3 ms·

I think about how the "computing world" has changed over the last 40 years. When I was a kid, everything was new. Every couple months a new type of computer,

I think about how the "computing world" has changed over the last 40 years. When I was a kid, everything was new. Every couple months a new type of computer, CPU or peripheral was released: Commodore 64, inexpensive floppy drive, affordable 4-color plotter, (this crazy thing called) a mouse, etc. BYTE captured the crazy zeitgeist of the age. The content was a crazy mix of how-to articles and what-to-buy product reviews (and the 1/9 page ads in the back.) The covers by Tinny were always witty and well executed. You can't judge a book by it's cover, but Tinny covers definitely grabbed your attention. When they replaced his covers with pictures of products it was definitely an indication times were changing. The first BYTE issue I remember was the one with the Star Trek cover (December 77) -- I had just recently seen a Spock ASCII art print out at the local academic computing center and burned most of my DEC-10 time playing the Star Trek game online. TREK and computing and BYTE magazine were all linked in my mind. We were living in the future, no doubt about it...

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Not just "everything was new" but also "everything was better" (well.. except the stuff that wasn't and failed horribly soon after launch). You bought a computer, and (if you had a money) you bought a new one after a few years and the change in performance, graphics etc. was HUGE. Kilobytes of ram went to megabytes, cga, ega, vga all brought huge improvements, then came many 3d variants, storage went from floppies, to a few megabytes to gigabytes. And now? Have a 5 year old mid-range computer? Buy some ram, and you get basically the same specs as the new ones, but with a slightly worse CPU. Everything (except the newest games) still works, and the biggest resource hog (especially ram) is the browser, which still shows sites with same amount of info as it did in 1990s, but somehow that autoplaying video ad needs a few more gigabytes of ram. It's still great for my wallet... but I haven't opened a computer magazine (or well.. a youtube clip in modern time) and said "damn, I want this!" in quite a while now (at least not regarding computers).
- ghaff 4y ago
  And for a lot of purposes, you're basically living in a browser anyway. I do have a pretty new M1 MacBook Pro. But I also have a 2015-vintage MacBook Pro and iMac and they're perfectly fine for what I use them for.
- tinsmith 4y ago
  > but I haven't opened a computer magazine and said... I feel this. In my opinion, we have not had a computing magazine worth opening in two decades, at least in the US. I know we can find news and articles relevant to our interests with unparallelled ease on today's Internet, but a huge part of me misses going to a bookseller and picking up that month's selection of nerd rags. I have always had trouble pinpointing exactly what it is I miss about the magazines of old. Sometimes I feel that it had more to do with how I fit into that world at the time, being a curious teen who loved tinkering with tech, and the future was wide open. Othertimes I think it had to do with the mags being my window to that world, since I had nobody to guide me.
  - erwan577 4y ago
    Before the web and global geek culture, magazines were the only way to get a feeling of "belonging" to some kind of tech community, sometimes the community of some computer brand owners, sharing the same interest for the compatible software & hardware products. Heavily priced online board systems then milked the same needs providing downloads which replaced free disks offered with magazines.
WeAddValue 4y ago
I recall one of the computing magazines of that era, possibly the Dec 77 issue of BYTE you mentioned, published the entire code in BASIC for a space-oriented game. Inputs were simple letter or letter+number commands and outputs were an ASCII drawing of a sector of outer space (complete with * for stars). You would shoot at an alien then skip to another sector before getting counterattacked. My high school buddies and I desperately wanted to play this game but ... none of us had a computer! So, sitting in the cafeteria at lunch/breaks in our bell bottom pants, we walked thru the code line by line recording the values of variables with pencil on paper. This was when BASIC only allowed 1 or 2 character variable names and only had GOSUBs instead of proper functions. It was slow going at first but we eventually got to understand what sections of the code was doing and could replace line by line with, oh, its doing this again. I'll have to look for that Dec 77 BYTE so see it that was the magazine. I didn't know it at the time but it was probably very formative for my future IT career.
- mcenedella 4y ago
  That’s an amazing story. Thank you for sharing!!
- acegopher 4y ago
  What a great story! I remember also "hand running" programs at times. While the Dec 77 issue of Byte[0] had Star Trek on the cover it didn't contain a BASIC listing. Could it have been either the May/June 1975 issue of Creative Computing[1] or one of the compilations (BASIC Computer Games[3])? [0] https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/70s/Byte-1977-12.pdf https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/70s/Byte-1977-12.... [1] https://archive.org/details/CreativeComputingv01n04MayJune1975 https://archive.org/details/CreativeComputingv01n04MayJune19... [2] https://archive.org/details/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcomputer_Edition_1978_Creative_Computing https://archive.org/details/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcomput...

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

Not just "everything was new" but also "everything was better" (well.. except the stuff that wasn't and failed horribly soon after launch). You bought a computer, and (if you had a money) you bought a new one after a few years and the change in performance, graphics etc. was HUGE. Kilobytes of ram went to megabytes, cga, ega, vga all brought huge improvements, then came many 3d variants, storage went from floppies, to a few megabytes to gigabytes. And now? Have a 5 year old mid-range computer? Buy some ram, and you get basically the same specs as the new ones, but with a slightly worse CPU. Everything (except the newest games) still works, and the biggest resource hog (especially ram) is the browser, which still shows sites with same amount of info as it did in 1990s, but somehow that autoplaying video ad needs a few more gigabytes of ram. It's still great for my wallet... but I haven't opened a computer magazine (or well.. a youtube clip in modern time) and said "damn, I want this!" in quite a while now (at least not regarding computers).

ghaff 4y ago
And for a lot of purposes, you're basically living in a browser anyway. I do have a pretty new M1 MacBook Pro. But I also have a 2015-vintage MacBook Pro and iMac and they're perfectly fine for what I use them for.
tinsmith 4y ago
> but I haven't opened a computer magazine and said... I feel this. In my opinion, we have not had a computing magazine worth opening in two decades, at least in the US. I know we can find news and articles relevant to our interests with unparallelled ease on today's Internet, but a huge part of me misses going to a bookseller and picking up that month's selection of nerd rags. I have always had trouble pinpointing exactly what it is I miss about the magazines of old. Sometimes I feel that it had more to do with how I fit into that world at the time, being a curious teen who loved tinkering with tech, and the future was wide open. Othertimes I think it had to do with the mags being my window to that world, since I had nobody to guide me.
- erwan577 4y ago
  Before the web and global geek culture, magazines were the only way to get a feeling of "belonging" to some kind of tech community, sometimes the community of some computer brand owners, sharing the same interest for the compatible software & hardware products. Heavily priced online board systems then milked the same needs providing downloads which replaced free disks offered with magazines.

WeAddValue 4y ago

I recall one of the computing magazines of that era, possibly the Dec 77 issue of BYTE you mentioned, published the entire code in BASIC for a space-oriented game. Inputs were simple letter or letter+number commands and outputs were an ASCII drawing of a sector of outer space (complete with * for stars). You would shoot at an alien then skip to another sector before getting counterattacked. My high school buddies and I desperately wanted to play this game but ... none of us had a computer! So, sitting in the cafeteria at lunch/breaks in our bell bottom pants, we walked thru the code line by line recording the values of variables with pencil on paper. This was when BASIC only allowed 1 or 2 character variable names and only had GOSUBs instead of proper functions. It was slow going at first but we eventually got to understand what sections of the code was doing and could replace line by line with, oh, its doing this again. I'll have to look for that Dec 77 BYTE so see it that was the magazine. I didn't know it at the time but it was probably very formative for my future IT career.

mcenedella 4y ago
That’s an amazing story. Thank you for sharing!!
acegopher 4y ago
What a great story! I remember also "hand running" programs at times. While the Dec 77 issue of Byte[0] had Star Trek on the cover it didn't contain a BASIC listing. Could it have been either the May/June 1975 issue of Creative Computing[1] or one of the compilations (BASIC Computer Games[3])? [0] https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/70s/Byte-1977-12.pdf https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/70s/Byte-1977-12.... [1] https://archive.org/details/CreativeComputingv01n04MayJune1975 https://archive.org/details/CreativeComputingv01n04MayJune19... [2] https://archive.org/details/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcomputer_Edition_1978_Creative_Computing https://archive.org/details/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcomput...