,3a,75y,17...
- cristoperb 5y agoHere's what's available on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?&sort=date 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.
- makeworld 5y agoThe ones this collection has should definitely be uploaded.
- Thoreandan 5y agoIt looks like some content from vintageapple is already donated to IA https://archive.org/details/macbooks https://archive.org/details/macbooks
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoFrom a couple years ago maybe? Some other Byte mag convos lately: week ago on cover art https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28607038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28607038 Logo language issue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556 another cover archive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26453783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26453783
- dfphil 5y agoBack in the 70’s I read kilobyte, excuse me, baud. But Byte magazine was cool, too.
- blondin 5y agothanks 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)
- discreteevent 5y agoLooking 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 5y agoI 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.
- dhosek 5y agoI 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 5y ago> 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.
- akvadrako 5y agoAnother source for Byte covers is https://pestingers.net/pages-images/antique-computers/byte-magazines/byte-magazine-covers.htm https://pestingers.net/pages-images/antique-computers/byte-m...
- kaycebasques 5y agoTangential: does anyone know of a comprehensive scan of 1990s Wired magazine?
- tyingq 5y agoI 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%20collection%3A%28%22magazine_rack%22%29 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%29%20OR%20title%3A%28wired%201991%29%20OR%20title%3A%28wired%201992%29%20OR%20title%3A%28wired%201993%29%20OR%20title%3A%28wired%201994%29%20OR%20title%3A%28wired%201995%29OR%20title%3A%28wired%201995%29%20OR%20title%3A%28wired%201996%29%20OR%20title%3A%28wired%201997%29%20OR%20title%3A%28wired%201998%29%20OR%20title%3A%28wired%201999%29 https://archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%28wired%201990...
- jjarvis 5y agoI would love to see a reboot of Byte Magazine even if it only came back in digital form.
- rchaud 5y agoA 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 5y agoOr... It's subscription only, and maybe those other things don't matter so much.
- datavirtue 5y agoNo 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.
- ddingus 5y agoAll depends on the format, does it not? A printed publication, perhaps with audio supplement (podcast type thing), would not be a venue. And at the same time, may well be super compelling, given it has an industry voice and perspective similar to what BYTE had.
- rchaud 5y agoMIT Technology Review is subscription-based and they have podcasts and YT channels. You could run expensive ads in print mags like Scientific American or Harvard Business Review, but you'll reach a far bigger audience online. This will be true even if the subscription fee was hundreds of dollars per year. Podcasts and short videos are effectively low-cost infomercials for your product. Their purpose is not to make revenue by reading out intermittent ads, but attract an audience that might subscribe.
- ajmarsh 5y agoI 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 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-11
- ddingus 5y agoI love them too. Always did. Great art, relevant, thought provoking.
- rcarmo 5y agoWell, 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.
- twinge 5y agoThe 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_21-12_Chips_Changed_the_World.pdf https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/199612_Byte_Magazine_Vol_2... - page 86 in the magazine, page 90 in the PDF
- cblconfederate 5y agoPeople 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.
- hanche 5y agoBut 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.)
- amelius 5y agoI 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.
- datavirtue 5y agoPeople 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.
- ddingus 5y agoRemember, 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)
- timthorn 5y ago
- pronoiac 5y agoAw, 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 5y agoOne 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.pdf;jsessionid=9B6B8F279FDAC150B9DCA19858ECB6A6?sequence=2 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".
- nunez 5y agoLooking 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 5y agoIt 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 5y agoMany initially interesting publications have suffered the same fate. As a more recent example, Ars Technica is getting there.
- nunez 5y agoI'm even more sad about Ars and Anandtech since I still remember when they were both deeply technical
- JKCalhoun 5y agoYou're describing the industry.
- gootler 5y agoarchive.org has a lot more and a lot better.
- Diederich 5y agoI've always found the advertisements at least as interesting as the actual content.
- UI_at_80x24 5y agoOne 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.
- EarlKing 5y agoThis 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.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoThey did get sold around then to McGraw Hill. Probably not a coincidence.
- rbanffy 5y agoAs PCs consolidated the market, a lot of the initial diversity died. When the hardware platform consolidated, so did the software and it became much less important to be able to program for the platform you chose because there were very few to choose from. There was, of course, a ton on innovation on peripherals. Laser, ink jet printers, optical storage seemed to be the future (and it was, for some time), Unix workstations… Even after the PC killed off most of the home computer market, the high-end was still a thriving ecosystem.
- georgeecollins 5y agoDr Dobb's was good too. It never had the magic for me that Byte did, but I remember it being interesting.
- AlbertCory 5y ago"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.
- cblconfederate 5y agoI 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'
- pcf 5y agoMany 404 errors for the PDF links. Just FYI.
- pcamen 5y agoHey 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.
- DannyB2 5y agoDownload old BYTE magazines from here: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Byte_Magazine.htm https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Byte_Magazine.htm Or higher quality scans here: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine Or Popular Electronics: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Guide.htm https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Gui... Creative Computing: https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing
- JKCalhoun 5y agoYes, American Radio History is one of my favorite sites (to hoard from). Lots more than just Byte and Popular Electronics.
- Sunspark 5y agoI 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 5y agoI remember how shocking it was when SoftTalk came out. It didn't have program listings in it!
- Sunspark 5y agoThat's why the T-800 Terminator's code was from Nibble magazine. SoftTalk didn't want to create Skynet.
- dhosek 5y agoThere was an article published in Nibble that I desperately wanted to read¹ back around 1982ish, but the only library near me that carried it was a few suburbs away. I remember calling the library to make sure they had the issue on hand and the library thinking that I was joking. 13-year-old me patiently explained to her that a nibble was half a byte which didn't really help my case.² 1. If I recall correctly, it provided a way to use a 100ohm dual pot joystick from Radio Shack with the Apple ][ which expected 150ohm pots on its paddle/joystick inputs. 2. And because you're probably dying to know, it turns out that the issue in question had gone missing, so I never did learn how to make that joystick work with an Apple ][, but then I also didn't have the money to buy one anyway.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
- datavirtue 5y agoThis reminds me of the unconstrained optimism and ambition of my youth. Like Byte, all of that is gone now. Thank you for the work.
- HelixEndeavor 5y agoAre there any modern tech magazines that capture anything similar to the wonder of these, instead of feeling like a collections of advertisements and ego pieces on Elon Musk?
- dirkg 5y agoI miss BYTE. Growing up in a country where we didn't have much resources and certainly no money to actually own a computer, but the school library did have a subscription to a few mags. BYTE was amazing. Is there any mirror? I'd rather not put more strain on his server. And are there archives of other mags like Dr.Dobbs?
- PaulHoule 5y agoI read these as a kid, but I got a few of these from the antique mall a few weeks ago and I was amazed at how half baked it was at times (the industry was moving so fast a few months of latency meant they were often out of date.) Steve Ciracia was the guy holding it all together. Every month he published a hardware project that was commercial quality (you could buy it) except for the occasional two month project. It was a running gag that he coded with a soldering iron, struggled with assembly, probably didn’t know basic and logo, forget about it. Despite that some months he would answer all the letters to the editor which ranged from ‘too bad they don’t document things like this’, to ‘you can buy that from the Jameco catalog’ to ‘here are three ways to fix a corrupted word star disk if you moved it to a subdirectory because it was written for DOS 1 and doesn’t support subdirectories.’
- chadcmulligan 5y agoI worked at a place where we used one of Steve Ciarcias circuits - the 8052-AH Basic module and used it as a security controller. We took the circuit as it was in the magazine, and built it and added some optocouplers and it worked, it was unique. Upon thought, I think we also used an 8051 microcontroller circuit as well.
- PaulHoule 5y agoCiarcia could be so prolific because most of his circuits were centered around an integrated circuit such as a CPU, voice synthesizer, graphics controller, etc. Many of his projects were really a fully realized example of an example circuit from the project datasheet as opposed to an adventure in discrete logic such as Steve Wozniak's "Breakout with 44 chips."
- ASalazarMX 5y ago> Hi Hacker News folks. Thanks for visiting. Unfortunately all the simultanious connectons downloading large PDFs is putting a bit of strain on my server which is also serving some other important stuff.I've had to apply a rate limit to the site to make sure everyting still works reasonably If only there was a tool to offload this static content to a network of peers so bandwidth usage was not an issue. We could call it Flood to emphasize the large amount of traffic. Joke aside, I refrained from looking around because if the server is struggling, my nostalgia can wait a few days.
- solarized 5y agoBeautiful ! > Please don't download too much at once please just torrent it bro.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoWow. Found an ad in 1978 for a DECwriter II for $1495. A printer. With lousy (by 2021 standards) graphics (or none; I don't recall DECwriter specs). $1495. A DECwriter III was $2895. The world has moved a lot in the last 33 years...
- watersb 5y agoAn index of BYTE issues available via archive.org, which may be able to handle your collective enthusiasm: https://anarchivism.org/w/Byte_(Magazine) https://anarchivism.org/w/Byte_(Magazine)
- roca 5y agoI swear I can smell that distinctive BYTE smell right now.
- password4321 5y agoI recently discovered Dr. Dobb's Developer Library DVD 6: https://archive.org/details/DDJDVD6 https://archive.org/details/DDJDVD6 articles from Dr. Dobb's Journal from January 1988 through December 2008, articles from C/C++ Users Journal from January 1990 through February 2006, articles from SysAdmin from January 1992 through August 2007, and articles from The Perl Journal from Spring 1996 through April 2005 -- Unfortunately the source code included is only (often partial) listings that were printed in the magazine, I couldn't find the entire projects that were made available via the 'electronic Resource Center' (which I believe was an ftp site that was never archived). -- Edit: The Internet Archive also has scans of Dr. Dobb's Journal from 1976-1987: https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal
- KSS42 5y agoI just threw out about a dozen BYTE issues from the late 90's that were sitting in a box for the last 2o years.