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Byte Magazine 1975-1995

worldradiohistory.com

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Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#91

Post by sobkas »

jandrese wrote: post #71
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.

> 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.

Someone left disk in floppy drive and you turned computer on? Have a nice bootsector virus for free(and then we had Chernobyl, it was fun). It only got worse with pendrives and autorun functionality in Windows. Even today corpo that owns me, blocks them from being mounted on dev machines.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#92

Post by erwan577 »

tinsmith wrote: post #77
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Before the web and global geek culture, magazines were the only way to get a feeling of "belonging" to some kind of tech community, sometimes the community of some computer brand owners, sharing the same interest for the compatible software & hardware products. Heavily priced online board systems then milked the same needs providing downloads which replaced free disks offered with magazines.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#93

Post by vram22 »

jmclnx wrote: post #84
ghaff wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, BIX just shut down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Information_Exchange

Seems you are right, looks like IRC came out of something call MUT. I wonder how I was thinking BIX was somehow involved :)

Possibly like IBM to HAL, with a subliminal cipher in between. Both pairs being TLAs ;)

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#94

Post by vram22 »

bcrl wrote: post #34
melling wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read (IIRC in Andy Grove's autobiography, Only The Paranoid Survive), that this dumping was what made Intel switch from making memory to processors. The rest is history.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#95

Post by vram22 »

PacoLinux wrote: post #89

For me, the best magazines : Byte & Dr Dobbs Journal. (And for electronics, Elektor). Its a shame no more paper magazines now available like those.

DDJ was more software- and programming-oriented than BYTE, and some of the articles in it were very interesting too. It remained alive for longer than BYTE, IIRC.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#96

Post by HankB99 »

I spent way too much time perusing the pages of Byte. I won't say "wasted" because I never felt that.

One thing I wished I could find was one particular "Stop Bit" that I recall to this day. Among my favorite phrases was

> Hardware Salespeople catch rabbits, paint them gray, and sell them as desktop elephants.

I just found it on page 412 of the September, 1989. While searching for the author, Peter C. Olsen, I found that this has been transcribed (fittingly) and posted here. http://linuxmafia.com/pub/humour/hunting-an-elephant.html

Where you are Mr. Olsen, thank you so much for this insightful and entertaining commentary.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#97

Post by vram22 »

gstrike wrote: post #65

I finally made an account to post this comment. But, I love BYTE magazine! It was such an amazing resource during it's time. I first dug into them for a project I've been working on ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m7vDhscGzU ), and then I found myself looking at more. It truly captured something special. I wonder if there's anything that comes close these days. If you spend the time to read through these older one…

>They'd often share programs and circuits in the magazine that others could recreate at home.

Yes. (Steve) Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, for instance, was very popular. I used to read that column sometimes, even though I had no hardware or electronics background. :)

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#98

Post by kmoser »

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.

It would be interesting to see if the price drops followed Moore's Law.

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#99

Post by djmips »

When other children read comic books - I had a subscription to Byte magazine. OK I didn't fully understand everything but it sure was fascinating and I did learn a lot as well!

Re: Byte Magazine 1975-1995

#100

Post by MonkeyClub »

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…

> Apparently selling a product that trades on a reader's feelings of inadequacy has always been a reliable business plan.

A big aha! moment for me was reading up on older civilizations: archaeologists would discover golden jewelry, but also bronze replicas, which were affordable by the lower classes who couldn’t afford gold, but still wanted to project an image of opulence.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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