Byte Magazine 1975-1995
worldradiohistory.com
worldradiohistory.com
(For example there was a whole issue in 1981 on Smalltalk-80, with an introduction by Adele Goldberg, where the Xerox Palo Alto people from the Smalltalk-80 team explain the implementation, the VM etc.)
https://vintageapple.org/byte/ has a (complete?) archive, albeit with slightly lower resolution scans.
BIX, like Compuserve/Delphi/etc., was one of the big commercial services--though possibly more hacker-oriented than some--which was also somewhat separate from the TRS-80 in the bedroom hobbyist BBSs (though some of the PC-based BBSs also became fairly large and commercial latterly).
Back in the DOS5/Win3.11 days there was an article about modifying command.com & io.sys so that you could customize the files that were used to load the system.
config.sys & autoexec.bat became (on my system) ipl.sys & ipl.bat (Inital Program Load)
It made the system immune to any virus* [except TSRs] (keeping a dummy config.sys & autoexec.bat let me see programs that tried to modify those files, and generally scored a TONNE of cool points in my mind. It also taught me about "security through obscurity".
This taught me that _MY_ hardware was mine to modify how I wanted. It gave me an incredible sense of power, and capability.
* = well at the time I thought it did. =)
Someone left disk in floppy drive and you turned computer on? Have a nice bootsector virus for free(and then we had Chernobyl, it was fun). It only got worse with pendrives and autorun functionality in Windows. Even today corpo that owns me, blocks them from being mounted on dev machines.
Some are not in that collection yet, so if you search for "BYTE magazine" you might find some more.
Also check out the collection of other computer magazines https://archive.org/details/computermagazines
Even more magazines here: https://archive.org/details/additional_collections https://archive.org/details/magazine_rack
>Could a Computer Take Over?
>Ed Rush, 1977
"Just how ridiculous IS the idea of a computer deciding to take over the world and be its dictator? Upon hearing this question, most people who are not computer oriented will laugh and say "That's only in science fiction stories." They will be much more likely to complain about "becoming a number," with everyone from the grocery store to the government wanting their number instead of their name.
Those who are more familiar with computers will laugh off the concept and charge it to paranoia due to ignorance. "A computer is little more than a lot of wires conducting currents here and there," they will say. "Besides, if it-gets uppity you can always pull the plug."
However, that group of people who are both computer knowledgeable and fans of the art form known as science fiction, but more properly called speculative fiction, might ask "Can you always pull the plug? Could a computer really seize the reins of government? And if so, how ?" In trying to answer these last questions, let us first speculate on the capabilities the computer itself would have to have. "
I have scraped hundreds now of hobbyist electronics magazines going back roughly 100 years.
From time to time, when offline, I'll pull up these old electronics hobbyist magazines that I've culled and skim through them. Occasionally an old circuit like a theremin will catch my eye and I'll make a note of which issue I found it in in a file that I keep.
Otherwise I think I like suffusing myself in the periodicals of those earlier decades (I think the 70's are one of my favorites).
It is rather telling how prevalent the ads are though that show men being browbeaten by wives or bosses — these men are encouraged then to take some kind of correspondence course in electronics to make the big bucks and be their own boss! Apparently selling a product that trades on a reader's feelings of inadequacy has always been a reliable business plan.
It is interesting to read things like letters to the editor to see what people of the day thought.
A big aha! moment for me was reading up on older civilizations: archaeologists would discover golden jewelry, but also bronze replicas, which were affordable by the lower classes who couldn’t afford gold, but still wanted to project an image of opulence.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Prices dropped quickly back then.
More recently, I bought a 16GB MacBook Pro in 2013. 10 years later I would expect my next to be 64GB.
My first computer was a NASCOM-1 with 1KB available to the user, and didn't even have an assembler. You programmed it by entering hex op codes directly into memory! And we liked it that way!
Still, at least the NASCOM-1 had a keyboard, not like MIT's Altair 8800 of a few years prior where you only had binary toggle switches to setup the address and data bus to program each byte!
I remember ordering computer parts over the phone, delivered COD, because I was 12, and didn't have a credit card or a checking account.
I loved it, but preferred Byte and PC Magazine.
I remember the Gateway 2000 ads. Crazy.
If you're not familiar with Computer Shopper, imagine something the size of a 2 x 2 grid of phonebooks and just as thick. They were impressively sized.
I guess this is because the advertising industry is no longer satisfied with providing ads related to the content of a publication, in places where people deliberately seek them out because they're interested. Back then, the ad industry could have made a plausible claim that it was providing a useful and valued service to readers.
That'd be a tough claim to support today.
[1]: https://twitter.com/jonasmerlin1/status/1582278969671397377
The pace was so torrid. They stopped even advertising the RAM for my ~3 year old Pentium 100 I had with 8MB of RAM. I was expecting to pay hundreds of dollars for an upgrade, but in the end an upgrade to 72MB was only about $70.
I remember looking through the latest issue, and at least once or twice an issue thinking "Huh, I never even thought of trying to have a computer do that." Issue after issue, month after month, there was brand new stuff that exceeded what I thought computers could do. I read the ads to learn what was happening.
The first BYTE issue I remember was the one with the Star Trek cover (December 77) -- I had just recently seen a Spock ASCII art print out at the local academic computing center and burned most of my DEC-10 time playing the Star Trek game online. TREK and computing and BYTE magazine were all linked in my mind. We were living in the future, no doubt about it...
And now? Have a 5 year old mid-range computer? Buy some ram, and you get basically the same specs as the new ones, but with a slightly worse CPU. Everything (except the newest games) still works, and the biggest resource hog (especially ram) is the browser, which still shows sites with same amount of info as it did in 1990s, but somehow that autoplaying video ad needs a few more gigabytes of ram.
It's still great for my wallet... but I haven't opened a computer magazine (or well.. a youtube clip in modern time) and said "damn, I want this!" in quite a while now (at least not regarding computers).
I feel this. In my opinion, we have not had a computing magazine worth opening in two decades, at least in the US. I know we can find news and articles relevant to our interests with unparallelled ease on today's Internet, but a huge part of me misses going to a bookseller and picking up that month's selection of nerd rags.
I have always had trouble pinpointing exactly what it is I miss about the magazines of old. Sometimes I feel that it had more to do with how I fit into that world at the time, being a curious teen who loved tinkering with tech, and the future was wide open. Othertimes I think it had to do with the mags being my window to that world, since I had nobody to guide me.
My high school buddies and I desperately wanted to play this game but ... none of us had a computer! So, sitting in the cafeteria at lunch/breaks in our bell bottom pants, we walked thru the code line by line recording the values of variables with pencil on paper. This was when BASIC only allowed 1 or 2 character variable names and only had GOSUBs instead of proper functions. It was slow going at first but we eventually got to understand what sections of the code was doing and could replace line by line with, oh, its doing this again.
I'll have to look for that Dec 77 BYTE so see it that was the magazine. I didn't know it at the time but it was probably very formative for my future IT career.
While the Dec 77 issue of Byte[0] had Star Trek on the cover it didn't contain a BASIC listing. Could it have been either the May/June 1975 issue of Creative Computing[1] or one of the compilations (BASIC Computer Games[3])?
[0] https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/70s/Byte-1977-12....
[1] https://archive.org/details/CreativeComputingv01n04MayJune19...
[2] https://archive.org/details/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcomput...
Wayne Green was the publisher of Byte magazine, which he started when he recognized hobby computing that the hams that read his "73" magazine were doing.
I thought it was interesting that the first edition of Byte had an article about hobby computing with a LSI-11, which is a PDP-11 variant.
[0] https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/Best-of-Byte-1977...
Source: https://issuu.com/zetmoon/docs/compute_gazette_issue_79_1990...
Update: That site (see other comment) has quite a few more issues up than when I last checked. That's good to see.
I'm not sure you can really compare PCW to BYTE. From what I recall PCW didn't really get into the more abstract computing topics that BYTE did - it was more more focused on products.
Another good magazine from same era was Dr. Dobb's Journal.
Shame that all these geeky magazines have disappeared.
It's interesting watching some of the old c.1980 BBC computer education TV shows that have been uploaded to YouTube. It's funny watching them trying to earnestly explain to TV viewers the difference between a 16-bit computer with a 16-bit bus vs one with an 8-bit bus, etc... I guess back then there was a thought that the general public would be brought up to speed on the nuances of such things!
You’re absolutely right that PCW was more focused on products. They did sometimes have a go at some of the more conceptual stuff though and I remember learning Z80 assembly from the regular column on assembly language.
I always thought it was a bit more edgy and entertaining than Byte, in some ways like a print version of the Register.
I always liked Guy Kewney (RIP) who will always be famous now for this - the greatest case of mistaken identity in TV history.
Some favourite quotes:
"XMLDeveloper seeks validation"
"Hang on a minute, this is a 32-bit development environment. What will I do with all my 16-bit code?" "Having seen your code, dump it. However, with Visual C++ 2.0 and MFC, most developers can just recompile"
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/90s/1991/Byte-199... (page 309)
"Plans call for an increase in storage capacity to 30 or 60 GB (supporting one to two months of patient image data) and an increase in the number of supporting workstations from three in the radiology department to 10 or 15 stations distributed throughout the hospital."
How very nostalgic. Thank you for posting.
If you spend the time to read through these older ones, you'll see they were doing something special. They'd often share programs and circuits in the magazine that others could recreate at home. I wonder how difficult it was to learn about computers, we have so many resources these days.
Yes. (Steve) Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, for instance, was very popular. I used to read that column sometimes, even though I had no hardware or electronics background. :)
One thing I wished I could find was one particular "Stop Bit" that I recall to this day. Among my favorite phrases was
> Hardware Salespeople catch rabbits, paint them gray, and sell them as desktop elephants.
I just found it on page 412 of the September, 1989. While searching for the author, Peter C. Olsen, I found that this has been transcribed (fittingly) and posted here. http://linuxmafia.com/pub/humour/hunting-an-elephant.html
Where you are Mr. Olsen, thank you so much for this insightful and entertaining commentary.
I got some of my first insight into what could be done with one of these $400 "compilers" to make my own software, which was an innate part of my 8-bit computing experience, but was locked away for quite some time.
What's the alternative for "Byte" magazine today? Where do you go to read similar stuff?
And even then I feel like any sort of magazine is anachronistic in this day and age. Too bad too because unlike the various far flung forums, slack channels, or subreddits, a magazine was a nice centralized melting pot where even the cover of the magazine could ignite an entire electronics revolution (and here I'm thinking of course about the Popular Electronics cover [2] that featured the Altair 8800). We've lost our "pulp watercoolers".
[1] https://magpi.raspberrypi.com
[2] http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/13/...
There isn't a lot of long-form technical journalism happening in print today. Web distribution is cheaper and simpler.
With print you have to lay out a page by hand - and I have no idea what they used before Quark/InDesign, but it can't have been easy to work with - get it printed to film for litho, sometimes with a few iterations, handed over to a trad printer, then distributed physically.
With the web you can upload text and images to a CMS and the layout can be handled automatically. And you're done. Ad revenue can also be automated, with manual exceptions for sponsorship deals.
Ironically producing videos for YT is a much more labour-intensive process, and therefore more like print, than plain web content.
That's the same "heise" where the somewhat-famous h2testw (for testing counterfeit USB sticks etc.), windows-offlineupdate (wsusoffline.net, now not very useful anymore) and umbpci (for those who remember the DOS days ;-) came from
BYTE was originally the magazine of people who made their own computers. Quickly became the magazine of people who bought Apple ]['s or TRS-80s or assembled their own computers from parts so they could write their own software. And then morphed into the magazine for people who had a clear idea for a business (or personal) data processing problem and were looking for ideas from "experts" for how to solve it (usually in the form of a product review.)
They re-launched Byte a decade ago, but I think it's time had passed. Maybe it should have been a review of various web sites and apps (like "How I organized my record collection with Air-Table" or "How I ripped all my CDs with iTunes" or "How I ditched my local music collection with Spotify.")
Compared to modern times, few people were using microcomputers and we were all (from necessity) very interested in a few of the same topics (programming, buying affordable systems and how to make an Epson FX-80 print properly.) Byte could run an article about BNF meta-syntax or "how to do a mailing list" and a huge percentage of the readership was actually interested. More than just an ur-wikipedia, Byte let you know what was important to know by running articles about it.
By the mid-80s it had sort of lost that, certainly by the early 90s. Not so much because the quality declined, but because the readership expanded and like all good businesses, they followed the money. It's core readership in 1977 was a niche in 1987, and probably not as profitable.
BYTE was awesome. But it was awesome because it fit the times so perfectly. (Actually it changed a couple times to keep fitting the times as the times changed.) And then one day it didn't. The community of people I knew had moved on to Dr. Dobbs for interesting software stuff and Computer Shopper for product reviews.
Alas, poor BYTE! I knew it, Horatio -- a magazine of infinite jest.
Up to 1998