I am trying to search for OS/2 but nothing comes out.
Any ideas?
Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That's hard - I do have scans of most of Byte, but I don't have many of PCW, so it's hard to remember. I still have a lot of printed PCW magazines stored somewhere, but I can't exactly go and look through them where they are.
But I think Byte was all good until at least 1986-1987, and PCW almost as long but I'm uncertain about the latter.
I subscribed to PCW from issue no. 2 (after finding issue no. 1 in a local shop, and the shop had a system where you could get them to set up the subscription for you - so I did that on the spot. Those were the days..)
And I stopped subscribing at some point, after the aforementioned "review commercial business software" change of focus. But I can't remember when that happened. I may also have dumped the later issues already (because of that), so even if I go look up the stored mags I may not be able to tell. Unlike Byte it's hard to find scanned complete PCW issues.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#53This is from a time when I actually liked ads. Can you imagine?
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#54Fun 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,…
Less than an hour away from Marlow, NH, original home of PC Connection. Must be something in the water.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#55I 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.
On fastish home network (~300 Mbps) with middle-age MacBook Pro (2020), it's wonderfully snappy, not sluggish at all.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#56(!) 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.
Interesting. German publisher Heise avoided this largely by fielding two sister publications: the "c't" (1983 onwards, aimed largely at the general, computer-literate audience) as well as the mentioned above "iX" (1988 onwards, aimed at professionals and pro-level amateurs).
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#57This 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.
> This would be so nice to have with music, fashion and lifestlye magazines.
Or catalogs. But scanning them in archival quality is a massive pain in the ass. And don't get me started on all the scalpers, who sell catalogs at prices beyond good and evil.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#58Kinda 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 t…
I downloaded all of Scientific American. There is a k12 school website that posts the password to their group account, you can log into SA's own archives, and they provide them as PDFs. Only 2-3 issues from 1868 (I think) are missing.
Cell (journal) also makes all their stuff accessible, but they don't provide the front matter or cover... was going to grab that too. Quite alot of everything's up on archive.org if there's anything in particular anyone wants.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#59This is awesome. You are awesome.
Re: Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
#60You've done an amazing job. This is buttery-smooth even when zooming in. Awesome!