Byte Magazine – LISP (1979)

Internet is.

Still, I love to wait for the read of chaos manor. S100 ...

I disagree. In 1995, I picked up an issue of BYTE and marveled at the coverage of microkernel operating systems and RISC processors. New and exciting things were on the horizon! Now, I see only decadence. Hardware has stagnated for a decade. Software has less functionality while using exponentially more resources. Compare the Windows 10 Settings app to the Control Panel, which first debuted with Windows 95. Or the OneNote UWP app, which is now discontinued, to previous versions of OneNote. Key functionalities have gotten worse. Chrome's PDF handling is so awful that I spent weeks searching for a PDF viewer that's as good as Acrobat 10. To my shock everything was markedly worse--slower, less reliable searching, etc. I finally installed PDF XChange Editor and it was like a breath of fresh air. Not only does it search PDFs correctly, but it highlights the results and shows indicators of hits on the scrollbar! (Apps these days don't even have scrollbars.)

Apple has given up on the Mac, and now it only gets iOS hand-me-downs. One of my great regrets is that I didn't get get my first Mac until 2007, and missed out on a big part of the Mac's heyday. I remember when each new release of OS X came out, I'd carefully read John Sircusa's intensive review on Ars Technica. The PDF imaging model in OS X 10.0, hardware accelerated compositing in 10.2, fine-grained locking in 10.4. That was 15 years ago! Kids who were born then are stealing alcohol from their parents' liquor cabinets now and the only cool thing to happen to OS X in their lifetime is APFS.

There are highlights, no doubt. Rust is a breakthrough. Apple's Ax processors bring desktop computing power into impossibly small form-factors. Pervasive mobile broadband has enabled a lot of new applications. (But the best software stack for leveraging that capability is a direct descendant of NeXTSTEP.) But it's few and far between now.

To me, that feeling only really went away in very recent times, when common desktop platforms stopped being starved for RAM. Before we could have 2GB+ RAM on our computers and not even think about it, it really was the case that adding more would make for a "wonderful" experience; there's just no comparison between running with free RAM vs. without! The transition to 64-bit compute everywhere also helped here, of course - no more address space constraints.

On the peripherals side, USB was a huge advance in retrospect. It did come at a bit of a price, in that every peripheral now has to run a fairly complex microcontroller just to deal with the high-level communication protocol (and in turn this led to the rediscovery of GPIO as a "thing" - it used to be the case that GPIO was how you did device interconnect!)

The next real advance will probably be software that actually uses heavily-multicore systems and even GPU compute effectively, for general-purpose tasks not niche special cases. Basically an equivalent to Firefox Quantum, for everything else that we do on our machines.

(Oh, and of course we're still waiting for a mobile platform that runs a genuine general-purpose OS. But hopefully we'll solve that shortly anyway, thanks to efforts like Purism and pmOS. And even the ubiquity of "smart" mobile hardware is in fact somewhat recent. This is linked to the upcoming advance I was just discussing, because power-efficient platforms like mobile are big on multicore compute and the use of GPU.)

Added: I just saw a sibling reply that talked about the crappiness of Windows 10 and recent OS X versions as proof that hardware innovation is dead, and a reply that in turn blamed the end of Moore's law. I think that both are missing the point quite substantially! Linux works just as well as it always did, and surely it should be the real standard if we're talking about innovation!

Which eventually turned out to be false. Instead we got Slack, Facebook, and Electron apps using those gigabytes for things one could do in a PDP-11.

64K and 4MHz for >$30,000. Now that's affordable personal computing.

It used a turtle because Wally Feurzeig, Cynthia Solomon, and Seymour Papert thought this was a good device for teaching about geometry, and Logo was associated with schools (and Lego!!!) because they were trying to change education.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)

Of course, you are also right in that once it has momentum along these lines, people tend to put it in a little box marked “children’s language” and not build on it in a more general-purpose language direction.

A few folks have tried, but like squeak and pharos and so many other dialects of Lisp and Smalltalk, it has never gained serious traction outside of its original purpose.

I've almost zero interest in magazines today, but I would still subscribe to BYTE, COMPUTE and a couple others, given their editorial focus was similar to what made them great then.

I don’t miss this.

Looking at this BYTE mag pretty much confirms to me the old adage that the Earth's population is increasing but the IQ levels are staying the same.

The demand for advertisements targeting readers interested in personal computers grew very quickly in 1979 and the early 1980s. Byte was able to capture much of the quickly growing advertising revenue because it took years for high-growth-capable competitors to Byte to get off the ground.

(Byte was mostly ads back then.)

PC Magazine started in Feb 1982. Its issues quickly became as thick or almost as thick and ad-filled as Byte's.

There were other magazines in the same market in the 1970s, e.g., Dr Dobb's Journal, but for some reason they never expanded their "portfolio" (terminology?) of advertisers the way that Byte did.

I guess the mainstream magazine publishers considered (probably rightly so at that stage of the industry) personal computers too niche to be worth their while. PC Magazine for example was started by an enthusiast, not a mainstream publisher.