Byte Magazine 1975-1995 • Hacker News Board

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#41

Post by dark-star » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:41 PM UTC

There's a large collection of BYTE magazines on IA: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine

Some are not in that collection yet, so if you search for "BYTE magazine" you might find some more.

Also check out the collection of other computer magazines https://archive.org/details/computermagazines

Even more magazines here: https://archive.org/details/additional_collections https://archive.org/details/magazine_rack

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#42

Post by dark-star » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:42 PM UTC

artie_effim wrote: post #13

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

AI and neural nets are nothing "new". AI research started in the 60s

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#43

Post by Starwatcher2001 » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:44 PM UTC

Wonderful resource. I may well get around to clearing my collection from my loft.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#44

Post by dark-star » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:45 PM UTC

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?

In Germany, c't and ix by "heise Verlag" are still pretty popular.

That's the same "heise" where the somewhat-famous h2testw (for testing counterfeit USB sticks etc.), windows-offlineupdate (wsusoffline.net, now not very useful anymore) and umbpci (for those who remember the DOS days ;-) came from

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#45

Post by jonasmerlin » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:50 PM UTC

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.

I actually wondered about this on Twitter recently[1]. Do you remember caring about/recognizing the aesthetics of some of these ads at the time, or is that more of a modern perspective?

[1]: https://twitter.com/jonasmerlin1/status/1582278969671397377

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#46

Post by kevstev » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:50 PM UTC

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.

In the mid 90s to early 00s, I loved looking at the ads in the Sunday newspaper from computer stores, and month by month you could see prices coming down for all components, if not week by week.

The pace was so torrid. They stopped even advertising the RAM for my ~3 year old Pentium 100 I had with 8MB of RAM. I was expecting to pay hundreds of dollars for an upgrade, but in the end an upgrade to 72MB was only about $70.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#47

Post by richardjam73 » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 2:55 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #17

richardjam73 wrote: post #9

The 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…

I also have a large collection I have downloaded over the years, primarily ones that I read when I was younger. I used an ipad to read them as that has the best screen resolution for such material for a portable device. The ipad unfortunatley broke last year and I haven't had enough money to replace it.

It is interesting to read things like letters to the editor to see what people of the day thought.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#48

Post by kichimi » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:00 PM UTC

nanna wrote: post #40

Related, EXE magazine (1988-2000) full scans. https://gizmonaut.net/exe/#scans

These are hilarious and written in a very tongue-in-cheek manner.

Some favourite quotes:

"XMLDeveloper seeks validation"

"Hang on a minute, this is a 32-bit development environment. What will I do with all my 16-bit code?" "Having seen your code, dump it. However, with Visual C++ 2.0 and MFC, most developers can just recompile"

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#49

Post by tluyben2 » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

On page 8 of magazine [0] (from 1977) they are talking about computers taking over the world. The same things people are still talking about still. There are also stories about no-code being the end of programmer jobs etc. The only thing that's not in there is blockchain.

[0] https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/Best-of-Byte-1977...

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#50

Post by tyingq » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

jonasmerlin wrote: post #45

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.

I actually wondered about this on Twitter recently[1]. Do you remember caring about/recognizing the aesthetics of some of these ads at the time, or is that more of a modern perspective? [1]: https://twitter.com/jonasmerlin1/status/1582278969671397377

Aside from the aesthetics, the content of the ads was different than today. There was lots of advertising aimed directly at hobbyists. Today, you mostly have to go to specific niche places like tindie.com to find something similar. Or basically, a significant portion of the market was people with engineering skills.