I couldn't afford to buy every issue. But when I did I read it cover to cover. It's hard to believe now, but apart from Byte and Dr Dobbs there just wasn't any other source for tech news where I lived (at least for someone who was half programmer - half build your own pc/local network)
BYTE Magazine
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Re: BYTE Magazine
#22My favourite number, that I kept for years later, was from September/1990. It had interviews with everyone that was "important" back then (Gates & Allen (MS), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Doug Engelbart (mouse & GUIs), Tony Hoare (quicksort), Brian Kernigham, Donald Knuth, Bob Metcalfe (Ethernet), Philipe Kahn (Borland), Bob Noyce, Dennis Ritchie (C), Bjarne Stroustroup (C++), Wolfram) predicting the future. None of them pre…
Definitely a gem. Here's a bit on Kapor founding the EFF, while law enforcement compares hackers to rapists:
Lotus founder Mitch Kapor and several industry colleagues have formed an organization they say will fight to ensure the Bill of Rights covers computer-based communication and electronic information. The purpose of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (California, MA), is to combat violations of civil liberties, Kapor says, as well as educate government policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and the public about computers.
The EFF has taken heat from some members of the industry because they see it as simply a "hacker defense fund," and some law enforcement officials are not necessarily in favor of it. "It's as if NOW started a foundation to come to the assistance of [people charged in] rape cases," says Don Ingraham, chief of the high-tech crime team and an assistant district attorney for Alameda County in northern California. "We don't know what to think of it." He says he doesn't understand why the computer industry would defend people trying to break into their systems.
Re: BYTE Magazine
#23Really the only source here in Hong Kong in 1980s. Nothing else compared.
Re: BYTE Magazine
#24My favourite number, that I kept for years later, was from September/1990. It had interviews with everyone that was "important" back then (Gates & Allen (MS), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Doug Engelbart (mouse & GUIs), Tony Hoare (quicksort), Brian Kernigham, Donald Knuth, Bob Metcalfe (Ethernet), Philipe Kahn (Borland), Bob Noyce, Dennis Ritchie (C), Bjarne Stroustroup (C++), Wolfram) predicting the future. None of them pre…
Do you mean none of them predicted the web?
We were already calling it the internet when I started college in 88 and after all, it ran on TCP/IP(the latter stands for Internet Protocol) which ARPANET adopted in 1983.
Re: BYTE Magazine
#25The only magazine I grew up with was MacAddict; was it normal for magazines to routinely be over 300 pages (and mostly full of ads)?
Edit: they have archived MacAddict too: https://archive.org/details/macaddict?&sort=date
Re: BYTE Magazine
#26The only magazine I grew up with was MacAddict; was it normal for magazines to routinely be over 300 pages (and mostly full of ads)? Edit: they have archived MacAddict too: https://archive.org/details/macaddict?&sort=date
yeah, you should have seen computer shopper magazine in its hayday.
Re: BYTE Magazine
#27I like the headline for the issue from September 1992: Is Unix Dead? Soon Unix will face its most powerful adversary to date: Microsoft Windows NT. Will Unix Survive?
If AWS didn't use Linux for servers and Apple chose to buy BeOS instead of NeXT, would Unix be around as prominently as it is right now?
Funny people credit AWS or Apple... Neither really convinced people unix was worth it in such a way that Sun Solaris did. Too bad they collapsed and oracle of all places snagged 'em.
Re: BYTE Magazine
#28The only magazine I grew up with was MacAddict; was it normal for magazines to routinely be over 300 pages (and mostly full of ads)? Edit: they have archived MacAddict too: https://archive.org/details/macaddict?&sort=date
I know that the magazine (The Rainbow Magazine) that was dedicated to the computer I had (the Tandy Color Computer) was easily over 250 pages during its heyday (mid-80s). And it's not like the Color Computer was one of the more popular computers like the Atari 400/800, Apple ][ or Commodore-64.
Re: BYTE Magazine
#29Love it. I grew up reading these. Somehow, they made their way to Hyderabad, India, and were sold on the roadside [1] for mere rupees, but had the top 20% of the front cover torn off. I never got that...Maybe a way to prevent re-sale in the US? Anyway, 13-year old me absolutely loved BYTE and PC Magazine from the US and a bunch of Sinclair ZX Spectrum assembler and BASIC books from the UK ("Shiva's friendly micro series"). I used to wait for Sunday to go a-book hunting: a couple of MAD magazines and a BYTE magazine made for a perfect weekend in 1988 :-)
I remember my grandfather's chagrin when he heard that I wanted to spend money on an IBM PC-XT clone rather than a Panasonic VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) [2]. What IS a computer, anyway?? A foolish, expensive toy, pah! He wasn't entirely wrong, of course :-)
I went nuts authoring an Editor in raw machine code, writing TSRs, and trying to hack the higher levels of Montezuma's revenge's by fiddling with it's machine code for a couple of years.
1. https://www.whatshot.in/hyderabad/forgotten-book-bazaars-of-...
2. "The price of Christmas past: £599 for a VHS recorder": https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/19/price-c...
Re: BYTE Magazine
#30My favourite number, that I kept for years later, was from September/1990. It had interviews with everyone that was "important" back then (Gates & Allen (MS), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Doug Engelbart (mouse & GUIs), Tony Hoare (quicksort), Brian Kernigham, Donald Knuth, Bob Metcalfe (Ethernet), Philipe Kahn (Borland), Bob Noyce, Dennis Ritchie (C), Bjarne Stroustroup (C++), Wolfram) predicting the future. None of them pre…
Gordon Bell and Engelbart were surprisingly spot-on regarding connectivity. It seems that for the people who are canonically regarded as visionaries, massive connectivity through tiny devices was obvious. For Bill Gates, not so much.
BYTE: Let's discuss the subject of portability. Do you think we'll have notebook computers or pocket computers? How do you think the size will evolve?
Gordon Bell: The computer will disappear by another 10 years in [its present form]. There will be zero-cost notebook-size computers with one chip in them that will have about 32 megabytes. So people will be carrying around these sort of minicellular, really connected, computers that go into their own databases somewhere.
Doug Engelbart: Everyone’s going to have a computer-carried around, or surgically implanted, or sitting on your hat or your spectacles or what-and they’re all going to be connected into networks just totally, [and] those networks will be wireless.
BYTE: This sounds more like a portable office than a portable computer. Do you really think cellular phones and faxes will enter the notebook arena?
Bill Gates: That's a little radical. I don't think it's necessary. If you can connect up every few hours, that's good enough. The machine in the office will just have this optic fiber that will go off to the world net work out there. It will directly connect to some kind of server and will have a lot of storage.