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Byte Magazine 1975-1995

worldradiohistory.com

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Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#31

Post by Tor3 »

klelatti wrote: post #3

Does anyone know of a similar archive for Personal Computer World which was (sort of) the UK equivalent to Byte? The Internet Archive has a quite a few but is also missing a lot too.

At least a few scans exist by now.. but very few, compared to American magazines. It could be that scanning initiatives were punched on quickly by the (at that time) passive owners. I used to look everywhere for scans, but could only find one or two, or just an article extracted from an issue. I had at that time thrown out all my years of physical magazines because of absolutely no space to keep them. I used to have all of them from issue 1 until the magazine degraded into the typical "application reviews only" mode, as happened to nearly all of the magazines (Byte included).

Update: That site (see other comment) has quite a few more issues up than when I last checked. That's good to see.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#32

Post by nielsbot »

daneel_w wrote: post #2

Computer 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.

“The truly epic BYTE magazine covers by Robert Tinney” https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-truly-epic-byte-magazine-...

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#33

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

simplegeek wrote: post #14

Thank you for making these available. What's the alternative for "Byte" magazine today? Where do you go to read similar stuff?

HN, a few subreddits, and a few specialised sites.

There isn't a lot of long-form technical journalism happening in print today. Web distribution is cheaper and simpler.

With print you have to lay out a page by hand - and I have no idea what they used before Quark/InDesign, but it can't have been easy to work with - get it printed to film for litho, sometimes with a few iterations, handed over to a trad printer, then distributed physically.

With the web you can upload text and images to a CMS and the layout can be handled automatically. And you're done. Ad revenue can also be automated, with manual exceptions for sponsorship deals.

Ironically producing videos for YT is a much more labour-intensive process, and therefore more like print, than plain web content.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#34

Post by bcrl »

melling wrote: post #22
greenbit wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ads are still fascinating. Makes you appreciate 32G of RAM when you see 16K on sale! for $150

Someone should compare the price drops in RAM. Prices dropped quickly back then. More recently, I bought a 16GB MacBook Pro in 2013. 10 years later I would expect my next to be 64GB.

Except for the trade war when tariffs were slapped on DRAM imports from Japan because of dumping. The prices listed in the ads by Jameco and other companies in the back of Byte tell some interesting stories.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#35

Post by abrugsch »

My dad wrote a few articles for Byte around assistive computing technologies (usually speech synthesis systems for Apple II) back around 1983 or so, as well as reviewing a (1200 baud IIRC) modem with photos taken by my mom... time to go looking for them!

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#36

Post by timbit42 »

artie_effim wrote: post #13

I randomly clicked 2 issues, and there were articles on AI and neural net implementations - 35 years ago!

Even the January 1990 issue of COMPUTE!'s Gazette has a three page neural net article starting on page 23.

Source: https://issuu.com/zetmoon/docs/compute_gazette_issue_79_1990...

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#37

Post by jfk13 »

tyingq wrote: post #6

Interesting 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.

It's interesting to recognise that the ads in these magazines were something many of us positively appreciated. Yet today, we go out of our way to try and suppress ads all over the web.

I guess this is because the advertising industry is no longer satisfied with providing ads related to the content of a publication, in places where people deliberately seek them out because they're interested. Back then, the ad industry could have made a plausible claim that it was providing a useful and valued service to readers.

That'd be a tough claim to support today.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#38

Post by moorg »

tyingq wrote: post #6

Interesting 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.

Reading the ads, it's remarkable how many computer manufacturers there were. Most of them look like pretty small companies too, effectively showing how low the barrier to entry was to start a computer company. Shouldn't it be possible today, too? Why do we have so few manufacturers?

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#39

Post by jmclnx »

ghaff wrote: post #25
bouvin wrote: post #4

Something that fascinated me back in the day (and something that I have not seen mentioned, whenever BYTE comes up here), when I as a teenager read BYTE (initially borrowed from the local Danish municipal library) was the transcripts from BIX [1]. It offered a tantalising view into the world of BBS (and what would come later through Usenet etc), before such things were widely accessible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/…

Usenet and the pro-Internet/ARPANET in general was more of a parallel Unix-centric universe than something that came later. BIX, like Compuserve/Delphi/etc., was one of the big commercial services--though possibly more hacker-oriented than some--which was also somewhat separate from the TRS-80 in the bedroom hobbyist BBSs (though some of the PC-based BBSs also became fairly large and commercial latterly).

IIRC, BIX morphed into IRC.
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