Vintage Byte Magazine Library

Remember, paying for that stuff had value in those times. People would buy directories and or pay for advice / direction from others in the know too.

Was hard to understand all that was going on out there. The ADS made more sense in that way than they do now. Sometimes, when a specific product was needed, those ADS connected people up in a way everyone found to have value.

One thing, perhaps missed today given content marketing, was following the ADS to see who did what. New products, old ones phasing out, where things were, who, and sometimes pretty good reasons why all were found in those ADS. Scanning them was not all fluff. (not always fluff I should say, because yeah. There was fluff)

I've always found the advertisements at least as interesting as the actual content.

It was screaming fast!

We went from a discussion on how many colors a machine had, whether it flogged a speaker for sound, or had an actual sound system, to multi-media excellence, and it happened QUICK!

I sure enjoyed my trip through those times.

But, there may be more to come!

Custom silicon is on it's way back around the computing circle of life. The way I see it, the different options we've seen hold fairly stable for a decade or so have all converged on similar ground. Differentiation is sometimes more contrived than actual, like the software, or form factor of a device, maybe it's ports, mean more than the actual computing potential it has. Additionally, we've somewhat peaked in terms of sequential compute, and things like multi-media are fairly ordinary, and of sufficient quality many don't see a big distinction between pro efforts and gear and consumer grade gear. Or, it just flat doesn't matter.

And now the dam is breaking!

To gain advantage, and also lock customers in, leverage mindshare and data, other investments users have or are making, custom silicon is looking very appealing now.

On top of that, the bigger players have the resources to do the development, more of what people need to know about doing it is out there, and tools are more available now to the point where mere mortals can play in this game.

A quick look at something relevant?

Consider the Parallax Propeller 2 microcontroller chip. It's done on an older process, 130nm I believe. On that process, the creator and team managed to get an 8 core, 300Mhz plus design with a lot of features. That project took a decade or so, and north of a million. While high, that's not out of line compared to what it all was just a short time before.

Chips are done, available for people to buy and build into projects / products. It's a custom design with particular emphasis on real time, parallel or concurrent programming, and data streaming, measurement with all I/O pins capable of analog or digital operation. For some applications nothing will come close. A great example of what can be done now.

The bigger players have all done, or are working on custom silicon for one reason or another. AI, network, computation, etc...

Soon, we are going to head back to something closer to that era. More highly differentiated devices / machines. Maybe there is room for the kind of work BYTE did in some form...

But, whether that happens or not, we may well see custom silicon push things forward again in dramatic ways.

Or... It's subscription only, and maybe those other things don't matter so much.

This is well timed. I was actually going over the Internet Archive's collection just the other day. It's a bit sad to watch the decline in quality as you move through the volumes. Somewhere around 1985 - 1986 BYTE shifted towards becoming just another magazine hocking hardware/software. It got so bad that some issues started to look like a rip-off of Ziff-Davis's PC Magazine. Around that point I'm betting a lot of BYTE readers left for greener pastures at Circuit Cellar Ink and Dr. Dobb's.