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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I love Steve Ciarcia's "Build a Modem" project. Steve published plans for a project every month: usually at time it was a demo project for some new integrated circuit with a few 74xx or 54xx glue chips to interface it to a computer... But it always was reliable and really worked. A few years later he was using various kinds of CPLD instead of the x4xx chips and had also discovered microcontrollers so one month the project was a microcontroller board and then in later months the project would be something you did by the board.

By 1988 or so Byte was really struggling and sometimes he seemed to be the only person keeping the lights on. He'd be answering letters to the editor, bailing people out of their WordStar problems, etc.

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I'd say Byte was really falling apart around 1985 or so. Prior to that it was by hobbyists, for hobbyists, and it showed. After that it started to lurch towards being just another magazine for consoomers, with Steve being really the only vestige of the magazine's original purpose... until he jumped ship to create Circuit Cellar INK.

Byte was idiosyncratic compared to say PC Magazine (which still had things like assembly language listings into the 90s) but there was definitely a whole swizzling of hobbyist vis a vis corporate PC users going on from the late 80s. At some point Byte became just a hard to define muddle. Dr. Dobbs had a similar problem in a more software-oriented role.

ADDED: A lot of computer events were going through a similar problem. At some point you're about everything and nothing.

PC Magazine was definitely trying to be a little bit of everything. They went in hard on hardware/software reviews clearly aimed at home office users, but then you'd have columns on nifty utilities in raw assembly, and then game reviews shoved in the back. Eventually they seemed to just junk everything except hardware/software reviews and basically became a glossier, smaller version of Computer Shopper, at which point I just tuned out.

PC Magazine was very focused on PCs. You wouldn’t read about Suns, or NeXTs, Amigas, or even Macs. Byte did a nice review of the Archimedes, the first ARM-based desktop. The ecosystem was a lot more diverse back then than other publications would make you think.

In the 1990's it seemed like once a year or so they would review various RISC workstations or servers

https://books.google.com/books?id=MfbDrFwiARgC&pg=PA170&dq=p...

You'd also occasionally get them on other tests.

And Mac vs PC tests were common as well.

That's true, but it was never with the breadth and depth of BYTE. They had in-depth issues about many different families of computers and operating systems. You wouldn't see articles about Transputers detailing experimental OSs for running on them. I remember the first time I read about Python was on BYTE.

I subscribed to Byte Magazine from 1985 to about 1988 or 89. My feeling was that by 1985, Byte had drifted away from the hobbyist market and was drifting more towards a computer science journal (kind of). By late 1987 it had shifted more towards a PC rag what with the rise of the 386 clones during that period.

It definitely wasn't worth reading once Robert Tinney stopped doing the covers.

There were some decent issues in the late 80s, but yeah, it had passed its prime. They relaunched as a website in... uh... 2009 maybe? I had a long conversation with the editor at that time about what I loved about Byte and Dr. Dobbs in the early days. I think it went over their heads and they sort of went back to "reviewing mice and computer monitors."

When I was in college in 1979 I bought a PCB and populated it to have a fully functional 300 baud DIRECT CONNECT modem, and was able to get to the university computers from home! How times have changed.

Ciarcia's the stuff of legend. Between him and the library I learned more about computers than from any other source until I actually got my hands on one.

Are there modern byte alternatives?

I often wanted to find a good magazine about computing.

For a while in the 2010s I read a magazine called CPU I picked up MicroCenter. It's glossy about all aspects of computing aimed at gamers. It was written at the Scientific American level- not too technical like ACM Communications and not too dumbed down like computers for specific computer brands.

Another folksy magazine is 2600. Its hacking for both beginners and advanced experts. Often there were tutorial articles on broad principles of computing.

I have seen neither since covid reopening. Either they failed during covid or bookstores have shrunk magazine inventory. Also many magazines/journals have gone digital only. You cant really browse them at university libraries anyone unless you have an affiliation account at the university.

P.S. I remember when Byte was a mimeographed newsletter before it turned into a glossy.

2600 is still in print, but they did have some major distribution issues during COVID. I believe they have worked them all out by now.

They've been digitizing the collection as well, coming out the with annual digests.

If you still like paper a lifetime subscription is surprisingly reasonable. I subscribed about 20 years ago and have definitely gotten my money's worth.

Digital only would be fun, but I would expect the same level of quality rather than a mess of single articles.

Some of the magazines around the maker world have been decent ... but it's hard to support a magazine these days.

But hackaday and the like seem to do just fine. Granted lots of puff pieces and reviews. But byte/DDJ/Radio Electronics, etc had lots of ad's too.

So, where is the cost? People seem to be willing to submit quality articles just for the exposure it gives them. And surely its possible to set a price on a magazine that can play for printing+postage sufficiently to make a small profit too.

The problem I see with hackaday and similar is the lack of quality curation. Make magazine has this problem x100. AKA, no one older than 6 really enjoys an article on how to make snow cones, when they are looking for build plans for a 300 BPS modem. I learned a lot of my early programming skills reading Doctor Dobbs and Nibble back when they had articles on data compression, or whatever.

In a way its why I read hacker news too, the book recommendations, and articles like this one are a pretty good replacement, although again one has to filter the noise, and the temptation to post things rather than write code is much larger.

So, I return to the original premise, maybe what is needed is a good editor/curator who removes the useless noise and slims it down to articles on how to write compilers, JPEG decompressions, and the like.

Everything is blogging now. I miss getting those shareware diskets/CDs...

In Germany we have „c‘t“ („Magazin für Computertechnik“) that started out as a kind of German language Byte (featuring projects such as building your own CPM driven PC) and became more a consumer oriented magazine. However, unlike Byte, they survived that transition quite well and gained so much traction that it is today still the leading journal on everything computer oriented and gets quoted in mainstream newspapers sometimes.

They still have the occasional hobbyist oriented article but mostly they are famous for testing new hard- and software rigorously without assigning any kind of award. So you will never get a single recommendation from them but rather check the test result table which product got more A grades in the category that’s most important to you.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%27t

You forgot to mention the specialized ones, they are still quite good.

>CT

Now that is a blast from my childhood. Maybe I should pick up a subscription for it.

I still like IEEEs Computer and ACMs Communications, but they aren’t market oriented at all. OTOH, print publications aren’t agile enough to do product reviews, as the shelf life of a magazine far exceeds most product runs.

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