Wow, a 500 page single issue? I read Byte back in the day. (Well my Dad’s copy.) I don’t remember most issues being that long. How did they find enough content? I guess the probably had a lot of ads, but still, 500 pages? Wow!
There were a lot of ads in Byte. But as noted above, many were interesting in their own right. I certainly read many with interest back in the early/mid-eighties.
I have magazines for a not-terribly-popular 8-bit computer, the Tandy Color Computer, that regularly exceeded 200 pages, and that was one of about four magazines devoted to that computer. There was no Internet back in those days.