The BYTE magazine covers by Robert Tinney | Hacker News Reader

The BYTE magazine covers by Robert Tinney

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242 pointsLarryDarrell66 comments

In the Spanish-speaking world, José María Ponce [0] was equally legendary with his equally epic covers for Microhobby [1], a magazine covering the ZX Spectrum in the 80s and early 90s.

Not only the covers are beautiful and witty, he always signed them PONCE but in very non-obvious places, so part of the fun of getting a new issue was to find the signature. Some are very cleverly hidden and ridiculously hard to find [2].

[0] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mar%C3%ADa_Ponce_Sai...

[1] http://portadasmh.speccy.org/Prev1.html

[2] https://microhobby.speccy.cz/mhf/030/MH030_01.jpg

Those covers are great! They remind me of the Choose Your Own Adventure book covers from the 80s. I don't know what what style to call those illustrations other than awesome!!!

Oliver Frey was famous in the UK for his covers for Spectrum/C64/Amstrad magazines (Crash/Zzap! 64/Amtix): https://twitter.com/retroscifiart/status/986035057973346304

In the same vein (but different theme) I remember searching for D.U.C.K hidden in the covers made by Don Rosa for Donald as a kid.

https://duck.neamar.fr/

Wow. I am from Argentina, and although not this one, we received some magazines from Spain in the 90s. That's who I learnt that Spain currency was the Peseta (and a few idioms as well!). I have good memories spending some afternoon reading them.

I grew up in Uruguay, so Microhobby definitely made it to the Río de la Plata :) Which ones did you get? Micromanía was also popular there.

we also got Micromania!

These are gorgeous, thank you for the links.

I spent my summer vacations reading my uncle’s microhobby collection. Such a great magazine.

At my company we work with water distribution network modeling. Long before I joined, my predecessors commissioned Robert Tinney for some art for our marketing and literature. You can see some examples here: https://communities.bentley.com/products/hydraulics___hydrol...

I love these too, I've got a "Future Computers?" print in my hall - https://i.redd.it/ia6vwdigsjfz.jpg

For a while http://tinney.net/ had a catalogue of available prints, then it went down for a while, now it's back with just an email address for people wanting prints. They do come up on eBay too.

Yep, I got the FORTH cover a few years ago, looks great:

https://x0r.be/@mtm/106310373200174194

I have this cover on my wall too. I believe it was from extra copies that FIG or Forth Dimensions had. I see it every day. There was another version I'd seen that had a bit more color and stars in the background. Not sure whose that was.

Oh how cool to see the Apollo 11 stamp! I'm having my mom's framed right now after finding it in her basement.

Forth is cool!

Nice. I ordered prints of a pair of my favorite covers back in 1984. Unfortunately I left one of them in a large manilla envelope for decades, and it got stained and yellowed. The other was under glass and it fared better, but still got a few yellow spots. https://tom-park-share.s3.amazonaws.com/img/tinney_prints.jp...

I was watching "Transatlantic Tunnel" from 1935 yesterday, and was amused at how the engineers were conducting zoom meetings!

The sad part is that this aesthetic even "modernized" enough will not be approved by any major media outlet of today.

Mainly because "the trends" are pseudo stylized 3d or flat shapes with childishly over-saturated colors.

I miss the time when trying to create something unique and deep visually was properly rewarded. And from the looks of it I am not alone.

The message and the medium are inextricably linked.

This level of detail is feasible for a paid periodical that can afford to commission original art that would sit on a desk or coffee table for a while. Today I doubt people would even buy a print computer magazine whose information is a month old.

For today's world of instant, disposable information, distributed via video, podcast, web page or serialized via tweets several times a day, this art would also become disposable. It'd be instantly forgotten amidst a sea of templated, corporate-friendly clip art ("assets") from Canva and Adobe Spark.

One notable exception is the cover of every week’s New Yorker.

Aesthetics change. You similarly couldn’t grab magazine covers from the early 1900s either. That doesn’t mean the work is bad. Everything has a place and time, and in the future the current artwork will look dated as well.

Beg to differ. From my practice, design and illustration in the analogue times had higher standard due to lack of "technically" available tools, templates and lowest visual standard ever created by corporations or patrons. You had not be able to produce something without any substantial drawing skill or knowledge. Today you can. And someone will pay you.

Artwork when done right and with universal message is never dated. This article proves it. Dated are trends created from corporations to sell you some UX and make money. You have to be blind not to see where are we going to end visually - AI generated nonsense which will be publicly accepted as "the only way".

There's always been bad design. Just like there's always been bad art. But that doesn't mean there aren't trends... no one is using analog tools to painting now in the style of the 1200s, and rarely in the styles of even the 1700s in composition, color palette, etc. Trends exist anywhere human creativity exists... those who are good and on the cutting edge will want to put their own stamp & twist on their work. That won't ever end no matter what technology affords in simplifying our world. Similarly, iPhones have made it really easy to take photos anywhere. But most photos are crap -- but that doesn't mean there still aren't people doing interesting photography with them. You can find quite a lot of that on Instagram, which is a world that has its own rapidly shifting trends.

The point that I am making has no connection with your argument. My point is that historically (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/330451.Civilisation) art quality is defined by cultural levels of the elites. Impressionism is the exception from this rule. Is not about the tech accessibility and ease of use at all. It is about lack of vision and higher standards in those who pay. :)

There are countless digital artist who are astonishing, and in desperation. Not everybody can do "the audience" trick and create steady stream of followers to survive.

For SHAME! He skipped the Star Trek one! ;-)

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-12

Yes, that's one of the most famous covers. I got that issue and several others free a few years back - there had been a garage sale and they were just giving away everything that was left over. There were boxes & boxes of Byte magazines. I didn't have room for all of them, but I picked out about 6 of them.

In UK Maplins mail order catalogue used to get me every time. So exciting on the cover. Inside just components and soldering irons (admittedly appreciated by some) https://www.google.com/search?q=maplins+catlogue+covers&tbm=...

And mini datasheets for lots of the chips they sold - it was a proper reference manual.

I love the one he made for the BYTE "Smalltalk" (the one with the air balloon)

Apparently here's some signed artwork:

http://www.smalltalk-80.com

The balloon in the artwork I had made for my undefined behavior blog post[1] was an homage to that cover.

[1]: https://raphlinus.github.io/programming/rust/2018/08/17/unde...

This is the one you could stare for hours and imagine yourself is this world.

I loved and I miss BYTE magazine.

It was a different age. Somehow this industry lost something when it became mainstream and as much as I rely on the web it is like drinking from a firehose.

Dr Dobbs was great as well.

What's interesting is, looking at back issues, it could still be relevant today, with up-to-date content.

Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar is still going (https://circuitcellar.com/), and Hacker News contains links to similar content regarding the latest and greatest hardware and programming languages. I can picture the Byte take on Apple's processors in my head.

+1. Dates us, but the magazine and the era itself fit so well together I thought.

The covers bring back memories of how big BYTE got. I often had a look at it at the library, and remember picking up an issue that had to have been an inch thick.

I just had a look in Wiki and 'Byte's 1982 average number of pages was 543.... The October 1984 issue had about 300 pages of ads sold at an average of $6,000 per page.' (Quite a bit of money 40 years ago.)

All my best computer journalism memories are from staring at Byte covers and then reading them cover to cover.

Thank you for reasons to find a collection to go buy.

Yes and some top-end technical stuff, that in many ways you can only get in a bit here and a bit there kinda way upon the web today.

One memory of magazines back then, I enjoyed reading the adverts and it is ironic as I probably spent more time upon adverts in a single edition of Byte than I do upon adverts in over a year upon the web. How times change. But darn, I miss the hardcopy Byte magazine. Also miss my vast collection that got lost over several moves in life. Though still have a few.

However, one magazine of that era I have equal fondness for was Unix World 84-95.

But at least I have a few copies of them still.

I think I got just as much pleasure reading back issues of 2600 as I did from Byte, including the adverts.

I just want to point out that a lot of magazine covers from Popular mechanics to cosmopolitan sort of introduced me to the world of design. I grew up in a really boring little seaside town and outside of the beach, we only had a library. That library is still there and is a treasure trove of 70s-90s magazines in their store room. As kids we'd just spend hours on hours just reading old magazines.

Being born in the early 90s - I grew up in the 00s but there was something very distinct about the 60s-70s style which we call retro-futurism now but it was clean cut, faded beige and straight lines that influence a lot of designers till this day. It hit different.

Holy smokes, you described my childhood fascination with 50s-80s magazines. My elementary school had a very extensive collection of Nat Geo from that era. I could spend hours looking at ads and ad copy to grasp at a design aesthetic that I knew was no longer present in my current world.

Hand drawn covers really made it feel like a zine. I subscribed to Nibble since I was an Apple hacker, and it was more of a garage-hacker chic than the polished Byte, but still had the same style cover art.

I'm wondering what topics of computer engineering still fit these types of covers and paper magazines?

I think it has to be some topics that are not easily Googled, otherwise there is no purpose to buy a paper magazine.

Retro computing, Computer virus research, anything else? It should be something deep and niche. The magazines should be monthly and each issue a few hundred of pages.

One recent example I can think of is POC||GTFO: https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/

Granted, it's not a paper magazine (although you can buy paper compendiums of it) and it's free to distribute. I think the world and technology has moved beyond paper for the distribution of knowledge. YMMV, but I see that as largely a good thing.

I believe 2600 is still in print.

It is: https://www.2600.com/

I’m still enjoying my $250 lifetime print subscription. Wonder if they still offer that.

Yeah they still offer it at 399 bucks. I'm wondering if there is a discount code or coupon?

I knew the son of the editor of BYTE back in the early 90s going to college in New Hampshire. Most people probably don't realize that BYTE was headquartered in a tiny NH town about as far from Silicon Valley - both physically and culturally - as you can get. Though it was close to the Boston area - where a lot of computing happened in the early days before mostly moving to California - Peterborough is a quaint New England town that may not have had a stop light back then. When I moved to NH in the late 80s, the public schools were still all using Apple IIs from a decade earlier. The idea that a major tech magazine was being written there pre-internet still makes me shake my head in wonder.

The Turkish version of BYTE was the best computing magazine throughout the 90s! Great memories reading them under my desk in school.

It feels like we lost something when byte disappeared. Is there anything like it these days?

I certainly lost something - I purchased a 3 year subscription with my first pay cheque, a month before it ceased publication :(

Like album covers in a way. I so hated feeling like I had to ditch mine, only have 2 left.

Same feeling when I had to ditch my Heavy Metal magazine collection.

Oh yeah. Wish you’d ditched them my way.

I regret throwing out all my old computers and magazines. I was never a hoarder but I should have kept my first 8 bit micro, the first PC I bought to run Linux, my first linux disk set, the BYTE magazines and others.

I remember reading BYTE for years. I had completely forgotten the experience after surfing the web for 30 years.

The ads are my favorite. "386 with 2MB RAM and 10MB hard drive for $5K"

I see how the C64's, Amiga's and Atari's did so well back then. But I too enjoyed the adverts back then - pure geek porn in those days and back then you would read everything - adverts included. Today, complete polar opposite approach to advertising.

Limited edition Byte Magazine cover illustration prints are still available: http://tinney.net/

What are some great computer science magazines to read today? BYTE seems amazingly technical, something like that still in print today would be a dream come true...

My junior high school library had Byte magazine. I remember looking through the past issues a lot, and these covers bring back fond memories.

Wayne Green (byte's publisher) was an interesting character overall. Not surprising that he would value the cover art as much as he did

Coincidentally, I was just reading "See Wayne Run. Run, Wayne, Run." [0] yesterday. Not sure if it's a character assassination or a valid warning to others. Lots of other interesting reading in the collection regardless.

[0] https://archive.org/details/Wayne_Green_Misc

These covers are fantastic - sort of like Magritte meets 1980s Silicon Valley.

Robert Tinney is an amazing artist whose work deserves recognition.

If you're too young to know what OMNI Magazine was, you should do an image search for their covers. They had a similarly futuristic look, albeit more grandiose.

I bought a numbered print in 1993, the robot coming out of the egg and have it framed in my office, it's great!

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