Byte was great. For years it was the highlight of my month. And I thought the cover art was amazing. The Smalltalk hot air balloon logo came from the cover of the August 1981 issue, which was devoted entirely to Smalltalk. Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982354
Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
81–90 of 161 posts
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I remember reading ads about a specific make of vacuum pumps next to an article with experiments which used them. Doesn't that just create a very obvious conflict of interest and nullify the credibility of the article?
In principle the editorial content might be firewalled, so somebody decided to use vacuum pumps, wrote the article and then the ad department goes huh, call the vacuum pump people and see if they want an advert next to the article. Obviously you, the reader, cannot know if that's what happened, or whether in reality it was the opposite way around, but maybe you trust the reviewer and believe they wouldn't do the othe…
There was some controversy in the music tech space on YouTube because Behringer attacked a YouTuber and reviewer after he gave a product a bad review.
In fact they seem to have tightened up on free review samples in general.
I did some reviewing in the 90s and the magazine had a solid reviews policy - tell the truth even if someone pulls their advertising. Which very much happened on a few occasions.
You can do that if you have no issues with selling ad pages, which Byte clearly didn't.
Whether that was ever generally true for the industry, or is true now with YouTube influencers, is a different question.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#83So someone else saw this comment, then? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47805825
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#84I started reading Byte when I had no way to understand what it was talking about. There were technical terms that I simply had no reference for. What the heck is an assembler?
I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#85Its hard to express what it was like in the early/mid-80s (before I had my drivers licence) to bike a few miles to the bookstore at the start of every month and see all the new computer magazine covers for that month. It was so exciting. I didn't have much money so I stuck with Micro Cornucopia as it had the biggest signal to noise ratio (and before that Rainbow Magazine). I did pickup Computer Shopper later when I s…
It should now be possible to discard my boxes of old Byte - but it is not easy.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#86vintageapple.org also has a really great collection of scans fwiw
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#87Two 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…
Looking at it today what I notice is that the ads and the content were disjoint. The ads were heavily for high-end microcomputers often running CP/M and the S-100 bus often in multiprocessor and multiuser configurations often with exotic graphic systems for the time, like you see these guys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco [1] prominently. That stuff was barely talked about in the editorial which was much more…
Originally the PDP-11s and the CP/M machines were in different markets. DEC's culture was science/tech/academia, selling to educated technical users and OEMs.
The CP/M market was the precursor of the modern PC market - mostly small businesses who didn't see themselves as technical but understood that word processing and spreadsheets could save them time and money.
Minis weren't considered small systems, both for reasons of cost and complexity, so Byte didn't cover them.
By the mid-80s the cost of a PDP-11 had come right down, and was comparable to a high-end CP/M box. DEC made some efforts to sell to small businesses, but never quite understood the people or the market.
Then the IBM PC and its clones appeared and nuked the CP/M market from orbit.
This was DEC's biggest strategic failure. It had about ten years to make the PDP-11 and VAX designs an industry standard. But it was too busy selling expensive peripherals and trying to compete with IBM at the high end to pay attention to what was happening at the low end, and IBM clones stole its lunch.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#88I was always more partial to Compute magazine
It looks like the ia's collection of Compute! is complete:
https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine?page=2&sort=dat...
Also Compute!' Gazette:
https://archive.org/details/computes.gazette/Compute_Gazette...
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#89Two 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.
Then there was computer shopper...man I'd get 8 months out of one of those just paging through and dreaming
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#90I still have a physical copy. I'll ship them (700 kg?) to you if you pay the cost. Email in profile. I also have lots of the actual machines and parts, especially Apple, Commodore. Ship them too?
I've been working on a project that helps you catalog all of this stuff. Check out the features page. It's extensive.
https://github.com/SixOThree/Collectibles
One thing I'm considering adding is a "inquire about this item" link.