11–20 of 96 posts
Any time I took coworkers to lunch it was the catalyst to a lot of conversation.
It’s fun to regularly peer into the past and be reminded of what has changed and what hasn’t.
Though the magazine was largely before my time, I have an art print of the cover for the May 1981 [1] issue and it makes me smile every time. [1] https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198105_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0...
It's also striking to see street addresses in the ads, some of which are local to me. One company used to do advanced graphics display controllers for computer kiosks in what is now a custom cabinets store in a dingy run down strip center.
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9306426,-77.237681,3a,75y,17...
Looking at one of these now I remember how magazines made technology very exciting (I don't think it was just because I was younger). I think a lot of it was down to the visuals. You just won't get illustrations like that on someone's blog. The illustrations made the technology seem more real and certainly more glamorous.
The 386 was an astonishing improvement over the 286. But now, the next generation Intel chip is... kind of nice, I guess? But it's not all that exciting.
Windows 95 was a massive improvement over Windows 3.0. Windows 11 doesn't make many people very excited compared to Windows 10.
A 20 Meg hard drive was miles ahead of floppies. But the last storage improvement was... nice, but not life-changing.
Hercules graphics was massively better than stock IBM PC graphics. The latest graphics card is exciting if you're a gamer, I guess, but it doesn't move the needle much for everyone else.
And so on. It was eye-opening every month to see what was new. It doesn't feel like that any more.
Here's what's available on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?&sort=date I'm not sure what's missing there, but it sounds like this collection fills in some gaps.
Tangential: does anyone know of a comprehensive scan of 1990s Wired magazine?
Edit: Better query that seems to mostly get Wired Magazines from 1990-1999. 63 of them, so not all of them, but quite a few.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%28wired%201990...
Here's what's available on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?&sort=date I'm not sure what's missing there, but it sounds like this collection fills in some gaps.
But wow, to read Jerry Pournelle's column again.