111–120 of 161 posts
I absolutely love that these are all available online. But it does call into question my decision to haul 100's of kg of these things around every time I moved residence over the last 40+ years.
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…
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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.
I 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.
I am using a few of your photo's but as a database I just filled a spreadsheet (poor man's database) that I can turn into a website hosted at home with two clicks: Squeak with Seaside, Magritte and Pier CMS (swiki). I then render a catalogue PDF with another few clicks for the LLMs. Total time for setup from zero 82 minutes, mostly the time to search the files on my spotlight indexed 400 TB harddisk.
The Byte magazines are extra searchable documentation for the Retro Computing stuff (from capacitors to fix old CRT monitors, cables to wire up coax, ADB, SCSI, IEEE-488 and Appletalk, whole computers, Transputer supercomputers, IBM Risc 1000, early FPGA's) and ways to do SEO: if people search for Lisa than Byte text OCR-ed will find Macintosh XL and my web page catalogue and they see I have several for sale.
There is a faster way still, just get you stuff in a csv tab delimited list and render it into a html file and host it on my first webserver september 2 1991 [2] or today on one of the few free webhosting options left: https://100yeararchive.neocities.org
When I started the first public ISP in 1987, several years before the first web page (on August 6, 1991 [2]), I just hosted my collectables and magazines (The same as I offer here today, I still have them 49 years later), photo's and hardware on hyper cards, mailing lists, uucp, usenet, FTP or Gopher. Webpages we also hosted on the unix home directory of my customers next to their pop email box. I think of your proposal as: the early internet is a great improvement on its successors.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19970509105527/http://www.knowar...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
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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 reas…
Its 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…
Embodiment, social context, and focus. I’m discovering a renewed appreciation for libraries — never lost in theory but in practice. I’m lucky my community has a good municipal public library nearby, a good university library not too much farther. Book collection at MPL is mixed but plenty of good to great material in the mix. Periodical collection has journalism superior to most freely available web. Periodical archi…