Thank you. Was subscribed to it around 1981-1983. Eagerly waited every month for it to make its way across the Atlantic so I could dig into all the fascinating new technologies. I'm sure it had a great influence on my interests and eventual career.
Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
31–40 of 74 posts
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#32Wow, that’s the first digital Microfiche implementation I’ve seen. Well done!
Same! This is really awesome! I'm hoping it's generalizeable enough to do with something like Game Informer, or other magazines. Seems like the underlying tech is just "load unreasonably sized images without performance issues" which feels plenty generalizeable, as a framework. So the question is in how complex or tedious it is to get every page into a single image (or whatever format these are loaded as), in a catalogued way.
Regardless, this is just a really fantastic example of this whole kind of project, and the fact that it was done with BYTE is the cherry on top.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#33dezoomify-rs https://byte.tsundoku.io/byte_files/10/0_0.jpg Found the following zoom levels: 0. byte (Deep Zoom Image) (868480 x 453747 pixels, 376956 tiles) ... I think, I'll skip downloading this
Yes it's a fair amount of data: pdfs/ 12.5 GiB pages/ 91.96 GiB (Each page as a .png) text/ 365.03 MiB (Each page as text) byte_files/ 55.98 GiB (The 1024x1024 tiles as .jpeg) I had not heard of https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify-rs before, that's really cool!
I wonder how it would do with the djvu codec which tends to have been used specifically for archiving documents. I suppose it is best applied at source if the physical material is at hand.
Might still be worth taking a look at as an experiment since this codec separates text, background and images into different layers, even when converted from another format.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#34I loved BYTE! The articles were so much more technical and interesting than anything you find in a computer magazine (or equivalent) today.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#35(!) I only have a few issues that I bought as a kid. I've been re-reading them lately and I noticed that that while e.g. a 1987 issue is (still!) deeply intellectually stimulating, a 1989 issue is kind of boring in comparison. It seems like it went from being focused on computer science/engineering to commercial uses of computing quite quickly.
I read all the Byte magazines until I stopped near the end of the eighties.. and the reason was as you indicated. The articles went from being about programming techniques, new languages, interesting hardware, CPUs, to instead be reviews of commercial software, and boring software at that. Actually Byte wasn't alone here.. nearly every magazine ended up the same (e.g. another one I read from the very first issue - the British magazine Personal Computer World), and died.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#36(!) I only have a few issues that I bought as a kid. I've been re-reading them lately and I noticed that that while e.g. a 1987 issue is (still!) deeply intellectually stimulating, a 1989 issue is kind of boring in comparison. It seems like it went from being focused on computer science/engineering to commercial uses of computing quite quickly.
I read all the Byte magazines until I stopped near the end of the eighties.. and the reason was as you indicated. The articles went from being about programming techniques, new languages, interesting hardware, CPUs, to instead be reviews of commercial software, and boring software at that. Actually Byte wasn't alone here.. nearly every magazine ended up the same (e.g. another one I read from the very first issue - th…
(I'm also a PCW fan. Grew up reading it in the local public library. Tiny mill town in Sweden.)
I'm curious: if you remember - which years would you describe as the best ones for Byte and PCW?
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#37I loved BYTE! The articles were so much more technical and interesting than anything you find in a computer magazine (or equivalent) today.
That is most of how I learned how computers worked when I was a teenager. I had no other resources of this quality, not even access to a computer most of the time.
Strangely, I don't get much nostalgia from this. The situation kind of sucked.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#38This is beautiful! I love this so much, as it makes it so simple and intuitive to drop into a sense of curiosity, exploration, serendipity, scanning around, seeing what catches the eye, zooming in and out.
It kind of recaptures part of the intangible sense of flipping through the old physical pages to see what catches the mind's interest. This feels substantively different from the current way that we discover and stumble upon things in the modern web and especially mobile app ecosystems with infinite scroll and algorithmically curated feeds.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#39[dead]
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#40I wanted to suggest a tweak to this cool project: The panning and zooming feel very sluggish. I'm not sure if there's a technical reason it needs to be that way, but if the animation duration or spring used to control that can be made faster, it will feel much nicer to navigate around.