Byte: The Smalltalk Issue (1981) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Byte: The Smalltalk Issue (1981) [pdf]

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37 pointsshawndumas16 comments

In the “Letters” section, page 32, Stephen Hain of the MIT Logo laboratory writes about how his implementation of the Logo programming language for the Apple computer which he was writing at MIT, with the initial understanding that it would be placed in the public domain, has been shelved indefinitely by MIT, withheld from the public. Why? Because Texas Instruments sells a version of Logo which was not as good, (for its TI-99/4 computer), and Texas Instruments essentially influenced MIT to scrap the program instead of releasing it in any form.

It is 1981; it will be a few years still before Richard Stallman quits his job at MIT and starts the GNU project. I wonder if he knew about this.

The visual language grammar starting on page 40 is fascinating.

https://www.google.com/search?q=railroad+diagram&ie=UTF-8&oe...

I had no idea. Thanks for the link!

Not a problem at all.

I first came across them in The Good Parts: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/excerpts/javascri...

they are also up front in json.org

http://www.json.org/

If you were an Apple ][ fan in the early days you probably had a copy of their Pascal language poster, and it was cool:

http://www.pascal-central.com/pascal-syntax.html

Those diagrams also appear in "Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation", which is now freely available:

   http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf

(pages 737-741 of the pdf)

It was a great experience diving into Smalltalk via VisualWorks in the mid-90's at the university.

Then the following year, Java was announced to the world...

This is one of the few paper issues of Byte I've saved for all these years, actually.

That magazine, along with 80 Micro, got me through grade school.

The amount of advertising puts even Wired to shame. Holy cow.

but it is more than 400 pages though

And back then it was devoured, greedily, by essentially anybody who was interested in computing. We had BBSs but no internet; information dissemination was radically different than today.

Hobbyist computer magazines in those days were what we had, except for user groups.

Who could afford BBSs?

In Portugal it meant long distance calls to Lisbon or Porto, into systems that were time limited and with up to 10 connections.

>The amount of advertising...

...was a reason people subscribed to computer magazines in the days before the internet, because it was one of the best ways to find out about (and purchase via mail-order) new stuff.

Back in the day Byte was a chunky affair packed full of goodness. I didn't mind the ads, they were part of the charm.

I kept all my Byte magazines from when I started reading it in ~1982 until they stopped printing it in 1998. Sadly I was very short sighted and "recycled" them - but when you've moved house frequently, shifting 15 years worth of Byte's got a bit back breaking.

I used to enjoy digging out older issues to read both the articles and review the ads with a sense of nostalgia.

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