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BYTE Magazine

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Re: BYTE Magazine

#61

Post by walrus01 »

It is really interesting looking at older ads from 1993, how much home PC/workstation stuff has dropped in price. A fairly ordinary Gateway 2000 486DX2/50 desktop PC with 8MB of RAM, adjusted from Dec. 1993 to today's date for inflation ( https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm ) is $5200 US dollars. At that time it's kind of a mid range offering since Gateway and others were also selling much more costly 486DX2/66 and Pentium 60/66 MHz machines.

Today for $5200 (sans monitor) you can build one hell of a beast of a Threadripper machine with factory-overclocked GTX1080 Ti, probably 1TB of Samsung NVME M.2 SSD, etc.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#62

Post by unicornporn »

So, this is obviously still in copyright. Pointing the light at these items in the archive should be a sure way to make the copyright trolls aware and eventually have them removed from there?

Re: BYTE Magazine

#63

Post by analog31 »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #36
leejoramo wrote: post #11

I 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 bo…

Ciarcia helped inspire my career. I was in high school, had learned programming, but was also interested in electronics, math, physics, etc. I got an internship at a computing center, where the work just seemed terribly boring. Of course one person's boredom is another person's excitement. But "programming with solder" was exactly the thing that pulled it all together for me.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#65

Post by 13of40 »

antod wrote: post #42
vijucat wrote: post #29

Love 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 ser…

Assuming it worked the same in India, magazine sellers 'returned' unsold copies by sending back just the cover titles to the distributor instead of the whole thing. You were buying the unsold 'returns'.

Can confirm. When I was a teenager you could find dumpsters full of perfectly good books other than that they had their front cover torn off.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#66

Post by cpr »

I was a minor figure in the starting of Byte back in, what 1974? Can't remember the year.

I worked with Carl Helmers (original editor, who had a hobbyist micro newsletter already going, dealing with 8008's, etc.) and Dan Fylstra (a friend from high school days in San Diego, later founder of Visicorp, publisher of Visicalc, the first "killer app" in the PC world) at Intermetrics in Cambridge (Fresh Pond), a gov't consulting firm.

Carl and Dan and I went up one summer day to Wayne Green (ham radio magazine publisher)'s place in New Hampshire and hashed out the basics.

I only wrote a couple of articles, helped with editing, and then school hit (I was starting junior year, I think) and I faded out. (Was also working more than full-time at Intermetrics (much more fun than school) while also attending Harvard full-time.)

But it was fun while it lasted...

Re: BYTE Magazine

#67

Post by forapurpose »

peapicker wrote: post #24
diego_moita wrote: post #12

My 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.

The article is in the September 1990 issue, and the first webpage was deployed a few months later. Obviously, if any of those people envisioned the web or anything like it, they would have done it themselves. 'Obviously' is usually used in hindsight.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#68

Post by HocusLocus »

whitten wrote: post #46

Another great magazine that helped me get up to speed on computers was Kilobaud Magazin. I guess it's name is kinda dated in the days of Gigabaud transmissions, as a kilobaud was 1024 bits per second, or 128 bytes per second. Anyway, you can review Kilobaud Magazine on Internet Archive using the URL : https://archive.org/search.php?query=Kilobaud

Wow I remember Kilobaud April 1979, that introduction to Quicksort with examples in BASIC, copying it down to carry around with me in a little notebook. Shell-Metzer was also popular at the time. I had a TRS-80m1(Z80) and Kilobaud was like a bible.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#69

Post by chadcmulligan »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #36
leejoramo wrote: post #11

I 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 bo…

Was that the 8052-AH Basic one? (Funny I still remember the numbers). I worked for a place where I built a commercial system using that. We used it for a couple of things, a nurse call system, a datalogger, just GP IO, was a great time.
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