Was an early editor/writer for Byte in the very early days (first few issues), though had to back off due to school load (in college at the time).
Carl Helmers and Dan Fylstra (founder of VisiCorp (publisher of VisiCalc), friend from high school days in San Diego) and I were all working at Intermetrics in Cambridge, and got together to start Byte, visiting Wayne and Virginia Green (big ham radio publisher at the time) in New Hampshire.
I only played a minor role, but it was definitely a lot of fun.
BYTE was amazing. Feel proud of what you helped create. I met Wayne in the mid 2000s and had him on my radio show multiple times. Amazing character. I miss him.
Thank you. I read it for years. In college we had an extensive collection that went back many years and I lost count of how many hours I spent reading them in the library.
Nostalgia indeed. I was a long time Byte subscriber, and along with Dr Dobbs, it was my 'source of truth' for tech news. I've spent far to long reminiscing today over these Byte issues, ah the memories, a real blast. Now back to work ;(
Hey guys, Peter here from vintageapple.org. My server is experiencing a bit of a hug of death from this. Please be kind and don't try to download everything all at once. I've had to apply a rate limit to that site for now to make sure the applications I'm hosting continue to work.
I miss those days so much. 80s computer magazines were exciting. The web is great, but it doesn't have the anticipation of waiting for the next issue and then sitting down to dig into it with focused attention to see what was fresh and new and to be wowed by all the things you couldn't afford. A 20 megabyte hard drive for ONLY $1000? That's a good price! Unimaginable luxury, I only had floppy disks into the 1990s.
I am someone who used to type in code from a magazine before I knew what the SAVE command was. You would never see someone doing something like that today.
"In 1983 an average of one new computer magazine appeared each week. By late that year more than 200 existed."
80s computer magazines were thick too! Compute! magazine published 392 pages in December 1983.
> I am someone who used to type in code from a magazine
I did this, too, but after being burned again and again with software that didn’t work after hours of typing, I gave up. Disheartening for a child. Of course, I could have been responsible for the problems.
There was an article published in Nibble that I desperately wanted to read¹ back around 1982ish, but the only library near me that carried it was a few suburbs away. I remember calling the library to make sure they had the issue on hand and the library thinking that I was joking. 13-year-old me patiently explained to her that a nibble was half a byte which didn't really help my case.²
1. If I recall correctly, it provided a way to use a 100ohm dual pot joystick from Radio Shack with the Apple ][ which expected 150ohm pots on its paddle/joystick inputs.
2. And because you're probably dying to know, it turns out that the issue in question had gone missing, so I never did learn how to make that joystick work with an Apple ][, but then I also didn't have the money to buy one anyway.
I fondly remember sitting in the display window at the local Radio Shack saving my typed in programs to a cassette tape machine ,
connected, of course, to a Trash-80.
It was almost pure luck if I managed to save the silly little thing, and all i was really interested in were the games.
I do remember to joy of getting a little ASCII slot machine game actually working after like 3 sessions. and the guys at the RS were so impressed that they left it running and used it as a in store demo.
The September 1983 issue of COMPUTE! was my introduction to programming. Still have it, and just showed it to my kid, who didn't understand its appeal at all. I later became a columnist, and it was an amazing experience.
What was it like being a columnist in the 80s? Did everyone work from home and hold meetings over the telephone, or did they have a shared office space?
The former. Worked from home and used phone or email. It was great and paid OK (I think $500 per column, plus all the commercial software I wanted). I also wrote reviews, so if I wanted to learn databases I would write a database roundup. Didn’t go to school for programming, so this was getting paid to learn. And of course being a published writer looked great when applying for a job.
The full-timers did have a real office, BTW. At one point the owners of Penthouse bought COMPUTE! and Omni, so my churchgoing editor found himself putting a porn mag online…
I read these as a kid, but I got a few of these from the antique mall a few weeks ago and I was amazed at how half baked it was at times (the industry was moving so fast a few months of latency meant they were often out of date.)
Steve Ciracia was the guy holding it all together. Every month he published a hardware project that was commercial quality (you could buy it) except for the occasional two month project. It was a running gag that he coded with a soldering iron, struggled with assembly, probably didn’t know basic and logo, forget about it.
Despite that some months he would answer all the letters to the editor which ranged from ‘too bad they don’t document things like this’, to ‘you can buy that from the Jameco catalog’ to ‘here are three ways to fix a corrupted word star disk if you moved it to a subdirectory because it was written for DOS 1 and doesn’t support subdirectories.’
I worked at a place where we used one of Steve Ciarcias circuits - the 8052-AH Basic module and used it as a security controller. We took the circuit as it was in the magazine, and built it and added some optocouplers and it worked, it was unique. Upon thought, I think we also used an 8051 microcontroller circuit as well.
Ciarcia could be so prolific because most of his circuits were centered around an integrated circuit such as a CPU, voice synthesizer, graphics controller, etc.
Many of his projects were really a fully realized example of an example circuit from the project datasheet as opposed to an adventure in discrete logic such as Steve Wozniak's "Breakout with 44 chips."
This is well timed. I was actually going over the Internet Archive's collection just the other day. It's a bit sad to watch the decline in quality as you move through the volumes. Somewhere around 1985 - 1986 BYTE shifted towards becoming just another magazine hocking hardware/software. It got so bad that some issues started to look like a rip-off of Ziff-Davis's PC Magazine. Around that point I'm betting a lot of BYTE readers left for greener pastures at Circuit Cellar Ink and Dr. Dobb's.
As PCs consolidated the market, a lot of the initial diversity died. When the hardware platform consolidated, so did the software and it became much less important to be able to program for the platform you chose because there were very few to choose from.
There was, of course, a ton on innovation on peripherals. Laser, ink jet printers, optical storage seemed to be the future (and it was, for some time), Unix workstations… Even after the PC killed off most of the home computer market, the high-end was still a thriving ecosystem.
Well, getting this up on HN certainly re-kindled my nostalgia for dial-up connections - the images are loading piecemeal, and the table is slowly growing as it's laid out...
Looking at one of these now I remember how magazines made technology very exciting (I don't think it was just because I was younger). I think a lot of it was down to the visuals. You just won't get illustrations like that on someone's blog. The illustrations made the technology seem more real and certainly more glamorous.
I don't think it was just because we were younger. I also don't think it was just because of the visuals (though those helped). I think a lot of it was because things were moving so fast.
The 386 was an astonishing improvement over the 286. But now, the next generation Intel chip is... kind of nice, I guess? But it's not all that exciting.
Windows 95 was a massive improvement over Windows 3.0. Windows 11 doesn't make many people very excited compared to Windows 10.
A 20 Meg hard drive was miles ahead of floppies. But the last storage improvement was... nice, but not life-changing.
Hercules graphics was massively better than stock IBM PC graphics. The latest graphics card is exciting if you're a gamer, I guess, but it doesn't move the needle much for everyone else.
And so on. It was eye-opening every month to see what was new. It doesn't feel like that any more.
Agree. I started with personal computing in 1983 and what was so exciting about that time, I think, was that each new generation of hardware could do something incredibly cool the prior generation fundamentally could not. I remember feeling a nearly constant level of excitement about tech, always so stoked to see what was coming next and what incredible new capability it would bring to the table.
And Moore's Law didn't hurt either, those clock rate increases!
Today's tech is amazing, but the progress is mostly incremental and that doesn't tend to get the blood pumping.
We went from a discussion on how many colors a machine had, whether it flogged a speaker for sound, or had an actual sound system, to multi-media excellence, and it happened QUICK!
I sure enjoyed my trip through those times.
But, there may be more to come!
Custom silicon is on it's way back around the computing circle of life. The way I see it, the different options we've seen hold fairly stable for a decade or so have all converged on similar ground. Differentiation is sometimes more contrived than actual, like the software, or form factor of a device, maybe it's ports, mean more than the actual computing potential it has. Additionally, we've somewhat peaked in terms of sequential compute, and things like multi-media are fairly ordinary, and of sufficient quality many don't see a big distinction between pro efforts and gear and consumer grade gear. Or, it just flat doesn't matter.
And now the dam is breaking!
To gain advantage, and also lock customers in, leverage mindshare and data, other investments users have or are making, custom silicon is looking very appealing now.
On top of that, the bigger players have the resources to do the development, more of what people need to know about doing it is out there, and tools are more available now to the point where mere mortals can play in this game.
A quick look at something relevant?
Consider the Parallax Propeller 2 microcontroller chip. It's done on an older process, 130nm I believe. On that process, the creator and team managed to get an 8 core, 300Mhz plus design with a lot of features. That project took a decade or so, and north of a million. While high, that's not out of line compared to what it all was just a short time before.
Chips are done, available for people to buy and build into projects / products. It's a custom design with particular emphasis on real time, parallel or concurrent programming, and data streaming, measurement with all I/O pins capable of analog or digital operation. For some applications nothing will come close. A great example of what can be done now.
The bigger players have all done, or are working on custom silicon for one reason or another. AI, network, computation, etc...
Soon, we are going to head back to something closer to that era. More highly differentiated devices / machines. Maybe there is room for the kind of work BYTE did in some form...
But, whether that happens or not, we may well see custom silicon push things forward again in dramatic ways.
Yeah. $10k on a machine that was old hat by the time it got dusty and people just kept buying and buying. We will never see anything like that again.
I got my hands on well over $20000 worth of computers before I was 18 from hand-me-downs. You couldn't hardly resell used computers because they were so out of date by that time...the reason people got rid of them.
If it had not been for the used computers and all the churn (enthusiast grandfather in charge of tech for the family business) I would have never laid hands on one and most likely would have ended up in construction.
> I think a lot of it was because things were moving so fast
I collect and restore vintage computers. I rarely would think of a PC as interesting because, as you go back the past couple decades, it’s essentially the same computer, but slower. And not even that much slower - a surprising amount of my work is done on an 8 year old laptop. It’s not as fast as the new corporate issue MBP, but it’s fast enough. And it has the same amount of memory and twice the storage.
Back then the very idea of working on an 8 year old computer was ludicrous.
I think the HDD vs floppies comparison is more sensibly analogized to SSD vs HDD. That was a massive change. I think the Apple Silicon vs Intel upgrade is pretty exciting (although a lot of that feels like promise of what might be coming in the M2 and beyond), but yes, it's definitely a different world than it was in the 90s which was probably the period of most rapid technical advancement in personal computing.
The speed difference is really quite dramatic. When I replaced the boot hard drive on my Mac Mini with a SSD after it died, it was an immediately obvious increase in performance.
The Windows 3.11 -> 95 transition was built on user research, but the Windows 10 -> 11 transition was build to enable market research. There are many competing interests that get in the way of building things that the users actually want.
What users want is usually boring. We express what we want in terms of what we know. The real kick comes from what we never knew we wanted.
My last Symbian phone was objectively better than the first iPhone, but we never suspected the fluid multi-touch UI was what we wanted until after we saw that Jeff Han demo.
A future of computers that are just faster, with more pixels, is very boring.
One of my fondest memories of BYTE is why I have the career I have today.
It was a how-to discussing making your system more secure against a virus (boot-sector/TSR).
It explained how to edit your io.sys, and command.com; so that the system would use different files then: config.sys & autoexec.bat to boot.
I failed at this task, and learned a very hard lesson about backups, but it wasn't as painful as it could have been. Format & re-install was rather common back then too (1-3'ish months on average)
But I learned that I WANT to hack on my systems. I learned that I COULD run MY hardware how I wanted.
It opened the world to me.
I do not accept a system as it's presented to me, I must find the edge-case and break-out of the conforms that would keep me contained.
I also learned about the difference between obscurity and security too. And that combined they are greater then the sum of their parts.
articles
from Dr. Dobb's Journal from January 1988 through December 2008,
articles from C/C++ Users Journal from January 1990 through
February 2006, articles from SysAdmin from January 1992 through
August 2007, and articles from The Perl Journal from Spring 1996
through April 2005
--
Unfortunately the source code included is only (often partial) listings that were printed in the magazine, I couldn't find the entire projects that were made available via the 'electronic Resource Center' (which I believe was an ftp site that was never archived).
> Hi Hacker News folks. Thanks for visiting. Unfortunately all the simultanious connectons downloading large PDFs is putting a bit of strain on my server which is also serving some other important stuff.I've had to apply a rate limit to the site to make sure everyting still works reasonably
If only there was a tool to offload this static content to a network of peers so bandwidth usage was not an issue. We could call it Flood to emphasize the large amount of traffic.
Joke aside, I refrained from looking around because if the server is struggling, my nostalgia can wait a few days.
Aw, I have a copy of the 1988 Byte issue on Lisp that I ought to scan and contribute, though probably to the Internet Archive, as I'm not sure how to send it in here.
Looking at some of these, it's kind of sad how it went from a deeply technical magazine (the earliest publication had an ad to join ACM, and it has several circuit diagrams) to a pop-tech supermarket mag (with tons of ads, lots of high-level hit pieces (how to get ready for y2k, for example), and A BAJILLIONTY ADS. I'm glad that they kept some semblance of technical content towards the end.
just recently re-read the sep, oct, and nov 78 issues on implementing tiny pascal. what a cliffhanger! they were like send money for the listing of the 8080 machine translator (which is what i was most interested in haha)
I miss BYTE. Growing up in a country where we didn't have much resources and certainly no money to actually own a computer, but the school library did have a subscription to a few mags. BYTE was amazing.
Is there any mirror? I'd rather not put more strain on his server. And are there archives of other mags like Dr.Dobbs?
I grew up in tech-hostile environment but somehow i got to buy a few volumes of byte in the 90s. I remember reading Jon Udell's column and for some reason liking his expose of web technologies. It is so weird , i even remember certain sentences. It's fair to say that I owe him my web 'career'
It is incredible what percentage of an issue of Byte was full page ads. They should have been paying the readers.
It's also striking to see street addresses in the ads, some of which are local to me. One company used to do advanced graphics display controllers for computer kiosks in what is now a custom cabinets store in a dingy run down strip center.
A digital-only publication cannot survive without playing the same content strategy games as all the other publications out there.
A new BYTE would quickly start diluting its value by offering a podcast, YT channel, IG/Snap Stories, affiliate links and a website slathered with Adsense ads. You'll wonder why they bothered rebooting it in the first place.
No one can resist adsense. "Yeah let's just skip out on that $50k a month, our customers don't want to see all those ads." The incintive, like free money for corporate stock buybacks, is just irresistible.
A printed publication, perhaps with audio supplement (podcast type thing), would not be a venue. And at the same time, may well be super compelling, given it has an industry voice and perspective similar to what BYTE had.
MIT Technology Review is subscription-based and they have podcasts and YT channels. You could run expensive ads in print mags like Scientific American or Harvard Business Review, but you'll reach a far bigger audience online.
This will be true even if the subscription fee was hundreds of dollars per year. Podcasts and short videos are effectively low-cost infomercials for your product. Their purpose is not to make revenue by reading out intermittent ads, but attract an audience that might subscribe.
I still get magazines...mostly for the building trade. Fuck digital. There is something about print that makes people get their shit together and produce quality content. You can't just wing it with some fluffy clickbait and Google ad-sense.
Wow. Found an ad in 1978 for a DECwriter II for $1495. A printer. With lousy (by 2021 standards) graphics (or none; I don't recall DECwriter specs). $1495. A DECwriter III was $2895.
People complain about ads , but browse any volume and count the number of ads (may be easier to count the number of non-ads). And you had to pay for that stuff.
But those ads are static. They have no animated gifs or videos, having to rely on typography and still images to catch your attention. As a result, they are much less intrusive.
More importantly, they couldn’t track you, nor did their selection rely on any knowlege of you (besides the fact that you were reading byte magazine.)
People like ads in magazines because they are relevant and informative of the progress of the industry. I learn nearly as much from ads reading "Fine Home Building" as I do reading the excellent technical articles.
I agree with you, except some of the ads were loose inserts that fell out when you shook the magazine, which was almost as annoying as animated gifs/videos.
Remember, paying for that stuff had value in those times. People would buy directories and or pay for advice / direction from others in the know too.
Was hard to understand all that was going on out there. The ADS made more sense in that way than they do now. Sometimes, when a specific product was needed, those ADS connected people up in a way everyone found to have value.
One thing, perhaps missed today given content marketing, was following the ADS to see who did what. New products, old ones phasing out, where things were, who, and sometimes pretty good reasons why all were found in those ADS. Scanning them was not all fluff. (not always fluff I should say, because yeah. There was fluff)
Are there any modern tech magazines that capture anything similar to the wonder of these, instead of feeling like a collections of advertisements and ego pieces on Elon Musk?
Was an early editor/writer for Byte in the very early days (first few issues), though had to back off due to school load (in college at the time).
Carl Helmers and Dan Fylstra (founder of VisiCorp (publisher of VisiCalc), friend from high school days in San Diego) and I were all working at Intermetrics in Cambridge, and got together to start Byte, visiting Wayne and Virginia Green (big ham radio publisher at the time) in New Hampshire.
I only played a minor role, but it was definitely a lot of fun.