Byte Magazine: Future Computers (1981)
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Also thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of ads.
It was a magazine for all the eclectic stuff someone interested in computers, especially from a hobby perspective, might like to read. So, as you say, you had low-level hardware hacking (Circuit Cellar), a lot of random PC hardware, programming, algorithms, etc.
It was always a bit of an odd mix and probably wasn't as "useful" for me as PC Magazine was at the time. But I appreciated the breadth even if some of it was pretty random. Dr. Dobbs occupied a somewhat similar space but pretty much exclusively on the software side.
In my first job (in 2001) some expensive piece of equipment was controlled by a compaq deskpro 386 with a proprietary ISA card + some hardware dongle that only worked on old computers running DOS (wouldn't work on Win9x DOS).
My boss at the time told me they spent $10k on that computer alone when they bought it in the 80s but that replacing the equipment it was controlling would cost upwards of a million $, so we had to keep that old PC alive.
I miss the 80s, too. Such a great time to get in on the ground floor of the technology wave. And spend money I couldn’t afford to spend.
I coulda been a billionaire if I'd done things slightly differently!
We had EVERYTHING needed to build an Apple II. Everything except being able to see what was right in front of our face.
One of the other employees (Hal Finney, you might have heard of him) wrote a BASIC interpreter that fit in a 2K PROM. We did nothing with it. Never occurred to us that it was worth anything.
So what do I do? I go into the compiler business, which paid well, but had zero prospects of big money :-)
But BASIC, DOS, etc., were fairly straightforward. The magic there was recognizing the opportunity. Maybe I would have failed to execute that properly that as a businessman, who knows, but failing to see the opportunity was where things went into the ditch. Note that Jobs took a while to learn how to run a business. The Apple II made so much money it gave him runway to learn.
And, yeah, depending on if it were a local call, phone charges could add to that considerably.
You tended to use scripts and programs to download, work offline, and then upload.
So the Apple II+ were $4000+ in today's money. Still doesn't make the new Mac Pro look reasonable. :)
Those 80 column mono-color screens though, nice.
A rich hierarchy of professional-grade desktop-ish-sized computers no longer exists because the PC architecture replaced everything.
The Mac Pro is the modern equivalent of an SGI workstation or - if we're talking late 1970s, when the Apple II was introduced - maybe a DEC VAX - both of which could cost up to a quarter million dollars.
It's actually unbelievable how cheap the Mac Pro is if you think in those terms.
The Mac Pro isn't different enough to categorize it along the lines of SGI. It doesn't run software that regular Macs don't, it doesn't have any particularly special hardware, it's "prosumer" equipment, not "professional" in the sense that SGI and similar were. In other words, it's a PC.
That's not a bad thing, by the way; we all have amazing computers now, and we should be glad.
Does the average consumer purchase a Mac Pro? No. Is the Mac Pro being used in every professional setting previously dominated by SGI? Yes.
> The Mac Pro isn't different enough to categorize it along the lines of SGI.
Uniqueness of architecture is orthogonal to the argument - which is that the cost of handling professional-grade workloads on the desktop is lower than ever.
The Mac Pro is arguably an SGI/Sun workstation equivalent.
Two years later, I got a Mac LCII with a 16Mhz/68030. A year after that, I got a 40Mhx accelerator for it and ran Speedometer to discover at least in the benchmarks, it ran about the same speed.
I'd love to play "Galactic Quest" the self-proclaimed "ultimate space adventure" in which "Vegan warships attack and fire in real time simulation"
The artwork used in the ad reminds me of concert posters for 80's high school bands.
Mine goes back to 1986, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these are still around today.
Sort of. You can get a pretty functional copy by just opening it up on your dining room table. (Though magazines are more likely to stay wide open than books are.) An evenly lit and flat to the spine copy probably requires some sort of copy stand.
At times I've thought of buying or making one but concluded it wasn't worth the effort to me.