Its hard to express what it was like in the early/mid-80s (before I had my drivers licence) to bike a few miles to the bookstore at the start of every month and see all the new computer magazine covers for that month. It was so exciting.
I didn't have much money so I stuck with Micro Cornucopia as it had the biggest signal to noise ratio (and before that Rainbow Magazine). I did pickup Computer Shopper later when I started building/rebuilding my mini-tower every few months.
While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.
I had a similar experience in the early 90s (im and 1981 kid). I loved going to the magazine stand and get whatever local programming magazine they had at the time.
Also, I loved Linux Journal (later years) and Linux Magazine. I got a subscription sent to a cousin who lived in the US (In Alaska!!). She came to Mexico every six months and would bring the stacks of those magazines, which i would read back to back.
One thing I miss from thise type of magazines was the high SNR ratio and most importantly the information "push" character of it. You would learn stuff that was related but adjacent to your interests. But it will make you expand your knowledge horizon.
Nowadays sure, everything is a search away... but, you dont know what you dont know. So what would you search for?
Additionally, most content on the internet is VERY low effort. High quality content got heavily devalued.
I’m discovering a renewed appreciation for libraries — never lost in theory but in practice. I’m lucky my community has a good municipal public library nearby, a good university library not too much farther. Book collection at MPL is mixed but plenty of good to great material in the mix. Periodical collection has journalism superior to most freely available web. Periodical archives at university library are incredible (including stuff like Byte).
The environment encourages a better balance between exploration and focus. There are people to greet or not as you wish. There is no algorithm trying to anger for engagement or crumb out just enough other rewards just often enough that you pull the lever for another hit for as long as possible. Search is a whole different game, both higher effort but also passing through a more scholarly tradition and less of the commercial incentive war.
Online advantages still remain (and evolve). I’m not about to give up the web. But I might want more of myself focused through environments and institutions like libraries.
Haven’t seen the bookstore newsstand for a while though, maybe I should see what that’s like these days too.
I think you're right. A lot of people have written about this, but one of my favourites who has stuck with me in recent years is Byung-Chul Han with "The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present"
It covers other topics as well, but describes the value of physical experiences and serendipitous encounters that occurred before the digital era as we know it today. Having everything at hand is an incredible trade-off, and it isn't entirely clear what the downsides are because you can literally never know beyond "I'm missing out on countless experiences". What could they have been?
We gain a sort of efficiency, which at one point almost seemed imperative... But here we are, wishing we could ride our bikes to the bookstore again, just to look at printed copies of weeks or months-old data in inconvenient paper bindings.
It seems to be more than nostalgia to me; it's the desire to be out in the world, engaged, excited, and exploring. Maybe even with friends! We had to do that once, but now, not so much. And the journey to what we're seeking follows the same track, roughly the same distance, and a similar result, every single time. Efficiency isn't always very fun.
Of course, inefficiency is sometimes not fun at all too. I suppose we need to find the right blend, for the right reasons, and be cognizant of these trade offs as we go about our days and our lives.
I recall the same thing with each new edition of Rainbow magazine. I would read it cover to cover several times. Eventually I would hand type in some of the BASIC programs. I remember reading about people connecting to various BBS's and be jealous of them. Now it's all at our finger tips for better or worse. I guess today there needs to be a conscious effort to filter out distracting noise, our attention has become monetized.
Printed stuff really shaped my life. From PC Magazine and Winworld (is that the name of it? it was a business like weekly or something) and MSDN magazine and PC Accelerator and 2600. Odd duck out in my life was Farmshow magazine but it's basically farm hacking and fascinated me as well. MIT Technology review came later and was good for a few years, I'm still waiting for the huge amount of breakthroughs they showcased in the 2000s to come to market but whatever I'd read about it years before it hit digg.
Yeah, there was a lot of variety too .. I particularly enjoyed the differences between the UK/Euro and UK magazines - it was quite some context, all things considered, to see the markets of both realms go in slightly different directions, at times ..
My Dad regularly gave me Omni magazine subscriptions, it was kind of how I realized there were really great things to read out there, as a young 'un ..
1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore.
2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after every page. It's interesting to look back at those ads from today but it's also a jarring experience to some extent.
Also make sure to read the letters to editor part! Always fun
From 1988-91, I was a volunteer teacher in Africa. I lived in a hut without running water or electricity, and I had a subscription to Byte.
There was also almost nothing to read, so when my monthly issue of Byte appeared (2-3 months later than most people would receive it), I devoured that thing. I would read it literally cover to cover, including all those ads, several times.
I wasn't (then) working in IT, so a lot of the content (like Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar) went way over my head but it didn't matter, I read it anyway, often by the light of my kerosene lantern. I learned a huge amount: object-oriented programming, this new thing called the Internet (capitalized back then, and before the WWW), and how Jerry Pournelle was a self-important jerk (but boy, did I envy the toys he got to play with!).
This was the age of big, fold-out Gateway 2000 ads, 20MB hard drives, and Turbo Pascal kicking other compilers' butts.
I would read the magazine, then write out programs (in BASIC, the only language I had learned at that point). On my monthly trips to the capital city I would go to a local NGO and in exchange for helping with their IT issues they would let me play (i.e type out my programs and try to get them working) on their computers.
My people. My first paid programming was hand translating a BASIC app to C. I did it on the same paper the original was printed on (green/white continuous feed). When I thought I had it right I went to my mom’s work in the middle of the night to type it in and check it. Over the course of a summer I made it work.
I took what I learned from BYTE and wrote a CP/M terminate/stay-resident 'driver' that got some interesting hardware working well enough to get me the contract, as a teenager, to write the DOS driver for thing as well.
That led to a rocket-ride career through decades of systems programming, and I just can't thank the BYTE folks enough for those mind-expanding days ..
I was in Lesotho, a small country completely surrounded by South Africa (when the White farmers were expanding and taking all the Africans' farmland, they left Lesotho because it was all mountains, but with no minerals).
My mom was teaching CS in the early 80s, and subscribed to Byte. The ads were of little use for me, as I had zero money, but of course I flipped through them anyway.
I devoured Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar and I think it was one of the main influences on my career, along with Goedel, Escher, Bach.
I discovered Digi-Key in the ads. That's kind of life-changing when all you had access to was Radio Shack. You can tell someone's age from the thickness of their first Digi-Key catalog. It was like only 30 or 40 pages, mostly chips, sockets, and some wiring tools.
At the time, there were two primary alternatives for buying a computer. The first was a computer store. The second was buying an issue of Byte or a competing publication called Computer Shopper that was 100% ads. When I was in grad school, students would share a single copy of Computer Shopper and debate the best choices of parts to assemble for a new machine. Virtually all were MS-DOS based.
Those ads were the only way to actually know what software and hardware was available to buy, including information related to "open source of the day", shareware, PD,...
Access to BBS was super expensive unless you were lucky to afford a modem, and live on local call distance.
European magazine like Computer Shopper were of similar size and ads ratio.
The toilet seat ad was well targeted (you have to read somewhere).
More seriously though, print advertising was able to target readers based upon the demographics of the publications readership. They didn't track people across their online life and beyond. (That said, there definitely was some tracking.)
In principle the editorial content might be firewalled, so somebody decided to use vacuum pumps, wrote the article and then the ad department goes huh, call the vacuum pump people and see if they want an advert next to the article.
Obviously you, the reader, cannot know if that's what happened, or whether in reality it was the opposite way around, but maybe you trust the reviewer and believe they wouldn't do the other thing, or at least they would feel morally unable to do the other thing without telling you.
And to some extent that same relationship matters to whether you trust the content anyway, irrespective of advertising. I believe Yahtzee Crosshaw did or did not like the video game, I reckon Yahtzee, for whatever it's worth, isn't lying if he said it was fun.
Or take a more obscure but perhaps more relevant example. "Techmoan" on Youtube says maybe this brand new Asda tape player is the best he's seen in years. It's not great, the equivalent product in the 1980s would have Dolby and it'd be smaller and lighter and generally better, but, it's 2026 and Asda can't buy a 1980s tape player, they would need to invest billions to make one and it makes no economic sense in the era of handheld super-computers to invest so much money to make better tape players. So this one is pretty good, considering. Well that's faint praise, but it is praise. If "Techmoan" says he just bought it to see if it's any good, and here's a link to Asda's website, I believe him. If Asda bought him the tape player or even just paid him to say it, why would he lie? He's an old curmudgeon who loves legacy music formats, he's not going to get rich lying to me, so that makes no sense.
There was some controversy in the music tech space on YouTube because Behringer attacked a YouTuber and reviewer after he gave a product a bad review.
In fact they seem to have tightened up on free review samples in general.
I did some reviewing in the 90s and the magazine had a solid reviews policy - tell the truth even if someone pulls their advertising. Which very much happened on a few occasions.
You can do that if you have no issues with selling ad pages, which Byte clearly didn't.
Whether that was ever generally true for the industry, or is true now with YouTube influencers, is a different question.
For me, it was basically a catalogue. The ads weren't annoying, they were the whole point, even more so than the articles themselves!
That's how you know what the industry was doing, and if you want to buy new hardware, these magazines were the main source of information.
Maybe ironically, for better independent content, as in actual articles rather than ads, hobbyist and video game magazines did better. There was a time where video game magazines taught you about programming! If anything, by having you copy lines of BASIC because there was no digital support available.
I agree. The ads were an import part of reading those magazines. They were relevant and at least somewhat informative. Also, they gave you a way to buy the products you needed. Back then you couldn't just get on Amazon, Alibaba, or Ebay and buy anything. You had to search for a source.
Presenting ads to a target audience IS the purpose for the magazine just as they are for TV, cable, radio, and every other media source. The articles, shows, or music are inducements to get you to read, watch, or listen which, in turn, motivates companys to pay to get their ads presented.
In Finland, we make an independent computer magazine called Skrolli that comes out 4 times per year. Our issues are about 120 pages each, but with hardly any ads.
There came a point for me in the 90's, I think, where BYTE kind of jumped the shark - it became THICK, but not informative - where there was just so much advertising. In those days, even the ads could be informative, but it seemed that as BYTE struggled to be relevant, it became thicker and thicker - pretty much guaranteeing its own demise.
I still value a massive collection when I see it, in atomic form, in the real universe of course - but my personal reading of the .PDF archive is usually focused more on its early years - which just seems so much more pioneering/adventurous.
As a kid who was interested in stuff like this in the 90s, the ads were part of the enjoyment for me. You could look at components, have rounds-to-zero idea what they did but let your imagination soar at the possibility of stringing them together into something new.
Looking at it today what I notice is that the ads and the content were disjoint. The ads were heavily for high-end microcomputers often running CP/M and the S-100 bus often in multiprocessor and multiuser configurations often with exotic graphic systems for the time, like you see these guys
prominently. That stuff was barely talked about in the editorial which was much more about ‘home computers’ like Apple and TRS-80 and Atari and TI up to 1983 or so. Up until then there were a few good ‘computer magazines’ like Creative Computing [2] that were platform agnostic but around that time they started to become more specific to platforms like I was subscribing to Rainbow for my color computer and there were a lot of mags for the C-64 [3] and emerging for the IBM PC and clones. Byte got more focused on the PC and low end CP/M machines with a little interest in high-end workstations and also 68k computers like Mac an Amiga… but just a little.
By the late 1980s the cool kids (some of those “kids” were adults) were already online on BBSes and you didn’t need magazines to keep up with free and ‘free’ (pirate) software. I think computer magazines were struggling, the PC kept growing. Computer Shopper became dominant because boy you could find good deals in it. Then the WWW came along and computer magazines were obsolete overnight.
[1] I saw plenty of PDP-11s and other minicomputers but never saw a high end microcomputer of that era outside the pages of Byte…. But somebody bought them.
[2] loved it at the time but it doesn’t have the staying power of Byte, there is a lab in the EE building next door donated by David Ahl who founded Creative Computing, some issues of CC in the 1978-1979 period are wild.
[3] the c-64 was a huge hit in terms of third party software and having friends who had them, but I don’t think it was talked about in Byte like other home computers because Byte was going upmarket then.
Originally the PDP-11s and the CP/M machines were in different markets. DEC's culture was science/tech/academia, selling to educated technical users and OEMs.
The CP/M market was the precursor of the modern PC market - mostly small businesses who didn't see themselves as technical but understood that word processing and spreadsheets could save them time and money.
Minis weren't considered small systems, both for reasons of cost and complexity, so Byte didn't cover them.
By the mid-80s the cost of a PDP-11 had come right down, and was comparable to a high-end CP/M box. DEC made some efforts to sell to small businesses, but never quite understood the people or the market.
Then the IBM PC and its clones appeared and nuked the CP/M market from orbit.
This was DEC's biggest strategic failure. It had about ten years to make the PDP-11 and VAX designs an industry standard. But it was too busy selling expensive peripherals and trying to compete with IBM at the high end to pay attention to what was happening at the low end, and IBM clones stole its lunch.
Computer Shopper in the UK was a lot like that back in the 80s and 90s: just a massive wedge of a magazine where the vast majority of pages were ads.
The classified/small ads section alone was enormous. And then you’d have companies that sold computer components include huge swathes of their catalogues and price lists in multi-page adverts. Would have been a real boon for system builders, but I didn’t have the cash back then. I was still in the world of 8-bit micros and 16-bit machines.
I hope people focus on the nature of the ads as much as the impressive quantity of them. The extent to which quality software and hardware was expensive is probably the main thing people should appreciate. The thing that always strikes me is how long the z80 held on as a thing people would pay for.
Most trade magazines of that era were pretty similar in size and number of ads , eg. PC Magazine. Pre-Internet they were one of the only ways to keep up with industry news, topics and products.
There were, and still are, a number of magazines in the electronics industry, EDN, for example, that were available for free to engineers that were 75% ads with a few articles. The publishers and advertisers expected the articles to draw the engineers who would be the ones to spec components for their current designs.
EDN - Voice of the Engineer
https://www.edn.com
Electronic Design News (EDN) is an electronics community for engineers, by engineers.
Find the latest articles, magazines, tools, and blogs in the industry.
It was also rather eclectic in a way that later magazines like PC Magazine weren't (even if PC Mag did still have features like assembly programming columns).
I certainly can't think of any magazines remotely like the big computer mags today. Taken to the extreme of Computer Shopper, no one is buying a magazine in large part for the ads today.
I missed the heyday of reading Byte in vivo as it came out, but the creativity of the covers always stood out. The artist had to come up with a concept, paint it, and get it all ready within a month. As a non-creative, that’s an impressive achievement.
The huge volume of advertisements was common for most magazines in this genre. In the UK this led to an interesting pricing / tax issue.
Value Added Tax is a tax putatively on, as the name suggests the value you've added. For a consumer you don't care whether you paid £15 for this product because it was £10 plus 50% VAT, or it was £15 with zero VAT, that's the same to you, and so the law says the advertiser can't say that's a £10 product even if there is 50% VAT, 'cos consumers can't buy it for £10, so you're lying to them.
However, if you're selling products for businesses, they're going to claim back the VAT on inputs to their business, only the added value gets taxed and that's implemented by charging the tax on their sales and allowing them to claim back the tax they paid for inputs. As a result it is allowed in that context to display the explicitly without VAT prices, your buyers potentially won't pay that tax anyway. So for a business you can say it's a £10 product.
The question in these magazines was: Are the products for businesses, or, are you actually selling to the hobbyists who often buy the magazine. You obviously want to advertise the lower prices with just an asterisk leading to a disclaimer about VAT to be paid, but if in reality most customers are hobbyists they're all paying VAT so maybe you're breaking the law by advertising the lower price?
Actual adverts definitely varied in how plausible the two categories of buyer were. How many businesses need to buy this slightly nicer Joystick for the Commodore 64? On the other hand, what hobbyist needs to buy hundreds or thousands of 10MB hard disks or SIMMs (yes the DIMM's predecessor was named the SIMM) for a discounted volume price ?
Ads that's are directly paid for, curated by properly incentivized humans, and don't have spyware built into them, are actually sought after by consumers. I used to spend hours staring at them, by choice. I probably still would today, if such things existed.
Byte was great. For years it was the highlight of my month. And I thought the cover art was amazing. The Smalltalk hot air balloon logo came from the cover of the August 1981 issue, which was devoted entirely to Smalltalk.
Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February:
Because I'm an old man, my sister made me a birthday card using an image from the front cover of their fourth issue (Christmas 1975) - corresponding to when I was born. It's a harbinger of a future that was by then inevitable but hadn't yet quite happened, the "personal computer" is very much still a nerd toy, expensive kits that can be assembled by the enthusiast to achieve little of immediate value - but you can more or less feel what's about to happen.
If you're old, I guess that makes me ancient. Byte is what got me hooked on the path I walk to this day, though back then it would be far beyond my wildest dreams to believe that in my lifetime it would be possible to hold an intelligent conversation with software, and everything that entails
Forget AI, if you could time travel and just bring an iPhone back to the late 70's it would look like a science fiction fantasy. An alien artifact.
It's interesting to wonder if the next 50 years of computing will be the same. Will a device from 2075 make what we have today seem like primitive toys? No doubt we'll have full blown AGI by then, which may be the major difference, and we'll (or rather our kids) will look back with nostaligia on these LLMs which seemed so revolutionary at the time, but severely limited and flawed, just a hint of what is going to come.
The LLMs are the philosophical "box of all conversation" trick, that's not intelligence, it just went from a neat philosophical device to explain why Turing's test doesn't do what you think intuitively it would do to a real world thing that is a mix of fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem.
I think that is a valid opinion, but don't think there is any conclusive evidence to make it a valid fact (while of course not disagreeing with "fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem" part). Would be happy to learn otherwise.
Ah, yes, the program that's "not intelligent" yet somehow turns in gold-medal results at international math and programming competitions designed to identify and test the smartest human students. Is that sentiment supposed to make us feel smart?
If anything, the closest thing we have to Byte in 1975 is /r/localllama in 2026. Believe me, there was no shortage of old men in 1975 who didn't get it, either.
I've downloaded the entire thing a while back for nostalgia sake.
And I am (of course) the proud owner of a physical copy of the "Smalltalk" issue :-)
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
I binned my large collection of Byte, Dr. Dobbs, etc. during a move. I recall taking them down from an attic cubby and then having to take them back up. Something like "Oh, forget it" came to pass. Stuff it heavy!
Interestingly, I think one of the most formative Byte articles for me was from 1978 (I think). It was an introduction to 3D graphics. Specifically the matrices for rotation and scaling etc.
I can assure that that while it is possible to visualize simple 3D models using the 40x25 character graphics of a PET, it's not advisable. The one thing I was unknowingly missing was Bresenham's line algorithm. That would have helped. I might have even moved up to "high res (80x50)" using the little block PETSCII characters.
I was able to work with it more in college where I had access to a Tektronix 4052 (which readily solve the whole line drawing problem).
One thing you can see really clearly, is how the price of specific computing items fluctuated.
The Lisp issue is what got me into said language. Later I was using music software (Cakewalk) and noticed the language was nearly the same, so I started making non-music stuff in Cakewalk as well. CAL was all about programming music logic, but it was a fully fledged language that did whatever text-oriented duties you could think of. It was also super easy to write viruses, although they would only run within Cakewalk of course. Fun times!
I got into computers in 1978 when I started high school and they had two Wang 2200 computers, each with a whopping 8KB of RAM.
Although I was 14 I asked my parents for a subscription to Byte. Every so often I'd get an offer in the mail to join a "wine of the month" service, or life insurance, etc. Clearly they had sold their mailing list and they just assumed anyone with a subscription must be an adult.
Anyway, I loved Steve Ciarcia's column and hated Jerry Pournelle's column that got too much space. His schtick was that he was a power user using the hardware/software for doing real work. But he was far from normal -- he'd write florid articles about having a software or hardware malfunction and then calling up the owner of the company and they next morning the guy who wrote the malfunctioning app would be at Jerry's house debugging it. "XYZ Corp produces quality software that they really stand behind and you should buy it too." Yeah, Jerry, you didn't buy it, and the average Joe doesn't get personal attention like that. I found him to be an insufferable, self-important twat. 45 years later I still feel the same about him.
The two characterizations of people in the introduction are timeless?
> A person with a primary interest in software will oftentimes be the person who purchases a kit computer because the kit minimizes the amount of hardware knowledge the person is required to have.
That’s how I came into my first computer - built from a kit in 7th grade.
And, yeah, I understand more about hardware than I did back then, but it’s all about the software to me still… okay, maybe some electronics and mechanics, too.
Chaos Manor always seemed like this mystical place to me as a kid. Limitless budget and always messing with hardware and software, whether necessary or not :-)
I've met both, Niven, twice, briefly. He was a grand story teller, but not really approachable.
Pournelle was always pleasant.
I had the opportunity to share a dinner with JP. I was on BIX, Byte Information Exchange, their "BBS" or "CompuServe"-ish service. And Jerry would occasionally sponsor small get togethers.
So there was about 8 of us just sharing dinner at a Chinese place in the Valley. It was a great time. The man can talk, to be sure. Sat right next to him.
Unlike Pournelle, Niven is still alive (87 year old), but I don't think he is writing new science fiction these days (although he has collaborated on some stories this century and has made guest appearances at some conferences in the last few years).
I remember Wayne well, W2NSD = never say die... He did well in ham radio magazines, and entered computer magazines running full speed with byte and others. His accountant advised him to put Byte in his wife's name for tax reasons. This later came back to 'byte' him when they divorced and she was adjudicated as the owner, but he never said die and went on to other things but never overtook Byte.
I recall him at the Atlantic city hamfest, where the Apple launched. Woz and Jobs were there, at set-up and they had a problem, no solder or iron and a 74366 had failed when the card involved was pulled under power = failed. This was before there were low cost, low power 74LS366 were available cheaply. This part had to be desoldered and replaced. They had no chip, solder, iron or wick. John Ramsey had a booth there, so he lent them the solder iron etc and he was also selling a wide range of TTL parts = the rest is history. I also had a table selling diverse ham radio bits/pieces.
Wayne was operating his magazine booth, more Wayne details here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green
Having lived through this era, living in the UK, Byte always seemed more commercially orientated than hobbyist, but I would buy and read it all the same.
Hobbyist computing grew out of hobbyist electronics with the Altair 8800 kit featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975 being one of the first personal computers. My own first computer was also a kit (bag of components and a bare circuit board), the NASCOM-1, introduced a couple of years later in 1977 and featured on the cover of the first issue of Personal Computer World, which was the first UK magazine dedicated to this new hobby of computing.
Another great magazine of this era was Dr Dobbs (Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia. Running Light without Overbyte), which was also aimed at hobbyists, featuring lots of program listings. These American magazines like Byte & Dr Dobbs were easy to buy in high street newsagents in the UK.
> Having lived through this era, living in the UK, Byte always seemed more commercially orientated than hobbyist, but I would buy and read it all the same.
The hobbyist arena tended to fall more towards magazines like Popular Electronics, and the focus was much more the lower circuit levels. Byte dipped their toes into that arena via a few of the regular columnists, but that was not their target (despite the fact that many of us subscribers were "computer hobbyists" by most any definition of that term).
I started reading Byte when I had no way to understand what it was talking about. There were technical terms that I simply had no reference for. What the heck is an assembler?
I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.
No, it's on my list, though. 99% of the magazine scans on the Internet are English. Foreign language magazines are rare. Some Japanese, some Russian. Arabic magazine scans are virtually non-existent, although I found some Persian ones the other day.
As a young hacker in the 70's and 80's, magazines were my primary source of docs. I lived in a remote community where such technology was really, really foreign at first. My relatives lived in other parts of the state, some very remote, some in the city. I had a HAM-/CB-enthusiastic hacker uncle I'd regularly visit in one end of the state (outback) and plenty of relatives in the major city and countryside where I lived, so my docs-collecting mission during a routine adventuring between these family areas went something like this:
1. If in the city/small town: go to the library, read latest BYTE magazine, Radio Electronics, a few other electronics (then computer-) magazines, and so on[1]. Then, browse back issues - my library had them all in the first few years - find code that I might adapt to my machine, copy notes or - remember it - for when I got home later. I usually didn't check anything out because I never, ever gave back BYTE magazines I loaned from the library, just because I never knew when I'd be back (or that was my excuse). So, the library was just for reference/note-taking. This actually made going on those boring family visits quite palatable.
2. If in the city: Go to every newsagent/magazine dealer in my route, read every single tech magazine - BYTE, Dr. Dobbs Journal, ZAP, etc. as quickly as possible, before being asked to leave. Buy something if possible, but only if a review finds something interesting. Usually, leave with a BYTE, at least. If I could afford it, always with a DDJ too. Repeat at every newsagent in the city.
3. If I am in the country, at Uncle Hacker-Shacks: In between hacking on his radios and amplifiers, burning my fingers on some new Fun Way Into Electronics Dick Smith kits, and with those toasty digits browsing his extensive magazine collection, including every BYTE issue since the beginning (it's the 70's/80's, I'm a teen) .. do chores (lawns/wood-chopping/fishing/cleaning/reading-to-little-kids) and save coins for photocopying .. take uncles magazines to get photocopies of interesting things, create my own ring-binder full of such things to take back home with me. Somehow, my uncle always had really great magazines and books and things, way, way out there beyond the dusty horizon... and I'd go home after the holidays, with copies of the best of it.
Usually BYTE magazine articles for systems (Apple/C64/etc.) similar enough to mine (Oric-1) to have some use for me, later, when I got back home to my computer. During those long bus, car, train, plane rides, I'd often spend more time reading and re-reading the listings, than I did typing it in when I finally got home.
BYTE was huge to me, it was my first real foray into cross-platform/multi-discipline software development, I literally had no choice but to port things to the Oric-1, if I wanted to do anything with it. I really wish I still had those old ring-binders, it'd be a blast to see my old notes and printouts (had the Oric printer for such things, it was my long-term archive, which I've long-since lost..)
The skills I gained, basically from 8 years old to 18 years old, by reading these magazines - truly informed an important part of my professional toolbox, which have stuck with me for years of course, since this was an era where a significant part of computing technology was being worked out.
I really wonder how kids these days get access to the evolutionary, real-time nature of the fields they're interested in. I guess MAKE filled that hole for a while.
EDIT: Just wanted to say, Issue #1 of BYTE is really worth a read .. "Assembling your own Assembler", and "Recycling used IC's" is so resonant with my Sunday-afternoon musings about the perils of AI and ML on my teenagers' mindset .. seems like someone else is gonna get some burned fingers, soon enough ..
[1] - (I think I read my first 2600 this way also...)
Steve Ciarcia was incredibly influential to young me. His projects were wild. I only built one of his designs: an 8052AH-BASIC microcontroller board that I still have in the basement. He did more "mainstream" stuff like the series of articles on building your very own 8088-based PC compatible (a huge effort back in the day). But then he'd do crazy stuff like an 8051-based board that calculated the Mandelbrot set networked to a PC, and the more of the boards that you built and connected to the network, the faster the computation of the result.
Radio Electronics was gold for articles on cable & satellite TV descramblers. The only problem was that too often, the parts list would have one inductor that was basically made of Pure Unobtainium where I lived :-(
Oh, it was really gold, totally agree with you. I remember Steve's amazing stuff .. also, Circuit Cellar cannot go unmentioned in this thread too of course, that is for sure essential reading for the budding hacker needing a break from the ML-wash, imho.
It was also where I first started learning about synthesizers, which is another subject my uncle and I would get burned fingers about - him building the oscillator and me doing the filter and so on .. but there were other magazines of that ilk, I thing Radio Electronics transitioned to "Electronics Magazine" in my market in those days (Australia), or so it seems through the fog of time ..
I can come clean and say that I have all of these magazines safely .PDF'ed for the sailboat somewhere, I do know that for sure anyway, lol ..
Compute! was very much aimed more at the home market that Byte (which appealed more to IT professionals). At the time, though, Compute! and Compute's Gazette (for Commodore computers) were great for me.
The most amazing magazine of all, though, was The Transactor. Exclusively Commodore, and for programmers. Very few ads, too. Their "Inner Space Anthology" was an incredible resource for everything technical. Memory maps, ROM listings, and much, much more.
Its hard to express what it was like in the early/mid-80s (before I had my drivers licence) to bike a few miles to the bookstore at the start of every month and see all the new computer magazine covers for that month. It was so exciting.
I didn't have much money so I stuck with Micro Cornucopia as it had the biggest signal to noise ratio (and before that Rainbow Magazine). I did pickup Computer Shopper later when I started building/rebuilding my mini-tower every few months.
While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.
I had a similar experience in the early 90s (im and 1981 kid). I loved going to the magazine stand and get whatever local programming magazine they had at the time.
Also, I loved Linux Journal (later years) and Linux Magazine. I got a subscription sent to a cousin who lived in the US (In Alaska!!). She came to Mexico every six months and would bring the stacks of those magazines, which i would read back to back.
One thing I miss from thise type of magazines was the high SNR ratio and most importantly the information "push" character of it. You would learn stuff that was related but adjacent to your interests. But it will make you expand your knowledge horizon.
Nowadays sure, everything is a search away... but, you dont know what you dont know. So what would you search for?
Additionally, most content on the internet is VERY low effort. High quality content got heavily devalued.
Embodiment, social context, and focus.
I’m discovering a renewed appreciation for libraries — never lost in theory but in practice. I’m lucky my community has a good municipal public library nearby, a good university library not too much farther. Book collection at MPL is mixed but plenty of good to great material in the mix. Periodical collection has journalism superior to most freely available web. Periodical archives at university library are incredible (including stuff like Byte).
The environment encourages a better balance between exploration and focus. There are people to greet or not as you wish. There is no algorithm trying to anger for engagement or crumb out just enough other rewards just often enough that you pull the lever for another hit for as long as possible. Search is a whole different game, both higher effort but also passing through a more scholarly tradition and less of the commercial incentive war.
Online advantages still remain (and evolve). I’m not about to give up the web. But I might want more of myself focused through environments and institutions like libraries.
Haven’t seen the bookstore newsstand for a while though, maybe I should see what that’s like these days too.
> I feel like something has been lost.
I think you're right. A lot of people have written about this, but one of my favourites who has stuck with me in recent years is Byung-Chul Han with "The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present"
It covers other topics as well, but describes the value of physical experiences and serendipitous encounters that occurred before the digital era as we know it today. Having everything at hand is an incredible trade-off, and it isn't entirely clear what the downsides are because you can literally never know beyond "I'm missing out on countless experiences". What could they have been?
We gain a sort of efficiency, which at one point almost seemed imperative... But here we are, wishing we could ride our bikes to the bookstore again, just to look at printed copies of weeks or months-old data in inconvenient paper bindings.
It seems to be more than nostalgia to me; it's the desire to be out in the world, engaged, excited, and exploring. Maybe even with friends! We had to do that once, but now, not so much. And the journey to what we're seeking follows the same track, roughly the same distance, and a similar result, every single time. Efficiency isn't always very fun.
Of course, inefficiency is sometimes not fun at all too. I suppose we need to find the right blend, for the right reasons, and be cognizant of these trade offs as we go about our days and our lives.
I recall the same thing with each new edition of Rainbow magazine. I would read it cover to cover several times. Eventually I would hand type in some of the BASIC programs. I remember reading about people connecting to various BBS's and be jealous of them. Now it's all at our finger tips for better or worse. I guess today there needs to be a conscious effort to filter out distracting noise, our attention has become monetized.
Oh yeah, it was really joyous to go on such bike rides and so on. The newsagents were really important to my young developing, hacker mind.
It was transformative to go, each week, and see new stuff or review things this way.
Printed stuff really shaped my life. From PC Magazine and Winworld (is that the name of it? it was a business like weekly or something) and MSDN magazine and PC Accelerator and 2600. Odd duck out in my life was Farmshow magazine but it's basically farm hacking and fascinated me as well. MIT Technology review came later and was good for a few years, I'm still waiting for the huge amount of breakthroughs they showcased in the 2000s to come to market but whatever I'd read about it years before it hit digg.
Yeah, there was a lot of variety too .. I particularly enjoyed the differences between the UK/Euro and UK magazines - it was quite some context, all things considered, to see the markets of both realms go in slightly different directions, at times ..
My Dad regularly gave me Omni magazine subscriptions, it was kind of how I realized there were really great things to read out there, as a young 'un ..
It should now be possible to discard my boxes of old Byte - but it is not easy.
i love this comment, 100% agree and where were you in my childhood my friend?
Two things always stood out for me about Byte
1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore.
2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after every page. It's interesting to look back at those ads from today but it's also a jarring experience to some extent.
Also make sure to read the letters to editor part! Always fun
From 1988-91, I was a volunteer teacher in Africa. I lived in a hut without running water or electricity, and I had a subscription to Byte.
There was also almost nothing to read, so when my monthly issue of Byte appeared (2-3 months later than most people would receive it), I devoured that thing. I would read it literally cover to cover, including all those ads, several times.
I wasn't (then) working in IT, so a lot of the content (like Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar) went way over my head but it didn't matter, I read it anyway, often by the light of my kerosene lantern. I learned a huge amount: object-oriented programming, this new thing called the Internet (capitalized back then, and before the WWW), and how Jerry Pournelle was a self-important jerk (but boy, did I envy the toys he got to play with!).
This was the age of big, fold-out Gateway 2000 ads, 20MB hard drives, and Turbo Pascal kicking other compilers' butts.
I would read the magazine, then write out programs (in BASIC, the only language I had learned at that point). On my monthly trips to the capital city I would go to a local NGO and in exchange for helping with their IT issues they would let me play (i.e type out my programs and try to get them working) on their computers.
lol greetings fellow Basic pencil coder! I used to also write basic programs by hand because I didn’t have a computer.
Pournelle original claim to fame was as one of the authors of “Strategy of Technology“ which was very influential in the 70s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_Technology
My people. My first paid programming was hand translating a BASIC app to C. I did it on the same paper the original was printed on (green/white continuous feed). When I thought I had it right I went to my mom’s work in the middle of the night to type it in and check it. Over the course of a summer I made it work.
The money went to buying my first computer (kit).
Hail, fellow BYTE'ian!
I took what I learned from BYTE and wrote a CP/M terminate/stay-resident 'driver' that got some interesting hardware working well enough to get me the contract, as a teenager, to write the DOS driver for thing as well.
That led to a rocket-ride career through decades of systems programming, and I just can't thank the BYTE folks enough for those mind-expanding days ..
Yea, I hear Ya! I wrote BASIC programs by hand, as well at home while in high school for the same reason :)
What country were you in?
I was in Lesotho, a small country completely surrounded by South Africa (when the White farmers were expanding and taking all the Africans' farmland, they left Lesotho because it was all mountains, but with no minerals).
My mom was teaching CS in the early 80s, and subscribed to Byte. The ads were of little use for me, as I had zero money, but of course I flipped through them anyway.
I devoured Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar and I think it was one of the main influences on my career, along with Goedel, Escher, Bach.
I discovered Digi-Key in the ads. That's kind of life-changing when all you had access to was Radio Shack. You can tell someone's age from the thickness of their first Digi-Key catalog. It was like only 30 or 40 pages, mostly chips, sockets, and some wiring tools.
At the time, there were two primary alternatives for buying a computer. The first was a computer store. The second was buying an issue of Byte or a competing publication called Computer Shopper that was 100% ads. When I was in grad school, students would share a single copy of Computer Shopper and debate the best choices of parts to assemble for a new machine. Virtually all were MS-DOS based.
Those ads were the only way to actually know what software and hardware was available to buy, including information related to "open source of the day", shareware, PD,...
Access to BBS was super expensive unless you were lucky to afford a modem, and live on local call distance.
European magazine like Computer Shopper were of similar size and ads ratio.
Ads that are well target aren't jarring. They are just part of the magazine.
I remember reading ads about a specific make of vacuum pumps next to an article with experiments which used them.
Today's ads are so obtrusive because you get toilet seat ads next to an article about general relativity.
The toilet seat ad was well targeted (you have to read somewhere).
More seriously though, print advertising was able to target readers based upon the demographics of the publications readership. They didn't track people across their online life and beyond. (That said, there definitely was some tracking.)
It’s content targeting vs reader targeting.
I agree, content targeting feels less jarring because it fits with what you are reading.
> I remember reading ads about a specific make of vacuum pumps next to an article with experiments which used them.
Doesn't that just create a very obvious conflict of interest and nullify the credibility of the article?
In principle the editorial content might be firewalled, so somebody decided to use vacuum pumps, wrote the article and then the ad department goes huh, call the vacuum pump people and see if they want an advert next to the article.
Obviously you, the reader, cannot know if that's what happened, or whether in reality it was the opposite way around, but maybe you trust the reviewer and believe they wouldn't do the other thing, or at least they would feel morally unable to do the other thing without telling you.
And to some extent that same relationship matters to whether you trust the content anyway, irrespective of advertising. I believe Yahtzee Crosshaw did or did not like the video game, I reckon Yahtzee, for whatever it's worth, isn't lying if he said it was fun.
Or take a more obscure but perhaps more relevant example. "Techmoan" on Youtube says maybe this brand new Asda tape player is the best he's seen in years. It's not great, the equivalent product in the 1980s would have Dolby and it'd be smaller and lighter and generally better, but, it's 2026 and Asda can't buy a 1980s tape player, they would need to invest billions to make one and it makes no economic sense in the era of handheld super-computers to invest so much money to make better tape players. So this one is pretty good, considering. Well that's faint praise, but it is praise. If "Techmoan" says he just bought it to see if it's any good, and here's a link to Asda's website, I believe him. If Asda bought him the tape player or even just paid him to say it, why would he lie? He's an old curmudgeon who loves legacy music formats, he's not going to get rich lying to me, so that makes no sense.
There was some controversy in the music tech space on YouTube because Behringer attacked a YouTuber and reviewer after he gave a product a bad review.
In fact they seem to have tightened up on free review samples in general.
I did some reviewing in the 90s and the magazine had a solid reviews policy - tell the truth even if someone pulls their advertising. Which very much happened on a few occasions.
You can do that if you have no issues with selling ad pages, which Byte clearly didn't.
Whether that was ever generally true for the industry, or is true now with YouTube influencers, is a different question.
Computer Shopper was in the US too.
In the Iberian Penisula we got the UK edition with its British humour, was it the same?
The US edition was US focused. Until this thread, I had no reason to know it was published for other markets.
For me, it was basically a catalogue. The ads weren't annoying, they were the whole point, even more so than the articles themselves!
That's how you know what the industry was doing, and if you want to buy new hardware, these magazines were the main source of information.
Maybe ironically, for better independent content, as in actual articles rather than ads, hobbyist and video game magazines did better. There was a time where video game magazines taught you about programming! If anything, by having you copy lines of BASIC because there was no digital support available.
I agree. The ads were an import part of reading those magazines. They were relevant and at least somewhat informative. Also, they gave you a way to buy the products you needed. Back then you couldn't just get on Amazon, Alibaba, or Ebay and buy anything. You had to search for a source.
Presenting ads to a target audience IS the purpose for the magazine just as they are for TV, cable, radio, and every other media source. The articles, shows, or music are inducements to get you to read, watch, or listen which, in turn, motivates companys to pay to get their ads presented.
In Finland, we make an independent computer magazine called Skrolli that comes out 4 times per year. Our issues are about 120 pages each, but with hardly any ads.
I found that the ads in those magazines were also informative. not unbiased, but a good introduction to new products.
There came a point for me in the 90's, I think, where BYTE kind of jumped the shark - it became THICK, but not informative - where there was just so much advertising. In those days, even the ads could be informative, but it seemed that as BYTE struggled to be relevant, it became thicker and thicker - pretty much guaranteeing its own demise.
I still value a massive collection when I see it, in atomic form, in the real universe of course - but my personal reading of the .PDF archive is usually focused more on its early years - which just seems so much more pioneering/adventurous.
As a kid who was interested in stuff like this in the 90s, the ads were part of the enjoyment for me. You could look at components, have rounds-to-zero idea what they did but let your imagination soar at the possibility of stringing them together into something new.
Looking at it today what I notice is that the ads and the content were disjoint. The ads were heavily for high-end microcomputers often running CP/M and the S-100 bus often in multiprocessor and multiuser configurations often with exotic graphic systems for the time, like you see these guys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco [1]
prominently. That stuff was barely talked about in the editorial which was much more about ‘home computers’ like Apple and TRS-80 and Atari and TI up to 1983 or so. Up until then there were a few good ‘computer magazines’ like Creative Computing [2] that were platform agnostic but around that time they started to become more specific to platforms like I was subscribing to Rainbow for my color computer and there were a lot of mags for the C-64 [3] and emerging for the IBM PC and clones. Byte got more focused on the PC and low end CP/M machines with a little interest in high-end workstations and also 68k computers like Mac an Amiga… but just a little.
By the late 1980s the cool kids (some of those “kids” were adults) were already online on BBSes and you didn’t need magazines to keep up with free and ‘free’ (pirate) software. I think computer magazines were struggling, the PC kept growing. Computer Shopper became dominant because boy you could find good deals in it. Then the WWW came along and computer magazines were obsolete overnight.
[1] I saw plenty of PDP-11s and other minicomputers but never saw a high end microcomputer of that era outside the pages of Byte…. But somebody bought them.
[2] loved it at the time but it doesn’t have the staying power of Byte, there is a lab in the EE building next door donated by David Ahl who founded Creative Computing, some issues of CC in the 1978-1979 period are wild.
[3] the c-64 was a huge hit in terms of third party software and having friends who had them, but I don’t think it was talked about in Byte like other home computers because Byte was going upmarket then.
Originally the PDP-11s and the CP/M machines were in different markets. DEC's culture was science/tech/academia, selling to educated technical users and OEMs.
The CP/M market was the precursor of the modern PC market - mostly small businesses who didn't see themselves as technical but understood that word processing and spreadsheets could save them time and money.
Minis weren't considered small systems, both for reasons of cost and complexity, so Byte didn't cover them.
By the mid-80s the cost of a PDP-11 had come right down, and was comparable to a high-end CP/M box. DEC made some efforts to sell to small businesses, but never quite understood the people or the market.
Then the IBM PC and its clones appeared and nuked the CP/M market from orbit.
This was DEC's biggest strategic failure. It had about ten years to make the PDP-11 and VAX designs an industry standard. But it was too busy selling expensive peripherals and trying to compete with IBM at the high end to pay attention to what was happening at the low end, and IBM clones stole its lunch.
Computer Shopper in the UK was a lot like that back in the 80s and 90s: just a massive wedge of a magazine where the vast majority of pages were ads.
The classified/small ads section alone was enormous. And then you’d have companies that sold computer components include huge swathes of their catalogues and price lists in multi-page adverts. Would have been a real boon for system builders, but I didn’t have the cash back then. I was still in the world of 8-bit micros and 16-bit machines.
I didn't realise what you meant until looking at this
https://archive.org/details/PcWorld2010
The difference in amount ads is really insane...
I hope people focus on the nature of the ads as much as the impressive quantity of them. The extent to which quality software and hardware was expensive is probably the main thing people should appreciate. The thing that always strikes me is how long the z80 held on as a thing people would pay for.
Ads back then were entertaining. I actually sometimes went to archive just to read those Ads instead of articles.
Most trade magazines of that era were pretty similar in size and number of ads , eg. PC Magazine. Pre-Internet they were one of the only ways to keep up with industry news, topics and products.
Then there was computer shopper...man I'd get 8 months out of one of those just paging through and dreaming
There were, and still are, a number of magazines in the electronics industry, EDN, for example, that were available for free to engineers that were 75% ads with a few articles. The publishers and advertisers expected the articles to draw the engineers who would be the ones to spec components for their current designs.
EDN - Voice of the Engineer https://www.edn.com Electronic Design News (EDN) is an electronics community for engineers, by engineers. Find the latest articles, magazines, tools, and blogs in the industry.
I like their tear downs of electronic equipment. https://www.edn.com/category/design/under-the-hood-teardown/...
Sadly Internet archive does not have a complete collection of old EDN magazines ....
It was also rather eclectic in a way that later magazines like PC Magazine weren't (even if PC Mag did still have features like assembly programming columns).
I certainly can't think of any magazines remotely like the big computer mags today. Taken to the extreme of Computer Shopper, no one is buying a magazine in large part for the ads today.
RE ".... It's a massive book like magazine....."
NO Internet back then.
People still had a massive thirst for information. Even the ads where interesting and read by many to learn more ....
I missed the heyday of reading Byte in vivo as it came out, but the creativity of the covers always stood out. The artist had to come up with a concept, paint it, and get it all ready within a month. As a non-creative, that’s an impressive achievement.
Red Herring was like that at the height of the dot com era. There were certain issues that were 600 pages long, although half of them were ads.
The huge volume of advertisements was common for most magazines in this genre. In the UK this led to an interesting pricing / tax issue.
Value Added Tax is a tax putatively on, as the name suggests the value you've added. For a consumer you don't care whether you paid £15 for this product because it was £10 plus 50% VAT, or it was £15 with zero VAT, that's the same to you, and so the law says the advertiser can't say that's a £10 product even if there is 50% VAT, 'cos consumers can't buy it for £10, so you're lying to them.
However, if you're selling products for businesses, they're going to claim back the VAT on inputs to their business, only the added value gets taxed and that's implemented by charging the tax on their sales and allowing them to claim back the tax they paid for inputs. As a result it is allowed in that context to display the explicitly without VAT prices, your buyers potentially won't pay that tax anyway. So for a business you can say it's a £10 product.
The question in these magazines was: Are the products for businesses, or, are you actually selling to the hobbyists who often buy the magazine. You obviously want to advertise the lower prices with just an asterisk leading to a disclaimer about VAT to be paid, but if in reality most customers are hobbyists they're all paying VAT so maybe you're breaking the law by advertising the lower price?
Actual adverts definitely varied in how plausible the two categories of buyer were. How many businesses need to buy this slightly nicer Joystick for the Commodore 64? On the other hand, what hobbyist needs to buy hundreds or thousands of 10MB hard disks or SIMMs (yes the DIMM's predecessor was named the SIMM) for a discounted volume price ?
But those are nice ads. Nowadays you get tons of these low/effort-AI-generated ads in YT. They suck big time.
I loved the ads. Some of them were quite risqué too.
Ads that's are directly paid for, curated by properly incentivized humans, and don't have spyware built into them, are actually sought after by consumers. I used to spend hours staring at them, by choice. I probably still would today, if such things existed.
Byte was great. For years it was the highlight of my month. And I thought the cover art was amazing. The Smalltalk hot air balloon logo came from the cover of the August 1981 issue, which was devoted entirely to Smalltalk.
Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982354
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
Byte's first mention of the 6502 (6501) I think:
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/m...
I had from around 1982 to 1990, and a random scattering of older issues.
All lost during a move from one city to another - except for one Byte book: Threaded Interpreted Languages.
https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...
Because I'm an old man, my sister made me a birthday card using an image from the front cover of their fourth issue (Christmas 1975) - corresponding to when I was born. It's a harbinger of a future that was by then inevitable but hadn't yet quite happened, the "personal computer" is very much still a nerd toy, expensive kits that can be assembled by the enthusiast to achieve little of immediate value - but you can more or less feel what's about to happen.
If you're old, I guess that makes me ancient. Byte is what got me hooked on the path I walk to this day, though back then it would be far beyond my wildest dreams to believe that in my lifetime it would be possible to hold an intelligent conversation with software, and everything that entails
Forget AI, if you could time travel and just bring an iPhone back to the late 70's it would look like a science fiction fantasy. An alien artifact.
It's interesting to wonder if the next 50 years of computing will be the same. Will a device from 2075 make what we have today seem like primitive toys? No doubt we'll have full blown AGI by then, which may be the major difference, and we'll (or rather our kids) will look back with nostaligia on these LLMs which seemed so revolutionary at the time, but severely limited and flawed, just a hint of what is going to come.
The LLMs are the philosophical "box of all conversation" trick, that's not intelligence, it just went from a neat philosophical device to explain why Turing's test doesn't do what you think intuitively it would do to a real world thing that is a mix of fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem.
I think that is a valid opinion, but don't think there is any conclusive evidence to make it a valid fact (while of course not disagreeing with "fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem" part). Would be happy to learn otherwise.
Ah, yes, the program that's "not intelligent" yet somehow turns in gold-medal results at international math and programming competitions designed to identify and test the smartest human students. Is that sentiment supposed to make us feel smart?
If anything, the closest thing we have to Byte in 1975 is /r/localllama in 2026. Believe me, there was no shortage of old men in 1975 who didn't get it, either.
I still have a physical copy. I'll ship them (700 kg?) to you if you pay the cost. Email in profile.
I also have lots of the actual machines and parts, especially Apple, Commodore. Ship them too?
I've been working on a project that helps you catalog all of this stuff. Check out the features page. It's extensive.
https://github.com/SixOThree/Collectibles
One thing I'm considering adding is a "inquire about this item" link.
I think this is the full archive: https://vintageapple.org/byte/
My favourite, Volume 06 Number 08
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
I've downloaded the entire thing a while back for nostalgia sake. And I am (of course) the proud owner of a physical copy of the "Smalltalk" issue :-) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
Ditto. It's the only issue I saved.
I binned my large collection of Byte, Dr. Dobbs, etc. during a move. I recall taking them down from an attic cubby and then having to take them back up. Something like "Oh, forget it" came to pass. Stuff it heavy!
Interestingly, I think one of the most formative Byte articles for me was from 1978 (I think). It was an introduction to 3D graphics. Specifically the matrices for rotation and scaling etc.
I can assure that that while it is possible to visualize simple 3D models using the 40x25 character graphics of a PET, it's not advisable. The one thing I was unknowingly missing was Bresenham's line algorithm. That would have helped. I might have even moved up to "high res (80x50)" using the little block PETSCII characters.
I was able to work with it more in college where I had access to a Tektronix 4052 (which readily solve the whole line drawing problem).
So someone else saw this comment, then? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47805825
One thing you can see really clearly, is how the price of specific computing items fluctuated.
The Lisp issue is what got me into said language. Later I was using music software (Cakewalk) and noticed the language was nearly the same, so I started making non-music stuff in Cakewalk as well. CAL was all about programming music logic, but it was a fully fledged language that did whatever text-oriented duties you could think of. It was also super easy to write viruses, although they would only run within Cakewalk of course. Fun times!
I got into computers in 1978 when I started high school and they had two Wang 2200 computers, each with a whopping 8KB of RAM.
Although I was 14 I asked my parents for a subscription to Byte. Every so often I'd get an offer in the mail to join a "wine of the month" service, or life insurance, etc. Clearly they had sold their mailing list and they just assumed anyone with a subscription must be an adult.
Anyway, I loved Steve Ciarcia's column and hated Jerry Pournelle's column that got too much space. His schtick was that he was a power user using the hardware/software for doing real work. But he was far from normal -- he'd write florid articles about having a software or hardware malfunction and then calling up the owner of the company and they next morning the guy who wrote the malfunctioning app would be at Jerry's house debugging it. "XYZ Corp produces quality software that they really stand behind and you should buy it too." Yeah, Jerry, you didn't buy it, and the average Joe doesn't get personal attention like that. I found him to be an insufferable, self-important twat. 45 years later I still feel the same about him.
It was my favourite magazine. The only way I could access it was by going to the US Information Services Library attached to their consulates.
I learned a tremendous deal from it and I will forever be grateful.
The two characterizations of people in the introduction are timeless?
> A person with a primary interest in software will oftentimes be the person who purchases a kit computer because the kit minimizes the amount of hardware knowledge the person is required to have.
That’s how I came into my first computer - built from a kit in 7th grade.
And, yeah, I understand more about hardware than I did back then, but it’s all about the software to me still… okay, maybe some electronics and mechanics, too.
Chaos Manor always seemed like this mystical place to me as a kid. Limitless budget and always messing with hardware and software, whether necessary or not :-)
Pournelle is so missed.
And Larry Niven, but in a different context.
I've met both, Niven, twice, briefly. He was a grand story teller, but not really approachable.
Pournelle was always pleasant.
I had the opportunity to share a dinner with JP. I was on BIX, Byte Information Exchange, their "BBS" or "CompuServe"-ish service. And Jerry would occasionally sponsor small get togethers.
So there was about 8 of us just sharing dinner at a Chinese place in the Valley. It was a great time. The man can talk, to be sure. Sat right next to him.
Unlike Pournelle, Niven is still alive (87 year old), but I don't think he is writing new science fiction these days (although he has collaborated on some stories this century and has made guest appearances at some conferences in the last few years).
https://larryniven.net/
> although he has collaborated on some stories this century
I bought "Bowl of Heaven" because his name was on it, but it was a disappointing read and DNF for me...
Not by all.
Jerry Pournelle's column alone was worth the price of admission.
It’s hard to beat this interface:
https://byte.tsundoku.io/
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002)
I remember Wayne well, W2NSD = never say die... He did well in ham radio magazines, and entered computer magazines running full speed with byte and others. His accountant advised him to put Byte in his wife's name for tax reasons. This later came back to 'byte' him when they divorced and she was adjudicated as the owner, but he never said die and went on to other things but never overtook Byte. I recall him at the Atlantic city hamfest, where the Apple launched. Woz and Jobs were there, at set-up and they had a problem, no solder or iron and a 74366 had failed when the card involved was pulled under power = failed. This was before there were low cost, low power 74LS366 were available cheaply. This part had to be desoldered and replaced. They had no chip, solder, iron or wick. John Ramsey had a booth there, so he lent them the solder iron etc and he was also selling a wide range of TTL parts = the rest is history. I also had a table selling diverse ham radio bits/pieces. Wayne was operating his magazine booth, more Wayne details here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green
vintageapple.org also has a really great collection of scans fwiw
Here's an index of sorts. I couldn't find anything better.
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date
Holy cow. Thank you, JP. I enjoyed your high-level writing while monkeying on your new-fangled machines.
From these comments, what does the discussion suggest about Byte magazine’s role in the early computing community?
Having lived through this era, living in the UK, Byte always seemed more commercially orientated than hobbyist, but I would buy and read it all the same.
Hobbyist computing grew out of hobbyist electronics with the Altair 8800 kit featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975 being one of the first personal computers. My own first computer was also a kit (bag of components and a bare circuit board), the NASCOM-1, introduced a couple of years later in 1977 and featured on the cover of the first issue of Personal Computer World, which was the first UK magazine dedicated to this new hobby of computing.
Another great magazine of this era was Dr Dobbs (Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia. Running Light without Overbyte), which was also aimed at hobbyists, featuring lots of program listings. These American magazines like Byte & Dr Dobbs were easy to buy in high street newsagents in the UK.
> Having lived through this era, living in the UK, Byte always seemed more commercially orientated than hobbyist, but I would buy and read it all the same.
The hobbyist arena tended to fall more towards magazines like Popular Electronics, and the focus was much more the lower circuit levels. Byte dipped their toes into that arena via a few of the regular columnists, but that was not their target (despite the fact that many of us subscribers were "computer hobbyists" by most any definition of that term).
I started reading Byte when I had no way to understand what it was talking about. There were technical terms that I simply had no reference for. What the heck is an assembler?
I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.
Has anyone archived the foreign language editions?
No, it's on my list, though. 99% of the magazine scans on the Internet are English. Foreign language magazines are rare. Some Japanese, some Russian. Arabic magazine scans are virtually non-existent, although I found some Persian ones the other day.
As a young hacker in the 70's and 80's, magazines were my primary source of docs. I lived in a remote community where such technology was really, really foreign at first. My relatives lived in other parts of the state, some very remote, some in the city. I had a HAM-/CB-enthusiastic hacker uncle I'd regularly visit in one end of the state (outback) and plenty of relatives in the major city and countryside where I lived, so my docs-collecting mission during a routine adventuring between these family areas went something like this:
1. If in the city/small town: go to the library, read latest BYTE magazine, Radio Electronics, a few other electronics (then computer-) magazines, and so on[1]. Then, browse back issues - my library had them all in the first few years - find code that I might adapt to my machine, copy notes or - remember it - for when I got home later. I usually didn't check anything out because I never, ever gave back BYTE magazines I loaned from the library, just because I never knew when I'd be back (or that was my excuse). So, the library was just for reference/note-taking. This actually made going on those boring family visits quite palatable.
2. If in the city: Go to every newsagent/magazine dealer in my route, read every single tech magazine - BYTE, Dr. Dobbs Journal, ZAP, etc. as quickly as possible, before being asked to leave. Buy something if possible, but only if a review finds something interesting. Usually, leave with a BYTE, at least. If I could afford it, always with a DDJ too. Repeat at every newsagent in the city.
3. If I am in the country, at Uncle Hacker-Shacks: In between hacking on his radios and amplifiers, burning my fingers on some new Fun Way Into Electronics Dick Smith kits, and with those toasty digits browsing his extensive magazine collection, including every BYTE issue since the beginning (it's the 70's/80's, I'm a teen) .. do chores (lawns/wood-chopping/fishing/cleaning/reading-to-little-kids) and save coins for photocopying .. take uncles magazines to get photocopies of interesting things, create my own ring-binder full of such things to take back home with me. Somehow, my uncle always had really great magazines and books and things, way, way out there beyond the dusty horizon... and I'd go home after the holidays, with copies of the best of it.
Usually BYTE magazine articles for systems (Apple/C64/etc.) similar enough to mine (Oric-1) to have some use for me, later, when I got back home to my computer. During those long bus, car, train, plane rides, I'd often spend more time reading and re-reading the listings, than I did typing it in when I finally got home.
BYTE was huge to me, it was my first real foray into cross-platform/multi-discipline software development, I literally had no choice but to port things to the Oric-1, if I wanted to do anything with it. I really wish I still had those old ring-binders, it'd be a blast to see my old notes and printouts (had the Oric printer for such things, it was my long-term archive, which I've long-since lost..)
The skills I gained, basically from 8 years old to 18 years old, by reading these magazines - truly informed an important part of my professional toolbox, which have stuck with me for years of course, since this was an era where a significant part of computing technology was being worked out.
I really wonder how kids these days get access to the evolutionary, real-time nature of the fields they're interested in. I guess MAKE filled that hole for a while.
EDIT: Just wanted to say, Issue #1 of BYTE is really worth a read .. "Assembling your own Assembler", and "Recycling used IC's" is so resonant with my Sunday-afternoon musings about the perils of AI and ML on my teenagers' mindset .. seems like someone else is gonna get some burned fingers, soon enough ..
[1] - (I think I read my first 2600 this way also...)
You nailed it with BYTE & Radio Electronics.
Steve Ciarcia was incredibly influential to young me. His projects were wild. I only built one of his designs: an 8052AH-BASIC microcontroller board that I still have in the basement. He did more "mainstream" stuff like the series of articles on building your very own 8088-based PC compatible (a huge effort back in the day). But then he'd do crazy stuff like an 8051-based board that calculated the Mandelbrot set networked to a PC, and the more of the boards that you built and connected to the network, the faster the computation of the result.
Radio Electronics was gold for articles on cable & satellite TV descramblers. The only problem was that too often, the parts list would have one inductor that was basically made of Pure Unobtainium where I lived :-(
Oh, it was really gold, totally agree with you. I remember Steve's amazing stuff .. also, Circuit Cellar cannot go unmentioned in this thread too of course, that is for sure essential reading for the budding hacker needing a break from the ML-wash, imho.
It was also where I first started learning about synthesizers, which is another subject my uncle and I would get burned fingers about - him building the oscillator and me doing the filter and so on .. but there were other magazines of that ilk, I thing Radio Electronics transitioned to "Electronics Magazine" in my market in those days (Australia), or so it seems through the fog of time ..
I can come clean and say that I have all of these magazines safely .PDF'ed for the sailboat somewhere, I do know that for sure anyway, lol ..
I was always more partial to Compute magazine
Compute! was very much aimed more at the home market that Byte (which appealed more to IT professionals). At the time, though, Compute! and Compute's Gazette (for Commodore computers) were great for me.
The most amazing magazine of all, though, was The Transactor. Exclusively Commodore, and for programmers. Very few ads, too. Their "Inner Space Anthology" was an incredible resource for everything technical. Memory maps, ROM listings, and much, much more.
https://csbruce.com/cbm/transactor
It looks like the ia's collection of Compute! is complete:
https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine?page=2&sort=dat...
Also Compute!' Gazette:
https://archive.org/details/computes.gazette/Compute_Gazette...