I remember how I read about functional programming languages for the first time in the August 1985 Byte issue, which I bought as a teenager because it featured a technical rundown of the new Amiga computer. For me in the early 80'e, Byte was a cornucopia of interesting stuff, much like Hacker News today.
(For example there was a whole issue in 1981 on Smalltalk-80, with an introduction by Adele Goldberg, where the Xerox Palo Alto people from the Smalltalk-80 team explain the implementation, the VM etc.)
Something that fascinated me back in the day (and something that I have not seen mentioned, whenever BYTE comes up here), when I as a teenager read BYTE (initially borrowed from the local Danish municipal library) was the transcripts from BIX [1]. It offered a tantalising view into the world of BBS (and what would come later through Usenet etc), before such things were widely accessible.
Usenet and the pro-Internet/ARPANET in general was more of a parallel Unix-centric universe than something that came later.
BIX, like Compuserve/Delphi/etc., was one of the big commercial services--though possibly more hacker-oriented than some--which was also somewhat separate from the TRS-80 in the bedroom hobbyist BBSs (though some of the PC-based BBSs also became fairly large and commercial latterly).
The single best inspiration for me to become a 'hacker' of sorts was BYTE.
Back in the DOS5/Win3.11 days there was an article about modifying command.com & io.sys so that you could customize the files that were used to load the system.
config.sys & autoexec.bat became (on my system) ipl.sys & ipl.bat (Inital Program Load)
It made the system immune to any virus* [except TSRs] (keeping a dummy config.sys & autoexec.bat let me see programs that tried to modify those files, and generally scored a TONNE of cool points in my mind. It also taught me about "security through obscurity".
This taught me that _MY_ hardware was mine to modify how I wanted. It gave me an incredible sense of power, and capability.
The computer viruses that were the worst in those days were the boot sector viruses. Stoned Empire Monkey and the like. They were so hard to remove from machines and spread like wildfire in computer labs.
> The computer viruses that were the worst in those days were the boot sector viruses. Stoned Empire Monkey and the like. They were so hard to remove from machines and spread like wildfire in computer labs.
Someone left disk in floppy drive and you turned computer on? Have a nice bootsector virus for free(and then we had Chernobyl, it was fun). It only got worse with pendrives and autorun functionality in Windows. Even today corpo that owns me, blocks them from being mounted on dev machines.
I loved Jerry Pournelle’s “Chaos Manor” columns, and Steve Ciarcia’s “Circuit Cellar” — it was nice to have both software and hardware represented. The articles on the Inmos Transputer were fascinating, and sparked my interest in parallel and distributed computing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
Jerry Pournelle's column was very entertaining and well written, but it taught me an important lesson. I knew something about the computers of the day (perhaps more than Pournelle), and I often found him giving bizarre, if not incorrect, advice (and sometimes, when he had a problem, he would just call his bud Bill Gates). Reading the column, it was clear he was the expert, even when he was not. So I learned that it is important to distinguish between good writing as entertainment, and good writing as expertise.
and some sent by vendors for review, at his home office. Because Pournelle was then, according to the magazine, "virtually Byte's only writer who was a mere user—he didn't create compilers and computers, he merely used them,"
"Just how ridiculous IS the idea of a computer deciding to take over the world and be
its dictator?
Upon hearing this question, most people
who are not computer oriented will laugh
and say "That's only in science fiction
stories." They will be much more likely to
complain about "becoming a number," with
everyone from the grocery store to the government wanting their number instead of
their name.
Those who are more familiar with computers will laugh off the concept and charge it
to paranoia due to ignorance. "A computer
is little more than a lot of wires conducting
currents here and there," they will say. "Besides, if it-gets uppity you can always pull
the plug."
However, that group of people who are
both computer knowledgeable and fans of
the art form known as science fiction, but
more properly called speculative fiction,
might ask "Can you always pull the plug?
Could a computer really seize the reins of
government? And if so, how ?"
In trying to answer these last questions,
let us first speculate on the capabilities the
computer itself would have to have. "
The scans from here differ from the ones on the Internet Archive. These are lower quality (Marks on pages, yellower, compression artifacts, bleed through, inconsistant page sizes) but as a result are much smaller. They are watermarked on each page. This archive also seems more complete than the IA one.
The site (worldradiohistory.com) was just featured on the front page yesterday with TAB books, and is an all around amazing resource.
I have scraped hundreds now of hobbyist electronics magazines going back roughly 100 years.
From time to time, when offline, I'll pull up these old electronics hobbyist magazines that I've culled and skim through them. Occasionally an old circuit like a theremin will catch my eye and I'll make a note of which issue I found it in in a file that I keep.
Otherwise I think I like suffusing myself in the periodicals of those earlier decades (I think the 70's are one of my favorites).
It is rather telling how prevalent the ads are though that show men being browbeaten by wives or bosses — these men are encouraged then to take some kind of correspondence course in electronics to make the big bucks and be their own boss! Apparently selling a product that trades on a reader's feelings of inadequacy has always been a reliable business plan.
I also have a large collection I have downloaded over the years, primarily ones that I read when I was younger. I used an ipad to read them as that has the best screen resolution for such material for a portable device. The ipad unfortunatley broke last year and I haven't had enough money to replace it.
It is interesting to read things like letters to the editor to see what people of the day thought.
> Apparently selling a product that trades on a reader's feelings of inadequacy has always been a reliable business plan.
A big aha! moment for me was reading up on older civilizations: archaeologists would discover golden jewelry, but also bronze replicas, which were affordable by the lower classes who couldn’t afford gold, but still wanted to project an image of opulence.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Also the ones on world radio history are searchable. They have a search feature on their website to search all their documents as they have all been OCR'ed.
Interesting juxtaposition to today, I bought Byte MOSTLY for the ads. The computer scene was changing so fast in the 80's that the ads were interesting and wanted.
That surfaced a memory… Mom buying one of those from Sam's Club and me pouring over it at home.
If you're not familiar with Computer Shopper, imagine something the size of a 2 x 2 grid of phonebooks and just as thick. They were impressively sized.
I spent a good chunk of my money back then buying the monthly issues, drooling over them. Unfortunatelly, it seems not many archivists have kept the 1990s editions... or didn't care to share them to the public, at least. I would have liked to get a copy in some kind of digital format.
It's interesting to recognise that the ads in these magazines were something many of us positively appreciated. Yet today, we go out of our way to try and suppress ads all over the web.
I guess this is because the advertising industry is no longer satisfied with providing ads related to the content of a publication, in places where people deliberately seek them out because they're interested. Back then, the ad industry could have made a plausible claim that it was providing a useful and valued service to readers.
Yeah. The ads had a different feel, because things were moving so fast. The ads (often) were telling you something new was available, or something improved was available, or something was less expensive. They (often) weren't just trying to manipulate you into buying the same old stuff that you didn't need.
I remember looking through the latest issue, and at least once or twice an issue thinking "Huh, I never even thought of trying to have a computer do that." Issue after issue, month after month, there was brand new stuff that exceeded what I thought computers could do. I read the ads to learn what was happening.
16KB ? You were lucky! (channeling my best Monty Python impression)
My first computer was a NASCOM-1 with 1KB available to the user, and didn't even have an assembler. You programmed it by entering hex op codes directly into memory! And we liked it that way!
Still, at least the NASCOM-1 had a keyboard, not like MIT's Altair 8800 of a few years prior where you only had binary toggle switches to setup the address and data bus to program each byte!
Except for the trade war when tariffs were slapped on DRAM imports from Japan because of dumping. The prices listed in the ads by Jameco and other companies in the back of Byte tell some interesting stories.
I read (IIRC in Andy Grove's autobiography, Only The Paranoid Survive), that this dumping was what made Intel switch from making memory to processors. The rest is history.
For a while we ran out of useful stuff to do with more RAM. We tried to fill the gap with micro-service development but the pain/ego ratio is not as good as having one big app chunking up the whole place. I assume the new AI stuff will pick up the slack and we'll soon have much more RAM hooked up to our NPUs than to our CPUs.
In the mid 90s to early 00s, I loved looking at the ads in the Sunday newspaper from computer stores, and month by month you could see prices coming down for all components, if not week by week.
The pace was so torrid. They stopped even advertising the RAM for my ~3 year old Pentium 100 I had with 8MB of RAM. I was expecting to pay hundreds of dollars for an upgrade, but in the end an upgrade to 72MB was only about $70.
I actually wondered about this on Twitter recently[1]. Do you remember caring about/recognizing the aesthetics of some of these ads at the time, or is that more of a modern perspective?
Aside from the aesthetics, the content of the ads was different than today. There was lots of advertising aimed directly at hobbyists. Today, you mostly have to go to specific niche places like tindie.com to find something similar. Or basically, a significant portion of the market was people with engineering skills.
Reading the ads, it's remarkable how many computer manufacturers there were. Most of them look like pretty small companies too, effectively showing how low the barrier to entry was to start a computer company. Shouldn't it be possible today, too? Why do we have so few manufacturers?
There are still some Mom & Pop shops that will put together a custom machine for you, but if you are talking about completely new computer architectures that aren't compatible with anything else the barriers to entry are so much higher. The expectations are miles away from where they were in the 80s. Back when everybody sucked it didn't matter that your first product barely works and had few capabilities. Today your competition is Intel, AMD, nVidia, Apple, etc... Trying to stand out compared to the giants is much harder. Plus you have to deal with the software. Making a DOS clone is no problem. Making a Windows 11 clone is orders of magnitude more work.
I think about how the "computing world" has changed over the last 40 years. When I was a kid, everything was new. Every couple months a new type of computer, CPU or peripheral was released: Commodore 64, inexpensive floppy drive, affordable 4-color plotter, (this crazy thing called) a mouse, etc. BYTE captured the crazy zeitgeist of the age. The content was a crazy mix of how-to articles and what-to-buy product reviews (and the 1/9 page ads in the back.) The covers by Tinny were always witty and well executed. You can't judge a book by it's cover, but Tinny covers definitely grabbed your attention. When they replaced his covers with pictures of products it was definitely an indication times were changing.
The first BYTE issue I remember was the one with the Star Trek cover (December 77) -- I had just recently seen a Spock ASCII art print out at the local academic computing center and burned most of my DEC-10 time playing the Star Trek game online. TREK and computing and BYTE magazine were all linked in my mind. We were living in the future, no doubt about it...
I recall one of the computing magazines of that era, possibly the Dec 77 issue of BYTE you mentioned, published the entire code in BASIC for a space-oriented game. Inputs were simple letter or letter+number commands and outputs were an ASCII drawing of a sector of outer space (complete with * for stars). You would shoot at an alien then skip to another sector before getting counterattacked.
My high school buddies and I desperately wanted to play this game but ... none of us had a computer! So, sitting in the cafeteria at lunch/breaks in our bell bottom pants, we walked thru the code line by line recording the values of variables with pencil on paper. This was when BASIC only allowed 1 or 2 character variable names and only had GOSUBs instead of proper functions. It was slow going at first but we eventually got to understand what sections of the code was doing and could replace line by line with, oh, its doing this again.
I'll have to look for that Dec 77 BYTE so see it that was the magazine. I didn't know it at the time but it was probably very formative for my future IT career.
What a great story! I remember also "hand running" programs at times.
While the Dec 77 issue of Byte[0] had Star Trek on the cover it didn't contain a BASIC listing. Could it have been either the May/June 1975 issue of Creative Computing[1] or one of the compilations (BASIC Computer Games[3])?
Not just "everything was new" but also "everything was better" (well.. except the stuff that wasn't and failed horribly soon after launch). You bought a computer, and (if you had a money) you bought a new one after a few years and the change in performance, graphics etc. was HUGE. Kilobytes of ram went to megabytes, cga, ega, vga all brought huge improvements, then came many 3d variants, storage went from floppies, to a few megabytes to gigabytes.
And now? Have a 5 year old mid-range computer? Buy some ram, and you get basically the same specs as the new ones, but with a slightly worse CPU. Everything (except the newest games) still works, and the biggest resource hog (especially ram) is the browser, which still shows sites with same amount of info as it did in 1990s, but somehow that autoplaying video ad needs a few more gigabytes of ram.
It's still great for my wallet... but I haven't opened a computer magazine (or well.. a youtube clip in modern time) and said "damn, I want this!" in quite a while now (at least not regarding computers).
> but I haven't opened a computer magazine and said...
I feel this. In my opinion, we have not had a computing magazine worth opening in two decades, at least in the US. I know we can find news and articles relevant to our interests with unparallelled ease on today's Internet, but a huge part of me misses going to a bookseller and picking up that month's selection of nerd rags.
I have always had trouble pinpointing exactly what it is I miss about the magazines of old. Sometimes I feel that it had more to do with how I fit into that world at the time, being a curious teen who loved tinkering with tech, and the future was wide open. Othertimes I think it had to do with the mags being my window to that world, since I had nobody to guide me.
Before the web and global geek culture, magazines were the only way to get a feeling of "belonging" to some kind of tech community, sometimes the community of some computer brand owners, sharing the same interest for the compatible software & hardware products. Heavily priced online board systems then milked the same needs providing downloads which replaced free disks offered with magazines.
And for a lot of purposes, you're basically living in a browser anyway. I do have a pretty new M1 MacBook Pro. But I also have a 2015-vintage MacBook Pro and iMac and they're perfectly fine for what I use them for.
The same site has a complete archive of "Ham Radio" magazine.
Wayne Green was the publisher of Byte magazine, which he started when he recognized hobby computing that the hams that read his "73" magazine were doing.
I thought it was interesting that the first edition of Byte had an article about hobby computing with a LSI-11, which is a PDP-11 variant.
Last week while on a very long (18+ hour) drive I heard either a podcast or a radio ad for a teeth alignment company and at the end it mentioned their web address: byte.com. They even spelled it out. I was curious and I just looked and it does look like they bought the domain last year. Kind of weird and sad.
Computer magazine/book art from the 70s and 80s is almost an artistic style of its own. I love browsing old issues of Byte, COMPUTE!'s Gazette etc. just to see the imaginative graphical work.
I don't know why but the aesthetics kind of reminds of the soviet space program propaganda posters. Probably because they are of the same time period but not sure.
On page 8 of magazine [0] (from 1977) they are talking about computers taking over the world. The same things people are still talking about still. There are also stories about no-code being the end of programmer jobs etc. The only thing that's not in there is blockchain.
Backpropagation was popularised and named in 1986 (though it was likely a rediscovery, with prior art going back to the 60's), so neural nets got a new wave of interest around then coinciding with home computers fast enough to at least achieve mildly interesting results.
Yeah, AI is a perennial topic and neural nets are an old school approach. When I was in school (not really that long ago) the NN textbook taught as an old fashioned approach that never produced good results, and the professor (from the EE department) would occasionally remark that we are seeing a resurgence of this technique and you never know, it could become popular again. I think at that point it already producing impressive results, but none of us were fully aware of where it was going.
Does anyone know of a similar archive for Personal Computer World which was (sort of) the UK equivalent to Byte? The Internet Archive has a quite a few but is also missing a lot too.
I used to buy PCW religiously every month, starting with the 1st issue which had the NASCOM-1 (kit computer) on the cover, which was my first computer.
I'm not sure you can really compare PCW to BYTE. From what I recall PCW didn't really get into the more abstract computing topics that BYTE did - it was more more focused on products.
Another good magazine from same era was Dr. Dobb's Journal.
Shame that all these geeky magazines have disappeared.
It's interesting watching some of the old c.1980 BBC computer education TV shows that have been uploaded to YouTube. It's funny watching them trying to earnestly explain to TV viewers the difference between a 16-bit computer with a 16-bit bus vs one with an 8-bit bus, etc... I guess back then there was a thought that the general public would be brought up to speed on the nuances of such things!
You’re absolutely right that PCW was more focused on products. They did sometimes have a go at some of the more conceptual stuff though and I remember learning Z80 assembly from the regular column on assembly language.
I always thought it was a bit more edgy and entertaining than Byte, in some ways like a print version of the Register.
I always liked Guy Kewney (RIP) who will always be famous now for this - the greatest case of mistaken identity in TV history.
At least a few scans exist by now.. but very few, compared to American magazines. It could be that scanning initiatives were punched on quickly by the (at that time) passive owners. I used to look everywhere for scans, but could only find one or two, or just an article extracted from an issue. I had at that time thrown out all my years of physical magazines because of absolutely no space to keep them. I used to have all of them from issue 1 until the magazine degraded into the typical "application reviews only" mode, as happened to nearly all of the magazines (Byte included).
Update: That site (see other comment) has quite a few more issues up than when I last checked. That's good to see.
These are hilarious and written in a very tongue-in-cheek manner.
Some favourite quotes:
"XMLDeveloper seeks validation"
"Hang on a minute, this is a 32-bit development environment. What will I do with all my 16-bit code?" "Having seen your code, dump it. However, with Visual C++ 2.0 and MFC, most developers can just recompile"
I work in the health tech space and the last 1994 article talks about how "Computerized Patient Records" might revolutionize the field.
"Plans call for an increase in storage capacity to 30 or 60 GB (supporting one to two months of patient image data) and an increase in the number of supporting workstations from three in the radiology department to 10 or 15 stations distributed throughout the hospital."
I finally made an account to post this comment. But, I love BYTE magazine! It was such an amazing resource during it's time. I first dug into them for a project I've been working on (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m7vDhscGzU), and then I found myself looking at more. It truly captured something special. I wonder if there's anything that comes close these days.
If you spend the time to read through these older ones, you'll see they were doing something special. They'd often share programs and circuits in the magazine that others could recreate at home. I wonder how difficult it was to learn about computers, we have so many resources these days.
>They'd often share programs and circuits in the magazine that others could recreate at home.
Yes. (Steve) Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, for instance, was very popular. I used to read that column sometimes, even though I had no hardware or electronics background. :)
My dad wrote a few articles for Byte around assistive computing technologies (usually speech synthesis systems for Apple II) back around 1983 or so, as well as reviewing a (1200 baud IIRC) modem with photos taken by my mom... time to go looking for them!
DDJ was more software- and programming-oriented than BYTE, and some of the articles in it were very interesting too. It remained alive for longer than BYTE, IIRC.
The mid-'84 ads for is unexpectedly reacquainted me with (through the ads for the Computer Innovations C Compiler) the Coronado Enterprises C Tutorial by Gordon Dodrill.
I got some of my first insight into what could be done with one of these $400 "compilers" to make my own software, which was an innate part of my 8-bit computing experience, but was locked away for quite some time.
Perhaps the field has become too fragmented. The MagPi Magazine [1] comes to mind, it focuses on hobbyist uses of the Raspberry Pi with articles on programming, projects. But as I say, m that's pretty niche.
And even then I feel like any sort of magazine is anachronistic in this day and age. Too bad too because unlike the various far flung forums, slack channels, or subreddits, a magazine was a nice centralized melting pot where even the cover of the magazine could ignite an entire electronics revolution (and here I'm thinking of course about the Popular Electronics cover [2] that featured the Altair 8800). We've lost our "pulp watercoolers".
HN, a few subreddits, and a few specialised sites.
There isn't a lot of long-form technical journalism happening in print today. Web distribution is cheaper and simpler.
With print you have to lay out a page by hand - and I have no idea what they used before Quark/InDesign, but it can't have been easy to work with - get it printed to film for litho, sometimes with a few iterations, handed over to a trad printer, then distributed physically.
With the web you can upload text and images to a CMS and the layout can be handled automatically. And you're done. Ad revenue can also be automated, with manual exceptions for sponsorship deals.
Ironically producing videos for YT is a much more labour-intensive process, and therefore more like print, than plain web content.
In Germany, c't and ix by "heise Verlag" are still pretty popular.
That's the same "heise" where the somewhat-famous h2testw (for testing counterfeit USB sticks etc.), windows-offlineupdate (wsusoffline.net, now not very useful anymore) and umbpci (for those who remember the DOS days ;-) came from
I'm having a "you kids get off my lawn" senior moment here... When Byte was in it's heyday, micro-computing was (largely) the domain of weirdo hobbyists. And sure, there was the nascent internet and plenty of BBSes, but most of what I learned came from user groups. MANY people bought early Apple ][s, Commodore PETs or TRS-80s to scratch some personal engineering itch. The HOWTO articles in Byte cater to this community. It had the same feel to me as the modern "maker" community. Most microcomputers of the era came with BASIC in ROM so you could train the computer to do what you wanted it to do. The idea that computer software was "media" wasn't really well developed. Or rather, everyone was making their own media.
BYTE was originally the magazine of people who made their own computers. Quickly became the magazine of people who bought Apple ]['s or TRS-80s or assembled their own computers from parts so they could write their own software. And then morphed into the magazine for people who had a clear idea for a business (or personal) data processing problem and were looking for ideas from "experts" for how to solve it (usually in the form of a product review.)
They re-launched Byte a decade ago, but I think it's time had passed. Maybe it should have been a review of various web sites and apps (like "How I organized my record collection with Air-Table" or "How I ripped all my CDs with iTunes" or "How I ditched my local music collection with Spotify.")
Compared to modern times, few people were using microcomputers and we were all (from necessity) very interested in a few of the same topics (programming, buying affordable systems and how to make an Epson FX-80 print properly.) Byte could run an article about BNF meta-syntax or "how to do a mailing list" and a huge percentage of the readership was actually interested. More than just an ur-wikipedia, Byte let you know what was important to know by running articles about it.
By the mid-80s it had sort of lost that, certainly by the early 90s. Not so much because the quality declined, but because the readership expanded and like all good businesses, they followed the money. It's core readership in 1977 was a niche in 1987, and probably not as profitable.
BYTE was awesome. But it was awesome because it fit the times so perfectly. (Actually it changed a couple times to keep fitting the times as the times changed.) And then one day it didn't. The community of people I knew had moved on to Dr. Dobbs for interesting software stuff and Computer Shopper for product reviews.
Alas, poor BYTE! I knew it, Horatio -- a magazine of infinite jest.
I love these old magazines. Byte, Omni, Computer Gaming World, Oh Boy's life. Magazines used to be so amazing, until they got hijacked by ads. The ads earlier were actually helpful, But post 2000s the ads were well just a nuisance.
When other children read comic books - I had a subscription to Byte magazine. OK I didn't fully understand everything but it sure was fascinating and I did learn a lot as well!
Cover title of the last issue: "Object-oriented computing has failed. But component software, such as Visual Basic's custom controls, is succeeding. Here's why." :)
(For example there was a whole issue in 1981 on Smalltalk-80, with an introduction by Adele Goldberg, where the Xerox Palo Alto people from the Smalltalk-80 team explain the implementation, the VM etc.)
https://vintageapple.org/byte/ has a (complete?) archive, albeit with slightly lower resolution scans.