It was great when almost the entire industry was in one magazine.
BYTE Magazine
31–40 of 114 posts
Re: BYTE Magazine
#32Brings back fond memories! Have to dig out my cassette drive...
Re: BYTE Magazine
#33I 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?
Unix-type servers have always dominant as web servers and this alone made is so a substantial portion of CPUs in the world boot with such kernels even in the 90s I think.
With Unix-like-oses having some inherent advantages over Windows, and the successful open source model making Linux and BSD free and in constant development, in hindsight the extension of Unix-like-oses to more and more domains seems inevitable.
The only thing standing in the way of a Unix/Linux future really was the potential of microkernel OSes but over many years, these have failed to live up to their hype (GNU began development of HURD before Linux was announced).
I mean, Google using Linux internally and using it for the development of Android seem like more obvious breakout moments to me. But there many such moments says to me that no one of them mattered that much.
Re: BYTE Magazine
#34Bah.
By far the cooler 'hacker's magazine' (as someone put it) was Transactor. Available at the same source! https://archive.org/search.php?query=transactor
Byte was so ... conventionally-oriented. "A friend to all is a friend to none." Scrambled ... or benedict?
Re: BYTE Magazine
#35My 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,…
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Re: BYTE Magazine
#36I have always felt that Jerry Pournelle’’s Chaos Manor and Steve Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar were highly influential on the whole idea and style of blogging. The way of writing about technical topics based on personal experience from one’s passion is at the heart of good blogging.
Jerry Pournelle I could have easily lived without. He had piles of his hardware and software given to him, and he had high level access into various companies when he had a problem because of his position at Byte. Couldn't relate, and never understood why people enjoyed his articles that much.
OTOH, Steve Ciarcia was like a god to me. The variety and scope of his projects was crazy. I built his BASIC-52 controller board (point to point wiring FTW!) and hung a 2x16 LCD display and SPO256-AL2 speech synthesizer off of it. I marvelled at his "parallel processor" Mandelbrot generator. Every month was one amazing design after another, and I credit him as one of the people that sent me on my path to my EE degree.
Re: BYTE Magazine
#37Page browsing is horribly broken.
Seems to work well for me in Firefox.
Re: BYTE Magazine
#38Just minutes ago I was reading the November, 1975 issue of Byte. The cover splash is about someday in the futuristic future when we’re all driving around in flying cars and eating meal pills, you may possibly be able to buy calculators and computers in a STORE!
Crazy!
Re: BYTE Magazine
#39This is fantastic, but I'm curious why it isn't more complete. 1988 has only 4 issues. Surely those copies aren't hard to obtain.
Looks like there may have been some DMCA takedowns, judging from what some of the missing URLs like https://archive.org/details/BYTE-1988-03 display.
Re: BYTE Magazine
#40I 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?
Before AWS, Apache running on Unix / Linux was the absolutely dominant web server, pretty much crushing Windows IIS. I don't think Apple factors in at all - they've barely budged the needle in terms of influencing this particular battle, IMHO.