[HN Gopher] Byte Magazine 1975-1995
___________________________________________________________________
Byte Magazine 1975-1995
Author : belter
Score : 192 points
Date : 2023-01-16 05:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (worldradiohistory.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worldradiohistory.com)
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| 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.
|
| * = well at the time I thought it did. =)
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| sobkas wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| manv1 wrote:
| Jerry Pournelle's column wouldn't have existed if he had owned an
| Apple Computer.
| pklausler wrote:
| I found his columns fun, but I have to admit that this
| hypothetical might have been a net win in technical accuracy.
| richardjam73 wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| richardjam73 wrote:
| 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.
| nanna wrote:
| Related, EXE magazine (1988-2000) full scans.
|
| https://gizmonaut.net/exe/#scans
| kichimi wrote:
| 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"
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I think I have an entire collection of Byte magazine in my shed.
| If the mice and weather have not ruined them.
| dark-star wrote:
| There's a large collection of BYTE magazines on IA:
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine
|
| Some are not in that collection yet, so if you search for "BYTE
| magazine" you might find some more.
|
| Also check out the collection of other computer magazines
| https://archive.org/details/computermagazines
|
| Even more magazines here:
| https://archive.org/details/additional_collections
| https://archive.org/details/magazine_rack
| retrocryptid wrote:
| 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.
| loph wrote:
| 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.
| asplake wrote:
| I remember the Smalltalk edition blowing my mind:
| https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/80s/Byte-1981-08....
| phoyd wrote:
| Yes, this was awesome. They explained the VM and everything.
| lsllc wrote:
| My fav was Lossless Data Compression, a really well written
| article describing how the algorithms behind PKZIP worked;
| Huffman & LZW coding.
|
| https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/90s/1991/Byte-199...
| (page 309)
| y-curious wrote:
| 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."
|
| How very nostalgic. Thank you for posting.
| klelatti wrote:
| 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.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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!
| klelatti wrote:
| Likewise re buying but from a bit later.
|
| 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.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Y2uQn_wvc
| Tor3 wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Same (amazing) site:
| https://worldradiohistory.com/Personal_Computer_World.htm
|
| Also:
| https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PC...
| klelatti wrote:
| Wow - great site indeed. Many thanks!
| Starwatcher2001 wrote:
| Wonderful resource. I may well get around to clearing my
| collection from my loft.
| artie_effim wrote:
| I randomly clicked 2 issues, and there were articles on AI and
| neural net implementations - 35 years ago!
| dark-star wrote:
| AI and neural nets are nothing "new". AI research started in
| the 60s
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| uxp100 wrote:
| 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.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Even the January 1990 issue of COMPUTE!'s Gazette has a three
| page neural net article starting on page 23.
|
| Source:
| https://issuu.com/zetmoon/docs/compute_gazette_issue_79_1990...
| Thoreandan wrote:
| 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.
| simplegeek wrote:
| Thank you for making these available.
|
| What's the alternative for "Byte" magazine today? Where do you go
| to read similar stuff?
| dark-star wrote:
| 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
| janandonly wrote:
| I can second this. In Holland, we get a translated C'T which
| is the only high-quality general "computer magazine" still
| existing.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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".
|
| [1] https://magpi.raspberrypi.com
|
| [2]
| http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/13/...
| dingosity wrote:
| 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...
| WeAddValue wrote:
| 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.
| mcenedella wrote:
| That's an amazing story. Thank you for sharing!!
| acegopher wrote:
| 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])?
|
| [0] https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-
| Byte/70s/Byte-1977-12....
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/CreativeComputingv01n04MayJun
| e19...
|
| [2] https://archive.org/details/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcom
| put...
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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).
| tinsmith wrote:
| > 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.
| erwan577 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| bouvin wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Information_Exchange
| ghaff wrote:
| 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).
| jmclnx wrote:
| IIRC, BIX morphed into IRC.
| ghaff wrote:
| As far as I know, BIX just shut down.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Information_Exchange
| jmclnx wrote:
| Seems you are right, looks like IRC came out of something
| call MUT. I wonder how I was thinking BIX was somehow
| involved :)
| volodarik_lemon wrote:
| [dead]
| mc32 wrote:
| We're getting there:
|
| >Could a Computer Take Over?
|
| >Ed Rush, 1977
|
| "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. "
| amacbride wrote:
| 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
| fastaguy88 wrote:
| 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.
| PacoLinux wrote:
| 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,"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle
| ghaff wrote:
| PC Magazine was almost certainly more routinely useful to me
| than Byte. But Byte had this old-schooly eclectic vibe to it.
| phoyd wrote:
| 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.)
|
| https://vintageapple.org/byte/ has a (complete?) archive, albeit
| with slightly lower resolution scans.
| gstrike wrote:
| 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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| My god, I loved Byte in that era. Well, for me, late 80s through
| mid 90s. They were so FAT with interesting stuff!
| winstonprivacy wrote:
| I loved this magazine. I was actually in one of them (I was 11 at
| the time). I'm going to have to find that.
| dugmartin wrote:
| 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.
| notorandit wrote:
| https://vintageapple.org/byte/
|
| Up to 1998
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
| moorg wrote:
| 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?
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| brk wrote:
| Hell, in its prime Computer Shopper was a GIANT magazine of
| just ads, that you paid for.
|
| I remember ordering computer parts over the phone, delivered
| COD, because I was 12, and didn't have a credit card or a
| checking account.
| Karunamon wrote:
| 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.
| antx wrote:
| 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.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Computer Shopper had LOTS of ads, but it was not just ads.
|
| I loved it, but preferred Byte and PC Magazine.
|
| I remember the Gateway 2000 ads. Crazy.
| brk wrote:
| In the early days (80's) it was primarily just ads and some
| reviews. Later they moved to mixing in some non-advertising
| content.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I don't recall, i think I have started reading it in 88.
| So it could be then.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| jfk13 wrote:
| 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.
|
| That'd be a tough claim to support today.
| jonasmerlin wrote:
| 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?
|
| [1]:
| https://twitter.com/jonasmerlin1/status/1582278969671397377
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
| kevstev wrote:
| 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.
| greenbit wrote:
| The ads are still fascinating. Makes you appreciate 32G of RAM
| when you see 16K _on sale!_ for $150
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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!
| melling wrote:
| Someone should compare the price drops in RAM.
|
| Prices dropped quickly back then.
|
| More recently, I bought a 16GB MacBook Pro in 2013. 10 years
| later I would expect my next to be 64GB.
| speed_spread wrote:
| 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.
| bcrl wrote:
| 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.
| fatnoah wrote:
| That's a great observation. Back in the day, I'd buy many
| magazines for the ads almost as much as the content.
| abrugsch wrote:
| 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!
| tluyben2 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/Best-of-
| Byte-1977...
| daneel_w wrote:
| 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.
| nielsbot wrote:
| "The truly epic BYTE magazine covers by Robert Tinney"
| https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-truly-epic-byte-magazine-...
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| 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.
| daneel_w wrote:
| To me there's a sense of pioneering in the pictures.
| PacoLinux wrote:
| For me, the best magazines : Byte & Dr Dobbs Journal. (And for
| electronics, Elektor). Its a shame no more paper magazines now
| available like those.
| ngc248 wrote:
| 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.
| pulse7 wrote:
| 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." :)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-17 23:02 UTC)