I remember the Smalltalk edition blowing my mind: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/80s/Byte-1981-08....
Byte Magazine 1975-1995
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Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995
#12Computer magazine/book art from the 70s and 80s is almost an artistic style of its own. I love browsing old issues of Byte, COMPUTE!'s Gazette etc. just to see the imaginative graphical work.
I don't know why but the aesthetics kind of reminds of the soviet space program propaganda posters. Probably because they are of the same time period but not sure.
Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995
#13I randomly clicked 2 issues, and there were articles on AI and neural net implementations - 35 years ago!
Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995
#14Thank you for making these available.
What's the alternative for "Byte" magazine today? Where do you go to read similar stuff?
Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995
#15I loved Jerry Pournelle’s “Chaos Manor” columns, and Steve Ciarcia’s “Circuit Cellar” — it was nice to have both software and hardware represented. The articles on the Inmos Transputer were fascinating, and sparked my interest in parallel and distributed computing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995
#16I remember how I read about functional programming languages for the first time in the August 1985 Byte issue, which I bought as a teenager because it featured a technical rundown of the new Amiga computer. For me in the early 80'e, Byte was a cornucopia of interesting stuff, much like Hacker News today.
(For example there was a whole issue in 1981 on Smalltalk-80, with an introduction by Adele Goldberg, where the Xerox Palo Alto people from the Smalltalk-80 team explain the implementation, the VM etc.)
https://vintageapple.org/byte/ has a (complete?) archive, albeit with slightly lower resolution scans.
Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995
#17The scans from here differ from the ones on the Internet Archive. These are lower quality (Marks on pages, yellower, compression artifacts, bleed through, inconsistant page sizes) but as a result are much smaller. They are watermarked on each page. This archive also seems more complete than the IA one.
The site (worldradiohistory.com) was just featured on the front page yesterday with TAB books, and is an all around amazing resource.
I have scraped hundreds now of hobbyist electronics magazines going back roughly 100 years.
From time to time, when offline, I'll pull up these old electronics hobbyist magazines that I've culled and skim through them. Occasionally an old circuit like a theremin will catch my eye and I'll make a note of which issue I found it in in a file that I keep.
Otherwise I think I like suffusing myself in the periodicals of those earlier decades (I think the 70's are one of my favorites).
It is rather telling how prevalent the ads are though that show men being browbeaten by wives or bosses — these men are encouraged then to take some kind of correspondence course in electronics to make the big bucks and be their own boss! Apparently selling a product that trades on a reader's feelings of inadequacy has always been a reliable business plan.
Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995
#18I remember the Smalltalk edition blowing my mind: https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/80s/Byte-1981-08....
Yes, this was awesome. They explained the VM and everything.
Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995
#19Thank you for making these available. What's the alternative for "Byte" magazine today? Where do you go to read similar stuff?
Perhaps the field has become too fragmented. The MagPi Magazine [1] comes to mind, it focuses on hobbyist uses of the Raspberry Pi with articles on programming, projects. But as I say, m that's pretty niche.
And even then I feel like any sort of magazine is anachronistic in this day and age. Too bad too because unlike the various far flung forums, slack channels, or subreddits, a magazine was a nice centralized melting pot where even the cover of the magazine could ignite an entire electronics revolution (and here I'm thinking of course about the Popular Electronics cover [2] that featured the Altair 8800). We've lost our "pulp watercoolers".
[1] https://magpi.raspberrypi.com
[2] http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/13/...
Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995
#20Interesting juxtaposition to today, I bought Byte MOSTLY for the ads. The computer scene was changing so fast in the 80's that the ads were interesting and wanted.
Hell, in its prime Computer Shopper was a GIANT magazine of just ads, that you paid for. I remember ordering computer parts over the phone, delivered COD, because I was 12, and didn't have a credit card or a checking account.
Computer Shopper had LOTS of ads, but it was not just ads.
I loved it, but preferred Byte and PC Magazine.
I remember the Gateway 2000 ads. Crazy.