BYTE, the most beloved computer-magazine brand of all, is coming back. | Hacker News Reader

BYTE, the most beloved computer-magazine brand of all, is coming back.

technologizer.com

80 pointstechnologizer51 comments

The back story of Byte (if anyone cares) is that Carl Helmers, who was working at Intermetrics at Fresh Pond in Cambridge, MA at the time (1973? 74?--forget details at this late date), was publishing a little samizdat Intel 4004/8008 hobbyist newsletter on the side (mimeographed, etc.).

I was working at Intermetrics (mostly a government compiler house at the time) as a consultant on a competitor language to ADA, as a sophomore in college. Dan Fylstra, a friend from San Diego high school days, and the future founder of VisiCorp (publisher of VisiCalc), was also working there, and we were both interested in what Carl was doing.

Somehow, he dragged us both into talking to Wayne Green, then the somewhat eccentric publisher of the most popular ham radio magazine, up in Peterborough, NH, and we three got Byte off the group with Wayne's help. (Carl was the main editor, and I was just a part-time editor/writer.)

As much as I enjoyed the work, I was still in school full-time, and also working more than full-time at Intermetrics (hey, it was fun work and paid well), so I had to drop out later that fall. Not sure what happened to Dan's involvement, but I think he also was then at Harvard Business School after undergrad at MIT (and soon thereafter starting VisiCorp), and thus pretty short on time.

The very early Bytes were completely "golly, gee whiz, look what you can do with this thing!" and more like Carl's newsletter--very amateur. I guess it eventually got a lot more professional, but I never really kept up with it.

(Edit: Hunh, looking at some of these scans, I managed to stay on the masthead as an associate for quite some time after I dropped off the map.)

All Byte fans (and 20-somethings that have never heard of Byte) - some guy is scanning issues to pdf here:

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/167235-byte-magazine/

Get them. Read them. You're welcome :)

Isn't it sad how this is absolutely not legal? I wish copyrights would expire as quickly as their original intent would justify. Maybe 5-10 years.

The original copyright holders would probably just state that their intent has always been for them to last forever.

What BYTE would need is a "OK. You sat on this copyrighted material for very long. It's now time for this knowledge to be available again" mechanism that would prevent abandoned works from remaining abandoned.

Oh wow... articles about C by Kernighan, reviews of Missile Defense. This is awesome.

I am french. At the time reading Byte was basically like having the Internet today, suddenly amazing things were "available". The magazine was not easy to find in France in the early 80's. I read all the back issues I could find.

Nothing is perfect. I blame the (in)famous 1990 article "Is Unix dead?" for keeping me away from Unix for years.

The article includes a picture of the December 1975 cover issue:

http://technologizer.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/bytecover.j...

The first listed article is "What is a Character"; it amuses me that thirty-five years later, with the invention of Unicode, you could still fill a few pages with an article under that headline.

Case in point: http://diveintopython3.org/strings.html

The story of what happened to BYTE in 1998, from Jerry Pournelle's point of view:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/fiasco.html

And from the perspective of Tom R. Halfhill, BYTE Magazine senior editor:

http://www.halfhill.com/bytefaq.html

I loved BYTE, but I could lose the hyperbole: What’s the most-loved computer magazine of all time? There’s really only one contender: BYTE,

Creative Computing, Kilobaud, and Dr Dobb's Journal are all strong contenders, in my book.

Amiga World? It's the only one I've ever actually had a subscription to.

Antic was the Atari camp's equivalent. It amazes me how many programs I typed from magazine listings.

Agreed. If you were to ask me about favorite magazines, BYTE would be in the running, but, in terms of loving - Compute! (and it's associated books) have a fond place in my heart. I spent many _hundreds_ of hours pouring through their assembly tutorials, learning about sprites, collisions, vertical/horizontal refreshes, and pretty much every everything they wrote on the C64, my beloved first computer.

Yes, Compute!-- and it's predecessor, The Pet Gazette.

and Compute!'s Gazette!

Creative Computing for me in the '70s, published by David Ahl. Interesting chap. http://www.swapmeetdave.com/Ahl/DHAbio.htm

Indeed. Very surprised by http://www.swapmeetdave.com/Ahl/Albums/Synecdoche-6-07/index...

I hope he does release a full collection of scanned/OCRed Creative Computing issues.

I loved BYTE, back in the day. At one point, I lugged around ten years' worth of back issues, before giving them to the local library.

I'm not very hopeful for the new edition. From the press release: the new BYTE "will serve as the professional’s guide to consumer technology, providing news, analysis, reviews, and insight across the media gamut."

Not reaching very high, are they? This doesn't sound like the publication that gave us in-depth articles on every bus type from S-100 on, languages such as Forth and Smalltalk, and Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar ...

When I was twelve years old, I read these magazines cover to cover at my local library (even the really old ones), and ESPECIALLY loved Jerry Pournelle's "Chaos Manor" columns in the back. To see its name being mentioned again warms my heart, even if Pournelle isn't involved.

When I was 12, I was a regular reader of bit magazine.

No, not a joke. It was a Japanese magazine similar to BYTE in spirit, but more of CS taste. I remember articles about concurrent Prolog, machine translation using pivot representations, distributed systems etc.

I stopped reading it when I got to the university, where I was able to be up-to-date with such kind of information without it.

And then, its publishing ceased in 2001.

I too was around 12 when I would carefully try to type in basic and assembly language programs from Byte magazine into our Apple IIe. What a lot of work! No downloading the code from the internet. No gem install, etc. And if you made a mistake somewhere, good like trying to find and fix it.

I loved every second of it though. Long live Byte!

I loved Byte.

As a kid growing up in South Africa, Byte was my connection to the outside world. International sanctions made computers incredibly expensive. Byte gave me hope that if I could just get abroad...

I would sit for hours in the local library and read 6 month old issues and live in hope that I would one day be able to play with the machines mentioned in there.

It won't be the same without Chaos Manor. :(

Here's a silly send-up of his writing style: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/95q1/jpreviews.html

Chaos Manor still exists, but it's not the same. At least for me, part of the fun was the immense diversity Jerry played with. In a world where just about every desktop runs the same (poorly built) OS, Chaos Manor is a lot less chaotic than it used to be.

Still won't be good unless they bring back Ciarcia's Circuit Celler as a regular feature.

You know that he's been doing his own magazine, Circuit Cellar Ink, right? (I think it recently hooked up with Elektor, at least in the US market.) Worth checking into.

Yeah, actually. He has a website too.

As a CS student in Guatemala in the 80s, Byte was like news from the cutting edge of technology. We used to get like 5-10 copies for the only store that sold them, and they went fast. I had to literally keep up with their shipping schedule in order to get my copy.

I've missed the deep technical articles, and fighting with my PC Magazine-reading friends about the superiority of our magazine.

Just recently, I was wrestling with the idea of discarding my old Byte magazines, but I really couldn't throw them away, some of the articles are still very good to read. I still have the Byte CD-ROM, wonder if it would still work?

Oh yeah, and I have a Tinney signed print of the robot coming out of the eggshell. I also have the magazine.

I hope this is not the usual resurrected brand disappointment, Amiga-like.

Or Atari. Or Commodore. :/

Be fair - that new C-64-named PC looks like a C64.

Two words, young folk: "Cover painting" http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/169

Crash magazine will always be my most beloved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_%28magazine%29

The announcement makes it sound as if the magazine isn't coming back - just a relaunched website. Anyone know if this is the case? I'm one of those people who likes to have a physical magazine to flick through.

I paid for a three year Byte subscription with my first pay cheque and got two issues before the magazine folded, so am keen to get back to it!

I think I still have the 1st two years' edition packed up in a box in the shed...moved from home, to college, thru 3 apartments, then 3 houses, and now in my shed. Never opened the boxes, but they survived many, many cleanouts. Don't really know why.

I don't want to break anyone's hopes but this doesn't really sounds good to me :

"[BYTE] will serve as the professional’s guide to consumer technology, providing news, analysis, reviews, and insight across the media gamut"

Loved Byte. What a dense collection of enjoyable articles every month. I'd subscribe and I don't get any paper magazines any more.

I don't understand the business case for gutting this fine publication.

I hope they are able to bring back their archive of stories back to the beginning of the magazine. That is a tremendous amount of information documenting the beginning of the personal computer era.

Never heard of it.

Woah - how can people not know about this magazine? It is pretty much a chronicle of the earlier days of computing.

Byte gave us articles like this:

"The Impossible Dream: Computing e to 116,000 places with a Personal Computer" by Stephen Wozniak, published in Byte Magazine Vol 6, Issue 6 (June 1981, pp392).

Heavy-duty writing, some pretty hard core engineering stuff . I recall the mac review, as well as the chief hardware designer of the Atari 520ST giving details about its architecture, down to the memory access schemes.

It's the Beatles of computer periodicals :)

There was a long series of articles about building a computer from the circuit board up, s-100 bus if I recall correctly.

And an article on lisp that blew my delicate 12 year old mind.

Edit- check out the April 85 issue on AI, and look at those authors. Quite the lineup. http://www.devili.iki.fi/library/issue/145.en.html

There was another very cool magazine in the early 90s, Midnight Engineering. Essentially a magazine for startups, though I remember it being hardware focused. It was a 1 man operation. One guy put it together, wrote most of it, did the layout, sold the ads, and perhaps most impressively (or insanely) printed it all himself. He bought this whole giant printing press system and ran it himself. Had a fascinating series of articles on everything that was involved in getting that up and running.

> Woah - how can people not know about this magazine? It is pretty much a chronicle of the earlier days of computing.

You might be surprised to learn that some of us hadn't been born yet in 1981 ;)

Well, its final issue was in 1998, so that still leaves a lot of leeway for those not born in 1981 :-)

Its from the mid '70's and stopped publishing in the late 90's. I suppose that you'd have to either be slightly old (late 20's) or a computer history geek to know about it. I'm the latter -- they stopped publishing when I was 9 (!) years old

Heh, it's always funny to hear youngsters talk about what's "old" to them. And even funnier, is that pretty much every group has an older group looking back and going "you kids don't know what old is yet, now get the hell off my lawn."

Late 20's is young as shit to me.... now you 60+ year old fossils who might be hanging around can go write some COBOL or whatever it is you do... <tongue_firmly_in_cheek />

Yup, I'm 20 right now, so that was when I was 8 years old. I imagine everyone under the age of 25 frequenting this site is unlikely to remember / know about the magazine.

Still cool to see a piece of history come back through!

I'm 29 and that's the first time in my life someones called me 'slightly old'. I'll treasure this moment.

Yay!!!

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