This must be the single most wonderful magazine archive i have ever seen and it's even searchable. This would be so nice to have with music, fashion and lifestlye magazines. The zooming in and out of decades is a breeze.
Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
41–50 of 74 posts
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#42Thank you for doing this, it also has a nice microform feel when browsing. I remember that in the pre internet days I went to the library to find the microfiche in the drawer en folder of the newspaper I wanted to read. I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6P9FhSkd0I I wonde…
82-83 was the peak of hobbyist computing where articles and ads were in-between components and software.
As the tech improved, it moved into "appliance" mode of being a box you plug in, not a heathkit you assemble. By 86, Gateway and Dell and other packagers sold the "box". As demand shifted, all the mags shrunk from phone-book proportions (PC Mag, Compute, SoftDisk, etc etc). Some survived longer as business software fought for the office and marketing moved to peripherals (mice, monitors, printers) but things got anemic by the 90s.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#43The navigation is very nice and snappy. It gets out of the way. Most UIs for browsing and navigating material feel constricted, like you're handling some kind of radioactive material through those thick gloves mounted directly into the fume hood.
Other than that, I had forgotten what a shameless exercise in marketing these magazines were. You were basically buying a book of ads. Even the articles feel like copy under the thin veneer of "Oh, look at this cool thing!".
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#44Thank you for doing this, it also has a nice microform feel when browsing. I remember that in the pre internet days I went to the library to find the microfiche in the drawer en folder of the newspaper I wanted to read. I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6P9FhSkd0I I wonde…
>I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer.
My library had two forms of microfiche.
One was a cartridge containing a single spool, which upon being inserted into the reader would unspool onto an internal mechanism. You used two jog wheels, one fine and one coarse, to control the speed at which you traversed the tape, and there were numeric inputs so you could go to an arbitrary page. (it got close enough)
The second were flat rectangular sheets with pages laid out in a grid, and you placed the flat sheet onto a glass bed, pulled down a cover and slid the plate into the reader, using etch-a-sketch-like controls to move along the x and y axis.
In either case you could insert a dime and a single page of whatever was on the screen would spit out from an attached printer.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#45Kinda meta, but I found it fascinating seeing the ads that were presumably bought up well in advance, with the same company on the same page in the first few pages of the issue, at least early on. Seeing how it changed over time, I can't help but wonder if that in itself is a bit of a historical record about the growth and death of parts of the industry.
That’s why I find old publications so interesting. I have several copies of Scientific American from the 19th century and watching the advertisements evolve at the pace of the industrial revolution is really fun, as are all the letters to the editor debating stuff like the nature of comets from a 19th century layperson’s perspective.
(You can get the same experience from the Scientific American archives but holding the 170 year old bound copies with all the prints is something else)
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#46Fun bit of trivia: Byte was edited and published in Peterborough, New Hampshire. If you've ever been to that area of the world, you'd know how totally absurd it is that such an influential, world-renowned tech magazine was based there.
Nominally, the offices were located sorta near Boston, which at the time had some important tech companies like Digital and Lotus, amongst others. But Peterborough was a small, rural, old-fashioned New England town about as far away from Silicon Valley as you could get. How a publication from that area was able to be so relevant to the tech industry is almost a mystery!
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#47Superb.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#48Awesome. A really nice way to do this.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#49Well this made my day. Randomly clicking on the covers, I hit on November 1979. It turns out that this issue had an article on software to solve SOMA cubes and Pentominoes written in 6502 machine code and Basic for the Pet PC. When I originally read this, 46 years ago, I had an Apple II+. So I made some adjustments to the code for the Apple in both the machine code and basic and got it working. That article (along with Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth) started my obsession for Pentominoes that exists today. I've taken that code and rewritten and improved it in Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, and Python. I'd copied that article and carried it with me for years until it got lost in an office move. What a treat to stumble across it today!
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#50Thank you for doing this, it also has a nice microform feel when browsing. I remember that in the pre internet days I went to the library to find the microfiche in the drawer en folder of the newspaper I wanted to read. I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6P9FhSkd0I I wonde…
The decline in monthly print medium is universal, mostly due to a loss of advertisers. Once advertisers leave, magazines and newspapers have to start cutting costs which reduces the amount and quality of the content included. The feedback cycle continues until there's nothing left. In the 1980s magazines were the primary medium through which information about new technology products spread. Then in the early 1990s people began moving online to the internet and the world changed.
In Byte's case specifically the large space devoted to ads for mail order services started to decline significantly in the 1990s. In part it was a change in the kind of reader that was interested in computers. There was no longer a need to publish the price of CPUs, SRAM and other ICs in the back of Byte as that wasn't what people were buying. Plus the mail order houses had built up their own lists of customers by then, and would directly mail flyers and catalogues. Computers were no longer easily built from scratch as 32 bit CPUs became more complex and out of reach of most hobbiests.
I loved Byte magazine in the 1980s, and learned so much from it... The monthly hardware project from Steve Circia was fascinating, and there were articles about data structures, languages and even filesystems. I am sad for the loss of that enjoyable monthly experience.