The thing I remember from that era was most of what I read about in Byte being out of reach financially. The open source movement has made software much more accessible. If I want to learn to program in Go or Haskell I don't need to start by reaching for my wallet.
BYTE Magazine
111–114 of 114 posts
Re: BYTE Magazine
#112I started reading Byte in the mid-80's, while at tech school. It was a great source of information on all kinds of computing subjects. It began to lose it's attraction (for me) when they stopped publishing source code. I still have a paper copy of Volume 5, number 11. The Huffman encoding article showed a very creative way of recursively writing out the code-tree for static Huffman encoding. I can't remember which is…
>I still have a paper copy of Volume 5, number 11. The Huffman encoding article showed a very creative way of recursively writing out the code-tree for static Huffman encoding. I remember reading that article in an old copy of BYTE that I picked up at a used book shop. The article was really good. It was early in my career and I remember being thinking what a cool algorithm it was, and felt good that I could understa…
>IIRC, the author's name was Jonathan Amsterdam.
Googled his name and found this video by a person with that name, may be the same person whom I mentioned above. He worked at Google on cloud client libraries for Go. Queued to watch later.
GopherCon 2017 - Lightning Talk: Jonathan Amsterdam - Errors as Side Notes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wW2U9SGKKI
Update: I just watched the video, it's very short, and the tool he describes seems useful for understanding new Go code. I won't describe what it does - go watch the video (pun intended).
Re: BYTE Magazine
#113Notable article from BYTE May 1977: "The Apple-II System Description" by Stephen Wozniak ( http://ethw.org/w/images/0/03/The-Apple-II-by-Stephen-Woznia... )
Hard to measure up to that one, but Abelson & Sussman's from 1988 (iirc) article-length compression of SICP made a strong impression on me.
Drat - that issue (Feb 88, according to Sussman's CV at https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/gjs.html) doesn't seem to be in the archive.
Re: BYTE Magazine
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hard to measure up to that one, but Abelson & Sussman's from 1988 (iirc) article-length compression of SICP made a strong impression on me.
Drat - that issue (Feb 88, according to Sussman's CV at https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/gjs.html ) doesn't seem to be in the archive.
Here's a pdf: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5468189