8 ms·

Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

pcblues 6mo ago
Holy cow. Thank you, JP. I enjoyed your high-level writing while monkeying on your new-fangled machines.
tialaramex 6mo ago
Because I'm an old man, my sister made me a birthday card using an image from the front cover of their fourth issue (Christmas 1975) - corresponding to when I was born. It's a harbinger of a future that was by then inevitable but hadn't yet quite happened, the "personal computer" is very much still a nerd toy, expensive kits that can be assembled by the enthusiast to achieve little of immediate value - but you can more or less feel what's about to happen.
- placebo 6mo ago
  If you're old, I guess that makes me ancient. Byte is what got me hooked on the path I walk to this day, though back then it would be far beyond my wildest dreams to believe that in my lifetime it would be possible to hold an intelligent conversation with software, and everything that entails
  - tialaramex 6mo ago
    The LLMs are the philosophical "box of all conversation" trick, that's not intelligence, it just went from a neat philosophical device to explain why Turing's test doesn't do what you think intuitively it would do to a real world thing that is a mix of fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem.
    - placebo 6mo ago
      I think that is a valid opinion, but don't think there is any conclusive evidence to make it a valid fact (while of course not disagreeing with "fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem" part). Would be happy to learn otherwise.
    - CamperBob2 6mo ago
      Ah, yes, the program that's "not intelligent" yet somehow turns in gold-medal results at international math and programming competitions designed to identify and test the smartest human students. Is that sentiment supposed to make us feel smart? If anything, the closest thing we have to Byte in 1975 is /r/localllama in 2026. Believe me, there was no shortage of old men in 1975 who didn't get it, either.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago
    Forget AI, if you could time travel and just bring an iPhone back to the late 70's it would look like a science fiction fantasy. An alien artifact. It's interesting to wonder if the next 50 years of computing will be the same. Will a device from 2075 make what we have today seem like primitive toys? No doubt we'll have full blown AGI by then, which may be the major difference, and we'll (or rather our kids) will look back with nostaligia on these LLMs which seemed so revolutionary at the time, but severely limited and flawed, just a hint of what is going to come.
lysace 6mo ago
It’s hard to beat this interface: https://byte.tsundoku.io/ https://byte.tsundoku.io/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002)
JSR_FDED 6mo ago
Chaos Manor always seemed like this mystical place to me as a kid. Limitless budget and always messing with hardware and software, whether necessary or not :-)
- smitty1e 6mo ago
  Pournelle is so missed.
  - SanjayMehta 6mo ago
    And Larry Niven, but in a different context.
    - PopAlongKid 6mo ago
      Unlike Pournelle, Niven is still alive (87 year old), but I don't think he is writing new science fiction these days (although he has collaborated on some stories this century and has made guest appearances at some conferences in the last few years). https://larryniven.net/ https://larryniven.net/
      - NitpickLawyer 6mo ago
        > although he has collaborated on some stories this century I bought "Bowl of Heaven" because his name was on it, but it was a disappointing read and DNF for me...
    - whartung 6mo ago
      I've met both, Niven, twice, briefly. He was a grand story teller, but not really approachable. Pournelle was always pleasant. I had the opportunity to share a dinner with JP. I was on BIX, Byte Information Exchange, their "BBS" or "CompuServe"-ish service. And Jerry would occasionally sponsor small get togethers. So there was about 8 of us just sharing dinner at a Chinese place in the Valley. It was a great time. The man can talk, to be sure. Sat right next to him.
haunter 6mo ago
Two things always stood out for me about Byte 1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore. 2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after every page. It's interesting to look back at those ads from today but it's also a jarring experience to some extent. Also make sure to read the letters to editor part! Always fun
- piker 6mo ago
  As a kid who was interested in stuff like this in the 90s, the ads were part of the enjoyment for me. You could look at components, have rounds-to-zero idea what they did but let your imagination soar at the possibility of stringing them together into something new.
- markus_zhang 6mo ago
  Ads back then were entertaining. I actually sometimes went to archive just to read those Ads instead of articles.
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  Those ads were the only way to actually know what software and hardware was available to buy, including information related to "open source of the day", shareware, PD,... Access to BBS was super expensive unless you were lucky to afford a modem, and live on local call distance. European magazine like Computer Shopper were of similar size and ads ratio.
  - noosphr 6mo ago
    Ads that are well target aren't jarring. They are just part of the magazine. I remember reading ads about a specific make of vacuum pumps next to an article with experiments which used them. Today's ads are so obtrusive because you get toilet seat ads next to an article about general relativity.
NordStreamYacht 6mo ago
I had from around 1982 to 1990, and a random scattering of older issues. All lost during a move from one city to another - except for one Byte book: Threaded Interpreted Languages. https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretiveLanguagesTheirDesignAndImplementationByteBooks1981 https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...
Smalltalker-80 6mo ago
I've downloaded the entire thing a while back for nostalgia sake. And I am (of course) the proud owner of a physical copy of the "Smalltalk" issue :-) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
- whartung 6mo ago
  Ditto. It's the only issue I saved. I binned my large collection of Byte, Dr. Dobbs, etc. during a move. I recall taking them down from an attic cubby and then having to take them back up. Something like "Oh, forget it" came to pass. Stuff it heavy! Interestingly, I think one of the most formative Byte articles for me was from 1978 (I think). It was an introduction to 3D graphics. Specifically the matrices for rotation and scaling etc. I can assure that that while it is possible to visualize simple 3D models using the 40x25 character graphics of a PET, it's not advisable. The one thing I was unknowingly missing was Bresenham's line algorithm. That would have helped. I might have even moved up to "high res (80x50)" using the little block PETSCII characters. I was able to work with it more in college where I had access to a Tektronix 4052 (which readily solve the whole line drawing problem).
- NetMageSCW 6mo ago
  I still have that issue and the threaded languages issue at my office. I also have the blue book and the orange book and the green book of Smalltalk internals.
pkphilip 6mo ago
It was my favourite magazine. The only way I could access it was by going to the US Information Services Library attached to their consulates. I learned a tremendous deal from it and I will forever be grateful.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
justin66 6mo ago
Has anyone archived the foreign language editions?
- qingcharles 6mo ago
  No, it's on my list, though. 99% of the magazine scans on the Internet are English. Foreign language magazines are rare. Some Japanese, some Russian. Arabic magazine scans are virtually non-existent, although I found some Persian ones the other day.
morphle 6mo ago
I still have a physical copy. I'll ship them (700 kg?) to you if you pay the cost. Email in profile. I also have lots of the actual machines and parts, especially Apple, Commodore. Ship them too?
- sixothree 6mo ago
  I've been working on a project that helps you catalog all of this stuff. Check out the features page. It's extensive. https://github.com/SixOThree/Collectibles https://github.com/SixOThree/Collectibles One thing I'm considering adding is a "inquire about this item" link.
  - morphle 6mo ago
    Thank you Matthew Dugal, but no thanks. You just created a bad GUI of a bloated database as a shaky web server. I am using a few of your photo's but as a database I just filled a spreadsheet (poor man's database) that I can turn into a website hosted at home with two clicks: Squeak with Seaside, Magritte and Pier CMS (swiki). I then render a catalogue PDF with another few clicks for the LLMs. Total time for setup from zero 82 minutes, mostly the time to search the files on my spotlight indexed 400 TB harddisk. The Byte magazines are extra searchable documentation for the Retro Computing stuff (from capacitors to fix old CRT monitors, cables to wire up coax, ADB, SCSI, IEEE-488 and Appletalk, whole computers, Transputer supercomputers, IBM Risc 1000, early FPGA's) and ways to do SEO: if people search for Lisa than Byte text OCR-ed will find Macintosh XL and my web page catalogue and they see I have several for sale. There is a faster way still, just get you stuff in a csv tab delimited list and render it into a html file and host it on my first webserver september 2 1991 [2] or today on one of the few free webhosting options left: https://100yeararchive.neocities.org https://100yeararchive.neocities.org When I started the first public ISP in 1987, several years before the first web page (on August 6, 1991 [2]), I just hosted my collectables and magazines (The same as I offer here today, I still have them 49 years later), photo's and hardware on hyper cards, mailing lists, uucp, usenet, FTP or Gopher. Webpages we also hosted on the unix home directory of my customers next to their pop email box. I think of your proposal as: the early internet is a great improvement on its successors. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/19970509105527/http://www.knoware.nl/ https://web.archive.org/web/19970509105527/http://www.knowar... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
tangus 6mo ago
Here's an index of sorts. I couldn't find anything better. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date
ratg13 6mo ago
I was always more partial to Compute magazine
- cristoperb 6mo ago
  It looks like the ia's collection of Compute! is complete: https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine?page=2&sort=date https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine?page=2&sort=dat... Also Compute!' Gazette: https://archive.org/details/computes.gazette/Compute_Gazette_Issue_01_1983_Jul/ https://archive.org/details/computes.gazette/Compute_Gazette...
- gramie 6mo ago
  Compute! was very much aimed more at the home market that Byte (which appealed more to IT professionals). At the time, though, Compute! and Compute's Gazette (for Commodore computers) were great for me. The most amazing magazine of all, though, was The Transactor. Exclusively Commodore, and for programmers. Very few ads, too. Their "Inner Space Anthology" was an incredible resource for everything technical. Memory maps, ROM listings, and much, much more. https://csbruce.com/cbm/transactor https://csbruce.com/cbm/transactor
ksaj 6mo ago
One thing you can see really clearly, is how the price of specific computing items fluctuated. The Lisp issue is what got me into said language. Later I was using music software (Cakewalk) and noticed the language was nearly the same, so I started making non-music stuff in Cakewalk as well. CAL was all about programming music logic, but it was a fully fledged language that did whatever text-oriented duties you could think of. It was also super easy to write viruses, although they would only run within Cakewalk of course. Fun times!
X1a0Ch3n 6mo ago
From these comments, what does the discussion suggest about Byte magazine’s role in the early computing community?
- HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago
  Having lived through this era, living in the UK, Byte always seemed more commercially orientated than hobbyist, but I would buy and read it all the same. Hobbyist computing grew out of hobbyist electronics with the Altair 8800 kit featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975 being one of the first personal computers. My own first computer was also a kit (bag of components and a bare circuit board), the NASCOM-1, introduced a couple of years later in 1977 and featured on the cover of the first issue of Personal Computer World, which was the first UK magazine dedicated to this new hobby of computing. Another great magazine of this era was Dr Dobbs (Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia. Running Light without Overbyte), which was also aimed at hobbyists, featuring lots of program listings. These American magazines like Byte & Dr Dobbs were easy to buy in high street newsagents in the UK.
  - pwg 6mo ago
    > Having lived through this era, living in the UK, Byte always seemed more commercially orientated than hobbyist, but I would buy and read it all the same. The hobbyist arena tended to fall more towards magazines like Popular Electronics, and the focus was much more the lower circuit levels. Byte dipped their toes into that arena via a few of the regular columnists, but that was not their target (despite the fact that many of us subscribers were "computer hobbyists" by most any definition of that term).
rigonkulous 6mo ago
As a young hacker in the 70's and 80's, magazines were my primary source of docs. I lived in a remote community where such technology was really, really foreign at first. My relatives lived in other parts of the state, some very remote, some in the city. I had a HAM-/CB-enthusiastic hacker uncle I'd regularly visit in one end of the state (outback) and plenty of relatives in the major city and countryside where I lived, so my docs-collecting mission during a routine adventuring between these family areas went something like this: 1. If in the city/small town: go to the library, read latest BYTE magazine, Radio Electronics, a few other electronics (then computer-) magazines, and so on[1]. Then, browse back issues - my library had them all in the first few years - find code that I might adapt to my machine, copy notes or - remember it - for when I got home later. I usually didn't check anything out because I never, ever gave back BYTE magazines I loaned from the library, just because I never knew when I'd be back (or that was my excuse). So, the library was just for reference/note-taking. This actually made going on those boring family visits quite palatable. 2. If in the city: Go to every newsagent/magazine dealer in my route, read every single tech magazine - BYTE, Dr. Dobbs Journal, ZAP, etc. as quickly as possible, before being asked to leave. Buy something if possible, but only if a review finds something interesting. Usually, leave with a BYTE, at least. If I could afford it, always with a DDJ too. Repeat at every newsagent in the city. 3. If I am in the country, at Uncle Hacker-Shacks: In between hacking on his radios and amplifiers, burning my fingers on some new Fun Way Into Electronics Dick Smith kits, and with those toasty digits browsing his extensive magazine collection, including every BYTE issue since the beginning (it's the 70's/80's, I'm a teen) .. do chores (lawns/wood-chopping/fishing/cleaning/reading-to-little-kids) and save coins for photocopying .. take uncles magazines to get photocopies of interesting things, create my own ring-binder full of such things to take back home with me. Somehow, my uncle always had really great magazines and books and things, way, way out there beyond the dusty horizon... and I'd go home after the holidays, with copies of the best of it. Usually BYTE magazine articles for systems (Apple/C64/etc.) similar enough to mine (Oric-1) to have some use for me, later, when I got back home to my computer. During those long bus, car, train, plane rides, I'd often spend more time reading and re-reading the listings, than I did typing it in when I finally got home. BYTE was huge to me, it was my first real foray into cross-platform/multi-discipline software development, I literally had no choice but to port things to the Oric-1, if I wanted to do anything with it. I really wish I still had those old ring-binders, it'd be a blast to see my old notes and printouts (had the Oric printer for such things, it was my long-term archive, which I've long-since lost..) The skills I gained, basically from 8 years old to 18 years old, by reading these magazines - truly informed an important part of my professional toolbox, which have stuck with me for years of course, since this was an era where a significant part of computing technology was being worked out. I really wonder how kids these days get access to the evolutionary, real-time nature of the fields they're interested in. I guess MAKE filled that hole for a while. EDIT: Just wanted to say, Issue #1 of BYTE is really worth a read .. "Assembling your own Assembler", and "Recycling used IC's" is so resonant with my Sunday-afternoon musings about the perils of AI and ML on my teenagers' mindset .. seems like someone else is gonna get some burned fingers, soon enough .. [1] - (I think I read my first 2600 this way also...)
pleyraki 6mo ago
I think this is the full archive: https://vintageapple.org/byte/ https://vintageapple.org/byte/
- eichin 6mo ago
  yeah, last I looked (a couple of years ago) this was a better and more complete collection than what archive.org had (and is what enabled me to get rid of most of my paper collection, though I kept some particular highlights)
- lossyalgo 6mo ago
  Thanks, this seems a lot more reasonable than the 168GB torrent available from IA, which I was halfway through downloading. It also contains every conceivable format possible, whereas your link is just PDFs equating just 12.5GB (easily downloadable with Free Download Manager + Firefox plugin -> right-click -> Download All :)
andrewl 6mo ago
Byte was great. For years it was the highlight of my month. And I thought the cover art was amazing. The Smalltalk hot air balloon logo came from the cover of the August 1981 issue, which was devoted entirely to Smalltalk. Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982354
- loumf 6mo ago
  https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
mlhpdx 6mo ago
The two characterizations of people in the introduction are timeless? > A person with a primary interest in software will oftentimes be the person who purchases a kit computer because the kit minimizes the amount of hardware knowledge the person is required to have. That’s how I came into my first computer - built from a kit in 7th grade. And, yeah, I understand more about hardware than I did back then, but it’s all about the software to me still… okay, maybe some electronics and mechanics, too.
dugmartin 6mo ago
Its hard to express what it was like in the early/mid-80s (before I had my drivers licence) to bike a few miles to the bookstore at the start of every month and see all the new computer magazine covers for that month. It was so exciting. I didn't have much money so I stuck with Micro Cornucopia as it had the biggest signal to noise ratio (and before that Rainbow Magazine). I did pickup Computer Shopper later when I started building/rebuilding my mini-tower every few months. While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.
- thijson 6mo ago
  I recall the same thing with each new edition of Rainbow magazine. I would read it cover to cover several times. Eventually I would hand type in some of the BASIC programs. I remember reading about people connecting to various BBS's and be jealous of them. Now it's all at our finger tips for better or worse. I guess today there needs to be a conscious effort to filter out distracting noise, our attention has become monetized.
- rigonkulous 6mo ago
  Oh yeah, it was really joyous to go on such bike rides and so on. The newsagents were really important to my young developing, hacker mind. It was transformative to go, each week, and see new stuff or review things this way.
  - hypercube33 6mo ago
    Printed stuff really shaped my life. From PC Magazine and Winworld (is that the name of it? it was a business like weekly or something) and MSDN magazine and PC Accelerator and 2600. Odd duck out in my life was Farmshow magazine but it's basically farm hacking and fascinated me as well. MIT Technology review came later and was good for a few years, I'm still waiting for the huge amount of breakthroughs they showcased in the 2000s to come to market but whatever I'd read about it years before it hit digg.
    - rigonkulous 6mo ago
pseingatl 6mo ago
Jerry Pournelle's column alone was worth the price of admission.
Gander5739 6mo ago
So someone else saw this comment, then? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47805825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47805825
talkingtab 6mo ago
I started reading Byte when I had no way to understand what it was talking about. There were technical terms that I simply had no reference for. What the heck is an assembler? I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.
rfarley04 6mo ago
vintageapple.org also has a really great collection of scans fwiw
tasty_freeze 6mo ago
I got into computers in 1978 when I started high school and they had two Wang 2200 computers, each with a whopping 8KB of RAM. Although I was 14 I asked my parents for a subscription to Byte. Every so often I'd get an offer in the mail to join a "wine of the month" service, or life insurance, etc. Clearly they had sold their mailing list and they just assumed anyone with a subscription must be an adult. Anyway, I loved Steve Ciarcia's column and hated Jerry Pournelle's column that got too much space. His schtick was that he was a power user using the hardware/software for doing real work. But he was far from normal -- he'd write florid articles about having a software or hardware malfunction and then calling up the owner of the company and they next morning the guy who wrote the malfunctioning app would be at Jerry's house debugging it. "XYZ Corp produces quality software that they really stand behind and you should buy it too." Yeah, Jerry, you didn't buy it, and the average Joe doesn't get personal attention like that. I found him to be an insufferable, self-important twat. 45 years later I still feel the same about him.
skim 6mo ago
My favourite, Volume 06 Number 08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
nike-17 6mo ago
[dead]
aurizon 6mo ago
I remember Wayne well, W2NSD = never say die... He did well in ham radio magazines, and entered computer magazines running full speed with byte and others. His accountant advised him to put Byte in his wife's name for tax reasons. This later came back to 'byte' him when they divorced and she was adjudicated as the owner, but he never said die and went on to other things but never overtook Byte. I recall him at the Atlantic city hamfest, where the Apple launched. Woz and Jobs were there, at set-up and they had a problem, no solder or iron and a 74366 had failed when the card involved was pulled under power = failed. This was before there were low cost, low power 74LS366 were available cheaply. This part had to be desoldered and replaced. They had no chip, solder, iron or wick. John Ramsey had a booth there, so he lent them the solder iron etc and he was also selling a wide range of TTL parts = the rest is history. I also had a table selling diverse ham radio bits/pieces. Wayne was operating his magazine booth, more Wayne details here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green
jhallenworld 6mo ago
Byte's first mention of the 6502 (6501) I think: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/m...
- brucehoult 6mo ago
  Interesting (but understandable pre-silicon) to see a couple of errors about the 6502 in that e.g. SBC needs SEC before it not CLC. The code examples could be improved too e.g. the 6502 memory copy has no need to use both index registers and increment them in lockstep with the same values. And better still, since you're copying fewer than 256 bytes, initialize one index register to COUNT-1 and copy from last to first. On the other hand the 6800 code is buggy too. It's incrementing only one byte of the FROM and TO pointers — and the MSB at that on a bigendian machine — with no provision for crossing a page boundary, when the normal thing is to LDX FROM LDA 0,X INX STX FROM LDX TO STA 0,X INX STX TO Still, as they say, much messier than 6502's... LDA FROM,X STA TO,X INX ... even if the 6502 needs an outer loop to copy more than 256 bytes, at least the inner loop is fast. Also no mention is made of `(ZP),Y` addressing mode which takes 6502 to another level entirely.
marshray 6mo ago
I absolutely love that these are all available online. But it does call into question my decision to haul 100's of kg of these things around every time I moved residence over the last 40+ years.
- radiator 6mo ago
  I am sure it doesn't. For one thing, it is much quicker to leaf through the physical copy than to browse the PDF.
bradley13 6mo ago
Byte was an amazing magazine in it's heyday. FWIW, the German magazine ct from Heise is a good modern replacement.
drac89 6mo ago
man... I was programming 8080 at school... time passing so fast
andersmurphy 6mo ago
Absolutely love the one on Forth. Issue 5 I think? Has a build it yourself modem for under 50$ in it.
evo_9 6mo ago
2600 magazine was another fun one to dig through: https://archive.org/details/2600magazine/2600_1-1/ https://archive.org/details/2600magazine/2600_1-1/
julianz 6mo ago
There's a great display wall of Byte mag at the Computer Museum of America in Atlanta, they've got original cover artworks and possibly every issue. Loved it. Also more Crays than you've ever seen in one place.
SilentM68 6mo ago
You might be interested in UnixBench, the original BYTE UNIX benchmark suite https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench
flopsamjetsam 6mo ago
BYTE mag and Creative Computing were the first computing magazines I read, and really kick-started my excitement with computers, even though everything was out of my reach (either too expensive as a kid, or running on computers that were too expensive for me to contemplate). I remember there was a library catalogue system written for the Apple II that I tried to "cargo cult" rewrite for my MicroBee (an Australian Z80-based computer). I had no idea what all the "CHR $4" calls were for, but loved the process of typing in the listings.
JoeAltmaier 6mo ago
I saved every issue. Boxed them up when I moved out of my childhood home. Moved them 13 times and they ended up in a shed in field on my farm (some success in Silicon Valley) where they mouldered into rot over 20 years. Hard to express what that monthly compendium of electronic and computer hobbyist articles meant, to a farm boy thousands of miles from anywhere.
diputsmonro 6mo ago
For those in the Seattle area, the Seattle Public Library has an excellent periodicals collection, including what appears to be a complete collection of BYTE, bound into volumes (apparently in house?) They also have a complete collection of Compute!
jayonsoftware 6mo ago
Looks like https://www.byte.com/ https://www.byte.com/ has changed so many hands
WalterBright 6mo ago
The first computer mag I encountered was Creative Computing. I've always had a soft spot for that friendly, easy going magazine. I corresponded with David Ahl (founder of the magazine) and he sent me a mint box of the first year run.
BirAdam 6mo ago
So, I’ve had to collect PDFs from various locations to assemble a complete archive, but: https://absurd.wtf/byte/ https://absurd.wtf/byte/ Now, I’ll need to check what is on archive for each issue and make sure I have the highest quality for each one…
- rasz 6mo ago
  Are those all OCRed correctly? /checks "A McGraw-Hlll PIIIJIICGIIOI1/0360-5280" " and dBonk erformance nc ie and t load ng ter 1 even " doesnt appear so
gatestone 6mo ago
I am especially fond of this article inventing LLMs as Markov chains. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11/page/n129/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11/page/n129/...

Holy cow. Thank you, JP. I enjoyed your high-level writing while monkeying on your new-fangled machines.

Because I'm an old man, my sister made me a birthday card using an image from the front cover of their fourth issue (Christmas 1975) - corresponding to when I was born. It's a harbinger of a future that was by then inevitable but hadn't yet quite happened, the "personal computer" is very much still a nerd toy, expensive kits that can be assembled by the enthusiast to achieve little of immediate value - but you can more or less feel what's about to happen.

placebo 6mo ago
If you're old, I guess that makes me ancient. Byte is what got me hooked on the path I walk to this day, though back then it would be far beyond my wildest dreams to believe that in my lifetime it would be possible to hold an intelligent conversation with software, and everything that entails
- tialaramex 6mo ago
  The LLMs are the philosophical "box of all conversation" trick, that's not intelligence, it just went from a neat philosophical device to explain why Turing's test doesn't do what you think intuitively it would do to a real world thing that is a mix of fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem.
  - placebo 6mo ago
    I think that is a valid opinion, but don't think there is any conclusive evidence to make it a valid fact (while of course not disagreeing with "fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem" part). Would be happy to learn otherwise.
  - CamperBob2 6mo ago
    Ah, yes, the program that's "not intelligent" yet somehow turns in gold-medal results at international math and programming competitions designed to identify and test the smartest human students. Is that sentiment supposed to make us feel smart? If anything, the closest thing we have to Byte in 1975 is /r/localllama in 2026. Believe me, there was no shortage of old men in 1975 who didn't get it, either.
- HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago
  Forget AI, if you could time travel and just bring an iPhone back to the late 70's it would look like a science fiction fantasy. An alien artifact. It's interesting to wonder if the next 50 years of computing will be the same. Will a device from 2075 make what we have today seem like primitive toys? No doubt we'll have full blown AGI by then, which may be the major difference, and we'll (or rather our kids) will look back with nostaligia on these LLMs which seemed so revolutionary at the time, but severely limited and flawed, just a hint of what is going to come.

lysace 6mo ago

It’s hard to beat this interface: https://byte.tsundoku.io/ https://byte.tsundoku.io/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002)

JSR_FDED 6mo ago

Chaos Manor always seemed like this mystical place to me as a kid. Limitless budget and always messing with hardware and software, whether necessary or not :-)

smitty1e 6mo ago
Pournelle is so missed.
- SanjayMehta 6mo ago
  And Larry Niven, but in a different context.
  - PopAlongKid 6mo ago
    Unlike Pournelle, Niven is still alive (87 year old), but I don't think he is writing new science fiction these days (although he has collaborated on some stories this century and has made guest appearances at some conferences in the last few years). https://larryniven.net/ https://larryniven.net/
    - NitpickLawyer 6mo ago
      > although he has collaborated on some stories this century I bought "Bowl of Heaven" because his name was on it, but it was a disappointing read and DNF for me...
  - whartung 6mo ago
    I've met both, Niven, twice, briefly. He was a grand story teller, but not really approachable. Pournelle was always pleasant. I had the opportunity to share a dinner with JP. I was on BIX, Byte Information Exchange, their "BBS" or "CompuServe"-ish service. And Jerry would occasionally sponsor small get togethers. So there was about 8 of us just sharing dinner at a Chinese place in the Valley. It was a great time. The man can talk, to be sure. Sat right next to him.

haunter 6mo ago

Two things always stood out for me about Byte 1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore. 2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after every page. It's interesting to look back at those ads from today but it's also a jarring experience to some extent. Also make sure to read the letters to editor part! Always fun

piker 6mo ago
As a kid who was interested in stuff like this in the 90s, the ads were part of the enjoyment for me. You could look at components, have rounds-to-zero idea what they did but let your imagination soar at the possibility of stringing them together into something new.
markus_zhang 6mo ago
Ads back then were entertaining. I actually sometimes went to archive just to read those Ads instead of articles.
pjmlp 6mo ago
Those ads were the only way to actually know what software and hardware was available to buy, including information related to "open source of the day", shareware, PD,... Access to BBS was super expensive unless you were lucky to afford a modem, and live on local call distance. European magazine like Computer Shopper were of similar size and ads ratio.
- noosphr 6mo ago
  Ads that are well target aren't jarring. They are just part of the magazine. I remember reading ads about a specific make of vacuum pumps next to an article with experiments which used them. Today's ads are so obtrusive because you get toilet seat ads next to an article about general relativity.

NordStreamYacht 6mo ago

I had from around 1982 to 1990, and a random scattering of older issues. All lost during a move from one city to another - except for one Byte book: Threaded Interpreted Languages. https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretiveLanguagesTheirDesignAndImplementationByteBooks1981 https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...

Smalltalker-80 6mo ago

I've downloaded the entire thing a while back for nostalgia sake. And I am (of course) the proud owner of a physical copy of the "Smalltalk" issue :-) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

whartung 6mo ago
Ditto. It's the only issue I saved. I binned my large collection of Byte, Dr. Dobbs, etc. during a move. I recall taking them down from an attic cubby and then having to take them back up. Something like "Oh, forget it" came to pass. Stuff it heavy! Interestingly, I think one of the most formative Byte articles for me was from 1978 (I think). It was an introduction to 3D graphics. Specifically the matrices for rotation and scaling etc. I can assure that that while it is possible to visualize simple 3D models using the 40x25 character graphics of a PET, it's not advisable. The one thing I was unknowingly missing was Bresenham's line algorithm. That would have helped. I might have even moved up to "high res (80x50)" using the little block PETSCII characters. I was able to work with it more in college where I had access to a Tektronix 4052 (which readily solve the whole line drawing problem).
NetMageSCW 6mo ago
I still have that issue and the threaded languages issue at my office. I also have the blue book and the orange book and the green book of Smalltalk internals.

pkphilip 6mo ago

It was my favourite magazine. The only way I could access it was by going to the US Information Services Library attached to their consulates. I learned a tremendous deal from it and I will forever be grateful.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

justin66 6mo ago

Has anyone archived the foreign language editions?

qingcharles 6mo ago
No, it's on my list, though. 99% of the magazine scans on the Internet are English. Foreign language magazines are rare. Some Japanese, some Russian. Arabic magazine scans are virtually non-existent, although I found some Persian ones the other day.

morphle 6mo ago

I still have a physical copy. I'll ship them (700 kg?) to you if you pay the cost. Email in profile. I also have lots of the actual machines and parts, especially Apple, Commodore. Ship them too?

sixothree 6mo ago
I've been working on a project that helps you catalog all of this stuff. Check out the features page. It's extensive. https://github.com/SixOThree/Collectibles https://github.com/SixOThree/Collectibles One thing I'm considering adding is a "inquire about this item" link.
- morphle 6mo ago
  Thank you Matthew Dugal, but no thanks. You just created a bad GUI of a bloated database as a shaky web server. I am using a few of your photo's but as a database I just filled a spreadsheet (poor man's database) that I can turn into a website hosted at home with two clicks: Squeak with Seaside, Magritte and Pier CMS (swiki). I then render a catalogue PDF with another few clicks for the LLMs. Total time for setup from zero 82 minutes, mostly the time to search the files on my spotlight indexed 400 TB harddisk. The Byte magazines are extra searchable documentation for the Retro Computing stuff (from capacitors to fix old CRT monitors, cables to wire up coax, ADB, SCSI, IEEE-488 and Appletalk, whole computers, Transputer supercomputers, IBM Risc 1000, early FPGA's) and ways to do SEO: if people search for Lisa than Byte text OCR-ed will find Macintosh XL and my web page catalogue and they see I have several for sale. There is a faster way still, just get you stuff in a csv tab delimited list and render it into a html file and host it on my first webserver september 2 1991 [2] or today on one of the few free webhosting options left: https://100yeararchive.neocities.org https://100yeararchive.neocities.org When I started the first public ISP in 1987, several years before the first web page (on August 6, 1991 [2]), I just hosted my collectables and magazines (The same as I offer here today, I still have them 49 years later), photo's and hardware on hyper cards, mailing lists, uucp, usenet, FTP or Gopher. Webpages we also hosted on the unix home directory of my customers next to their pop email box. I think of your proposal as: the early internet is a great improvement on its successors. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/19970509105527/http://www.knoware.nl/ https://web.archive.org/web/19970509105527/http://www.knowar... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...

tangus 6mo ago

Here's an index of sorts. I couldn't find anything better. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date

ratg13 6mo ago

I was always more partial to Compute magazine

cristoperb 6mo ago
It looks like the ia's collection of Compute! is complete: https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine?page=2&sort=date https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine?page=2&sort=dat... Also Compute!' Gazette: https://archive.org/details/computes.gazette/Compute_Gazette_Issue_01_1983_Jul/ https://archive.org/details/computes.gazette/Compute_Gazette...
gramie 6mo ago
Compute! was very much aimed more at the home market that Byte (which appealed more to IT professionals). At the time, though, Compute! and Compute's Gazette (for Commodore computers) were great for me. The most amazing magazine of all, though, was The Transactor. Exclusively Commodore, and for programmers. Very few ads, too. Their "Inner Space Anthology" was an incredible resource for everything technical. Memory maps, ROM listings, and much, much more. https://csbruce.com/cbm/transactor https://csbruce.com/cbm/transactor

ksaj 6mo ago

One thing you can see really clearly, is how the price of specific computing items fluctuated. The Lisp issue is what got me into said language. Later I was using music software (Cakewalk) and noticed the language was nearly the same, so I started making non-music stuff in Cakewalk as well. CAL was all about programming music logic, but it was a fully fledged language that did whatever text-oriented duties you could think of. It was also super easy to write viruses, although they would only run within Cakewalk of course. Fun times!

X1a0Ch3n 6mo ago

From these comments, what does the discussion suggest about Byte magazine’s role in the early computing community?

HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago
Having lived through this era, living in the UK, Byte always seemed more commercially orientated than hobbyist, but I would buy and read it all the same. Hobbyist computing grew out of hobbyist electronics with the Altair 8800 kit featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975 being one of the first personal computers. My own first computer was also a kit (bag of components and a bare circuit board), the NASCOM-1, introduced a couple of years later in 1977 and featured on the cover of the first issue of Personal Computer World, which was the first UK magazine dedicated to this new hobby of computing. Another great magazine of this era was Dr Dobbs (Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia. Running Light without Overbyte), which was also aimed at hobbyists, featuring lots of program listings. These American magazines like Byte & Dr Dobbs were easy to buy in high street newsagents in the UK.
- pwg 6mo ago
  > Having lived through this era, living in the UK, Byte always seemed more commercially orientated than hobbyist, but I would buy and read it all the same. The hobbyist arena tended to fall more towards magazines like Popular Electronics, and the focus was much more the lower circuit levels. Byte dipped their toes into that arena via a few of the regular columnists, but that was not their target (despite the fact that many of us subscribers were "computer hobbyists" by most any definition of that term).

rigonkulous 6mo ago

As a young hacker in the 70's and 80's, magazines were my primary source of docs. I lived in a remote community where such technology was really, really foreign at first. My relatives lived in other parts of the state, some very remote, some in the city. I had a HAM-/CB-enthusiastic hacker uncle I'd regularly visit in one end of the state (outback) and plenty of relatives in the major city and countryside where I lived, so my docs-collecting mission during a routine adventuring between these family areas went something like this: 1. If in the city/small town: go to the library, read latest BYTE magazine, Radio Electronics, a few other electronics (then computer-) magazines, and so on[1]. Then, browse back issues - my library had them all in the first few years - find code that I might adapt to my machine, copy notes or - remember it - for when I got home later. I usually didn't check anything out because I never, ever gave back BYTE magazines I loaned from the library, just because I never knew when I'd be back (or that was my excuse). So, the library was just for reference/note-taking. This actually made going on those boring family visits quite palatable. 2. If in the city: Go to every newsagent/magazine dealer in my route, read every single tech magazine - BYTE, Dr. Dobbs Journal, ZAP, etc. as quickly as possible, before being asked to leave. Buy something if possible, but only if a review finds something interesting. Usually, leave with a BYTE, at least. If I could afford it, always with a DDJ too. Repeat at every newsagent in the city. 3. If I am in the country, at Uncle Hacker-Shacks: In between hacking on his radios and amplifiers, burning my fingers on some new Fun Way Into Electronics Dick Smith kits, and with those toasty digits browsing his extensive magazine collection, including every BYTE issue since the beginning (it's the 70's/80's, I'm a teen) .. do chores (lawns/wood-chopping/fishing/cleaning/reading-to-little-kids) and save coins for photocopying .. take uncles magazines to get photocopies of interesting things, create my own ring-binder full of such things to take back home with me. Somehow, my uncle always had really great magazines and books and things, way, way out there beyond the dusty horizon... and I'd go home after the holidays, with copies of the best of it. Usually BYTE magazine articles for systems (Apple/C64/etc.) similar enough to mine (Oric-1) to have some use for me, later, when I got back home to my computer. During those long bus, car, train, plane rides, I'd often spend more time reading and re-reading the listings, than I did typing it in when I finally got home. BYTE was huge to me, it was my first real foray into cross-platform/multi-discipline software development, I literally had no choice but to port things to the Oric-1, if I wanted to do anything with it. I really wish I still had those old ring-binders, it'd be a blast to see my old notes and printouts (had the Oric printer for such things, it was my long-term archive, which I've long-since lost..) The skills I gained, basically from 8 years old to 18 years old, by reading these magazines - truly informed an important part of my professional toolbox, which have stuck with me for years of course, since this was an era where a significant part of computing technology was being worked out. I really wonder how kids these days get access to the evolutionary, real-time nature of the fields they're interested in. I guess MAKE filled that hole for a while. EDIT: Just wanted to say, Issue #1 of BYTE is really worth a read .. "Assembling your own Assembler", and "Recycling used IC's" is so resonant with my Sunday-afternoon musings about the perils of AI and ML on my teenagers' mindset .. seems like someone else is gonna get some burned fingers, soon enough .. [1] - (I think I read my first 2600 this way also...)

pleyraki 6mo ago

I think this is the full archive: https://vintageapple.org/byte/ https://vintageapple.org/byte/

eichin 6mo ago
yeah, last I looked (a couple of years ago) this was a better and more complete collection than what archive.org had (and is what enabled me to get rid of most of my paper collection, though I kept some particular highlights)
lossyalgo 6mo ago
Thanks, this seems a lot more reasonable than the 168GB torrent available from IA, which I was halfway through downloading. It also contains every conceivable format possible, whereas your link is just PDFs equating just 12.5GB (easily downloadable with Free Download Manager + Firefox plugin -> right-click -> Download All :)

andrewl 6mo ago

Byte was great. For years it was the highlight of my month. And I thought the cover art was amazing. The Smalltalk hot air balloon logo came from the cover of the August 1981 issue, which was devoted entirely to Smalltalk. Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982354

loumf 6mo ago
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

mlhpdx 6mo ago

The two characterizations of people in the introduction are timeless? > A person with a primary interest in software will oftentimes be the person who purchases a kit computer because the kit minimizes the amount of hardware knowledge the person is required to have. That’s how I came into my first computer - built from a kit in 7th grade. And, yeah, I understand more about hardware than I did back then, but it’s all about the software to me still… okay, maybe some electronics and mechanics, too.

dugmartin 6mo ago

Its hard to express what it was like in the early/mid-80s (before I had my drivers licence) to bike a few miles to the bookstore at the start of every month and see all the new computer magazine covers for that month. It was so exciting. I didn't have much money so I stuck with Micro Cornucopia as it had the biggest signal to noise ratio (and before that Rainbow Magazine). I did pickup Computer Shopper later when I started building/rebuilding my mini-tower every few months. While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.

thijson 6mo ago
I recall the same thing with each new edition of Rainbow magazine. I would read it cover to cover several times. Eventually I would hand type in some of the BASIC programs. I remember reading about people connecting to various BBS's and be jealous of them. Now it's all at our finger tips for better or worse. I guess today there needs to be a conscious effort to filter out distracting noise, our attention has become monetized.
rigonkulous 6mo ago
Oh yeah, it was really joyous to go on such bike rides and so on. The newsagents were really important to my young developing, hacker mind. It was transformative to go, each week, and see new stuff or review things this way.
- hypercube33 6mo ago
  Printed stuff really shaped my life. From PC Magazine and Winworld (is that the name of it? it was a business like weekly or something) and MSDN magazine and PC Accelerator and 2600. Odd duck out in my life was Farmshow magazine but it's basically farm hacking and fascinated me as well. MIT Technology review came later and was good for a few years, I'm still waiting for the huge amount of breakthroughs they showcased in the 2000s to come to market but whatever I'd read about it years before it hit digg.
  - rigonkulous 6mo ago

pseingatl 6mo ago

Jerry Pournelle's column alone was worth the price of admission.

Gander5739 6mo ago

So someone else saw this comment, then? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47805825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47805825

talkingtab 6mo ago

I started reading Byte when I had no way to understand what it was talking about. There were technical terms that I simply had no reference for. What the heck is an assembler? I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.

rfarley04 6mo ago

vintageapple.org also has a really great collection of scans fwiw

tasty_freeze 6mo ago

I got into computers in 1978 when I started high school and they had two Wang 2200 computers, each with a whopping 8KB of RAM. Although I was 14 I asked my parents for a subscription to Byte. Every so often I'd get an offer in the mail to join a "wine of the month" service, or life insurance, etc. Clearly they had sold their mailing list and they just assumed anyone with a subscription must be an adult. Anyway, I loved Steve Ciarcia's column and hated Jerry Pournelle's column that got too much space. His schtick was that he was a power user using the hardware/software for doing real work. But he was far from normal -- he'd write florid articles about having a software or hardware malfunction and then calling up the owner of the company and they next morning the guy who wrote the malfunctioning app would be at Jerry's house debugging it. "XYZ Corp produces quality software that they really stand behind and you should buy it too." Yeah, Jerry, you didn't buy it, and the average Joe doesn't get personal attention like that. I found him to be an insufferable, self-important twat. 45 years later I still feel the same about him.

skim 6mo ago

My favourite, Volume 06 Number 08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

nike-17 6mo ago

[dead]

aurizon 6mo ago

I remember Wayne well, W2NSD = never say die... He did well in ham radio magazines, and entered computer magazines running full speed with byte and others. His accountant advised him to put Byte in his wife's name for tax reasons. This later came back to 'byte' him when they divorced and she was adjudicated as the owner, but he never said die and went on to other things but never overtook Byte. I recall him at the Atlantic city hamfest, where the Apple launched. Woz and Jobs were there, at set-up and they had a problem, no solder or iron and a 74366 had failed when the card involved was pulled under power = failed. This was before there were low cost, low power 74LS366 were available cheaply. This part had to be desoldered and replaced. They had no chip, solder, iron or wick. John Ramsey had a booth there, so he lent them the solder iron etc and he was also selling a wide range of TTL parts = the rest is history. I also had a table selling diverse ham radio bits/pieces. Wayne was operating his magazine booth, more Wayne details here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green

jhallenworld 6mo ago

Byte's first mention of the 6502 (6501) I think: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/m...

brucehoult 6mo ago
Interesting (but understandable pre-silicon) to see a couple of errors about the 6502 in that e.g. SBC needs SEC before it not CLC. The code examples could be improved too e.g. the 6502 memory copy has no need to use both index registers and increment them in lockstep with the same values. And better still, since you're copying fewer than 256 bytes, initialize one index register to COUNT-1 and copy from last to first. On the other hand the 6800 code is buggy too. It's incrementing only one byte of the FROM and TO pointers — and the MSB at that on a bigendian machine — with no provision for crossing a page boundary, when the normal thing is to LDX FROM LDA 0,X INX STX FROM LDX TO STA 0,X INX STX TO Still, as they say, much messier than 6502's... LDA FROM,X STA TO,X INX ... even if the 6502 needs an outer loop to copy more than 256 bytes, at least the inner loop is fast. Also no mention is made of `(ZP),Y` addressing mode which takes 6502 to another level entirely.

marshray 6mo ago

I absolutely love that these are all available online. But it does call into question my decision to haul 100's of kg of these things around every time I moved residence over the last 40+ years.

radiator 6mo ago
I am sure it doesn't. For one thing, it is much quicker to leaf through the physical copy than to browse the PDF.

bradley13 6mo ago

Byte was an amazing magazine in it's heyday. FWIW, the German magazine ct from Heise is a good modern replacement.

drac89 6mo ago

man... I was programming 8080 at school... time passing so fast

andersmurphy 6mo ago

Absolutely love the one on Forth. Issue 5 I think? Has a build it yourself modem for under 50$ in it.

evo_9 6mo ago

2600 magazine was another fun one to dig through: https://archive.org/details/2600magazine/2600_1-1/ https://archive.org/details/2600magazine/2600_1-1/

julianz 6mo ago

There's a great display wall of Byte mag at the Computer Museum of America in Atlanta, they've got original cover artworks and possibly every issue. Loved it. Also more Crays than you've ever seen in one place.

SilentM68 6mo ago

You might be interested in UnixBench, the original BYTE UNIX benchmark suite https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench

flopsamjetsam 6mo ago

BYTE mag and Creative Computing were the first computing magazines I read, and really kick-started my excitement with computers, even though everything was out of my reach (either too expensive as a kid, or running on computers that were too expensive for me to contemplate). I remember there was a library catalogue system written for the Apple II that I tried to "cargo cult" rewrite for my MicroBee (an Australian Z80-based computer). I had no idea what all the "CHR $4" calls were for, but loved the process of typing in the listings.

JoeAltmaier 6mo ago

I saved every issue. Boxed them up when I moved out of my childhood home. Moved them 13 times and they ended up in a shed in field on my farm (some success in Silicon Valley) where they mouldered into rot over 20 years. Hard to express what that monthly compendium of electronic and computer hobbyist articles meant, to a farm boy thousands of miles from anywhere.

diputsmonro 6mo ago

For those in the Seattle area, the Seattle Public Library has an excellent periodicals collection, including what appears to be a complete collection of BYTE, bound into volumes (apparently in house?) They also have a complete collection of Compute!

jayonsoftware 6mo ago

Looks like https://www.byte.com/ https://www.byte.com/ has changed so many hands

WalterBright 6mo ago

The first computer mag I encountered was Creative Computing. I've always had a soft spot for that friendly, easy going magazine. I corresponded with David Ahl (founder of the magazine) and he sent me a mint box of the first year run.

BirAdam 6mo ago

So, I’ve had to collect PDFs from various locations to assemble a complete archive, but: https://absurd.wtf/byte/ https://absurd.wtf/byte/ Now, I’ll need to check what is on archive for each issue and make sure I have the highest quality for each one…

rasz 6mo ago
Are those all OCRed correctly? /checks "A McGraw-Hlll PIIIJIICGIIOI1/0360-5280" " and dBonk erformance nc ie and t load ng ter 1 even " doesnt appear so

gatestone 6mo ago

I am especially fond of this article inventing LLMs as Markov chains. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11/page/n129/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11/page/n129/...