81–90 of 101 posts
Wayne Green was the publisher of Byte magazine, which he started when he recognized hobby computing that the hams that read his "73" magazine were doing.
I thought it was interesting that the first edition of Byte had an article about hobby computing with a LSI-11, which is a PDP-11 variant.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the early days (80's) it was primarily just ads and some reviews. Later they moved to mixing in some non-advertising content.
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 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…
While the Dec 77 issue of Byte[0] had Star Trek on the cover it didn't contain a BASIC listing. Could it have been either the May/June 1975 issue of Creative Computing[1] or one of the compilations (BASIC Computer Games[3])?
[0] https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/70s/Byte-1977-12....
[1] https://archive.org/details/CreativeComputingv01n04MayJune19...
[2] https://archive.org/details/Basic_Computer_Games_Microcomput...
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
Jerry Pournelle's column was very entertaining and well written, but it taught me an important lesson. I knew something about the computers of the day (perhaps more than Pournelle), and I often found him giving bizarre, if not incorrect, advice (and sometimes, when he had a problem, he would just call his bud Bill Gates). Reading the column, it was clear he was the expert, even when he was not. So I learned that it i…