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Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

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Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#41

Post by sizzzzlerz »

GuB-42 wrote: post #37
haunter wrote: post #7

Two things always stood out for me about Byte 1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore. 2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after e…

For me, it was basically a catalogue. The ads weren't annoying, they were the whole point, even more so than the articles themselves! That's how you know what the industry was doing, and if you want to buy new hardware, these magazines were the main source of information. Maybe ironically, for better independent content, as in actual articles rather than ads, hobbyist and video game magazines did better. There was a…

Presenting ads to a target audience IS the purpose for the magazine just as they are for TV, cable, radio, and every other media source. The articles, shows, or music are inducements to get you to read, watch, or listen which, in turn, motivates companys to pay to get their ads presented.

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#42

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

placebo wrote: post #8
tialaramex wrote: post #3

Because I'm an old man, my sister made me a birthday card using an image from the front cover of their fourth issue (Christmas 1975) - corresponding to when I was born. It's a harbinger of a future that was by then inevitable but hadn't yet quite happened, the "personal computer" is very much still a nerd toy, expensive kits that can be assembled by the enthusiast to achieve little of immediate value - but you can mo…

If you're old, I guess that makes me ancient. Byte is what got me hooked on the path I walk to this day, though back then it would be far beyond my wildest dreams to believe that in my lifetime it would be possible to hold an intelligent conversation with software, and everything that entails

Forget AI, if you could time travel and just bring an iPhone back to the late 70's it would look like a science fiction fantasy. An alien artifact.

It's interesting to wonder if the next 50 years of computing will be the same. Will a device from 2075 make what we have today seem like primitive toys? No doubt we'll have full blown AGI by then, which may be the major difference, and we'll (or rather our kids) will look back with nostaligia on these LLMs which seemed so revolutionary at the time, but severely limited and flawed, just a hint of what is going to come.

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#43

Post by sizzzzlerz »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #20
haunter wrote: post #7

Two things always stood out for me about Byte 1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore. 2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after e…

Most trade magazines of that era were pretty similar in size and number of ads , eg. PC Magazine. Pre-Internet they were one of the only ways to keep up with industry news, topics and products.

There were, and still are, a number of magazines in the electronics industry, EDN, for example, that were available for free to engineers that were 75% ads with a few articles. The publishers and advertisers expected the articles to draw the engineers who would be the ones to spec components for their current designs.

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#44

Post by sdevonoes »

haunter wrote: post #7

Two things always stood out for me about Byte 1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore. 2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after e…

But those are nice ads. Nowadays you get tons of these low/effort-AI-generated ads in YT. They suck big time.

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#45

Post by [deleted] »

haunter wrote: post #7

Two things always stood out for me about Byte 1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore. 2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after e…

[deleted]

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#46

Post by 1parkerj1 »

haunter wrote: post #7

Two things always stood out for me about Byte 1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore. 2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after e…

I didn't realise what you meant until looking at this

https://archive.org/details/PcWorld2010

The difference in amount ads is really insane...

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#47

Post by le-mark »

gramie wrote: post #12
haunter wrote: post #7

Two things always stood out for me about Byte 1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore. 2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after e…

From 1988-91, I was a volunteer teacher in Africa. I lived in a hut without running water or electricity, and I had a subscription to Byte. There was also almost nothing to read, so when my monthly issue of Byte appeared (2-3 months later than most people would receive it), I devoured that thing. I would read it literally cover to cover, including all those ads, several times. I wasn't (then) working in IT, so a lot…

lol greetings fellow Basic pencil coder! I used to also write basic programs by hand because I didn’t have a computer.

Pournelle original claim to fame was as one of the authors of “Strategy of Technology“ which was very influential in the 70s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_Technology

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#48

Post by pwg »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #40
X1a0Ch3n wrote: post #36

From these comments, what does the discussion suggest about Byte magazine’s role in the early computing community?

Having lived through this era, living in the UK, Byte always seemed more commercially orientated than hobbyist, but I would buy and read it all the same. Hobbyist computing grew out of hobbyist electronics with the Altair 8800 kit featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975 being one of the first personal computers. My own first computer was also a kit (bag of components and a bare circuit board), the NASCOM…

> Having lived through this era, living in the UK, Byte always seemed more commercially orientated than hobbyist, but I would buy and read it all the same.

The hobbyist arena tended to fall more towards magazines like Popular Electronics, and the focus was much more the lower circuit levels. Byte dipped their toes into that arena via a few of the regular columnists, but that was not their target (despite the fact that many of us subscribers were "computer hobbyists" by most any definition of that term).

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#50

Post by elorant »

haunter wrote: post #7

Two things always stood out for me about Byte 1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore. 2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after e…

Red Herring was like that at the height of the dot com era. There were certain issues that were 600 pages long, although half of them were ads.
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