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Byte Magazine 1975-1995

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Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#71

Post by jandrese »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #51

The single best inspiration for me to become a 'hacker' of sorts was BYTE. Back in the DOS5/Win3.11 days there was an article about modifying command.com & io.sys so that you could customize the files that were used to load the system. config.sys & autoexec.bat became (on my system) ipl.sys & ipl.bat (Inital Program Load) It made the system immune to any virus* [except TSRs] (keeping a dummy config.sys & autoexec.bat…

The computer viruses that were the worst in those days were the boot sector viruses. Stoned Empire Monkey and the like. They were so hard to remove from machines and spread like wildfire in computer labs.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#72

Post by ghaff »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #70
dingosity wrote: post #57

I think about how the "computing world" has changed over the last 40 years. When I was a kid, everything was new. Every couple months a new type of computer, CPU or peripheral was released: Commodore 64, inexpensive floppy drive, affordable 4-color plotter, (this crazy thing called) a mouse, etc. BYTE captured the crazy zeitgeist of the age. The content was a crazy mix of how-to articles and what-to-buy product revie…

Not just "everything was new" but also "everything was better" (well.. except the stuff that wasn't and failed horribly soon after launch). You bought a computer, and (if you had a money) you bought a new one after a few years and the change in performance, graphics etc. was HUGE. Kilobytes of ram went to megabytes, cga, ega, vga all brought huge improvements, then came many 3d variants, storage went from floppies, t…

And for a lot of purposes, you're basically living in a browser anyway. I do have a pretty new M1 MacBook Pro. But I also have a 2015-vintage MacBook Pro and iMac and they're perfectly fine for what I use them for.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#75

Post by pulse7 »

Cover title of the last issue: "Object-oriented computing has failed. But component software, such as Visual Basic's custom controls, is succeeding. Here's why." :)

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#76

Post by jandrese »

moorg wrote: post #38
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?

There are still some Mom & Pop shops that will put together a custom machine for you, but if you are talking about completely new computer architectures that aren't compatible with anything else the barriers to entry are so much higher. The expectations are miles away from where they were in the 80s. Back when everybody sucked it didn't matter that your first product barely works and had few capabilities. Today your competition is Intel, AMD, nVidia, Apple, etc... Trying to stand out compared to the giants is much harder. Plus you have to deal with the software. Making a DOS clone is no problem. Making a Windows 11 clone is orders of magnitude more work.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#77

Post by tinsmith »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #70
dingosity wrote: post #57

I think about how the "computing world" has changed over the last 40 years. When I was a kid, everything was new. Every couple months a new type of computer, CPU or peripheral was released: Commodore 64, inexpensive floppy drive, affordable 4-color plotter, (this crazy thing called) a mouse, etc. BYTE captured the crazy zeitgeist of the age. The content was a crazy mix of how-to articles and what-to-buy product revie…

Not just "everything was new" but also "everything was better" (well.. except the stuff that wasn't and failed horribly soon after launch). You bought a computer, and (if you had a money) you bought a new one after a few years and the change in performance, graphics etc. was HUGE. Kilobytes of ram went to megabytes, cga, ega, vga all brought huge improvements, then came many 3d variants, storage went from floppies, t…

> but I haven't opened a computer magazine and said...

I feel this. In my opinion, we have not had a computing magazine worth opening in two decades, at least in the US. I know we can find news and articles relevant to our interests with unparallelled ease on today's Internet, but a huge part of me misses going to a bookseller and picking up that month's selection of nerd rags.

I have always had trouble pinpointing exactly what it is I miss about the magazines of old. Sometimes I feel that it had more to do with how I fit into that world at the time, being a curious teen who loved tinkering with tech, and the future was wide open. Othertimes I think it had to do with the mags being my window to that world, since I had nobody to guide me.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#78

Post by WeAddValue »

dingosity wrote: post #57

I think about how the "computing world" has changed over the last 40 years. When I was a kid, everything was new. Every couple months a new type of computer, CPU or peripheral was released: Commodore 64, inexpensive floppy drive, affordable 4-color plotter, (this crazy thing called) a mouse, etc. BYTE captured the crazy zeitgeist of the age. The content was a crazy mix of how-to articles and what-to-buy product revie…

I recall one of the computing magazines of that era, possibly the Dec 77 issue of BYTE you mentioned, published the entire code in BASIC for a space-oriented game. Inputs were simple letter or letter+number commands and outputs were an ASCII drawing of a sector of outer space (complete with * for stars). You would shoot at an alien then skip to another sector before getting counterattacked.

My high school buddies and I desperately wanted to play this game but ... none of us had a computer! So, sitting in the cafeteria at lunch/breaks in our bell bottom pants, we walked thru the code line by line recording the values of variables with pencil on paper. This was when BASIC only allowed 1 or 2 character variable names and only had GOSUBs instead of proper functions. It was slow going at first but we eventually got to understand what sections of the code was doing and could replace line by line with, oh, its doing this again.

I'll have to look for that Dec 77 BYTE so see it that was the magazine. I didn't know it at the time but it was probably very formative for my future IT career.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#79

Post by Thoreandan »

The mid-'84 ads for is unexpectedly reacquainted me with (through the ads for the Computer Innovations C Compiler) the Coronado Enterprises C Tutorial by Gordon Dodrill.

I got some of my first insight into what could be done with one of these $400 "compilers" to make my own software, which was an innate part of my 8-bit computing experience, but was locked away for quite some time.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#80

Post by ghaff »

amacbride wrote: post #15

I 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

PC Magazine was almost certainly more routinely useful to me than Byte. But Byte had this old-schooly eclectic vibe to it.
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