The 44 Year Old Computer Magazine That Changed Everything [video] | Hacker News Reader

The 44 Year Old Computer Magazine That Changed Everything [video]

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20 pointsxkriva1114 comments

This Byte volume can be found here: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/mode/2up

Byte was a magazine I always looked forward to receiving as it had a great connection via the writers to what was happening in the computer and software world.

I remember biking to the library to read it every time it came out

Ha! Same.

It's a real shame that Object Oriented programming got perverted into a boatload of boilerplate, as evidenced in C++, Java, etc.

I was all on board with it in Borland Pascal for Windows, and Delphi, but when I looked at C++, I got off that train. You can always take a good idea, and go too far with it... I never did understand the whole Factories for classes thing.

I tried to watch the first bit of the video, but I'm still trying to figure what exactly did it change?

There was no internet, so unless you were connected to educational organization and their curriculum, there was no way to get information of various topics in somewhat palatable way. BYTE changed all that, and suddenly everybody could learn all about Prolog and Smalltalk and other Scheiße.

Ah okay, yeah fair enough. I thought the guy was talking about the specific magazine issue of Smalltalk.

He was: he pointed out that the world of computing he (we) knew back then is illustrated in all the ads. Note that August 1981 is also the month the original IBM PC came out. In contrast the articles showed a world of computing with mice, overlapping windows, menus, cut/copy/paste.

A comment in the video pointed out that the mouse had been invented back in 1964 and claiming it was not common is a cop out. The author of the video didn't know about it before this issue and I didn't know about it. But now we knew, and for how many others was this true?

"Scheiße"

Bad memories of Smalltalk. Current implementation did not scale up.

Good memories of Smalltalk. (Was it Smalltalk or was it me?)

> Current implementation did not scale up.

Did the prototype suggest it would?

I was not in that project, but I heard it just suddenly choked up, just when the model was becoming useful.

There was no mention in the box that there was a limit. It was the fancy version with EMS-support, so it was not a hardware problem.

Not your memories of Smalltalk.

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