You might be interested in UnixBench, the original BYTE UNIX benchmark suite
Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
121–130 of 161 posts
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#122Two 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 had a friend in college who bought Computer Shopper just for the ads. He built and upgraded his PCs. Back then the price of everything would drop by the month and new processors could double your performance.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yes, I have been telling kids to make library use as part of their search for knowlege. First when you get to your material you face either a shelf of related books or bound journals covering a range of related topics. And there is the serendipity of random encounters focused by the subconcious. Also reference librarians can help direct one to unkown resourses.
First when you get to your material you face either a shelf of related books or bound journals covering a range of related topics.
Unfortunately many novel library buildings are transitioning to electronic stacks which fetch specific resources quickly and are well suited to large collections but deny the experience of browsing.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Me too. We'd write and discuss them at school, then run home and try them out. QBasic, and batch file viruses. Ages 10 and 11. Fast forward 35 years and kids play minecraft, programming is dying, and modular desktop computers themselves are seemingly becoming a rarity between surveillance mobile phones and surveillance TVs. Disposable vape pens have more processing power and screen resolution than our household PCs back then, which cost thousands of dollars.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#125Its 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…
> I feel like something has been lost. I think you're right. A lot of people have written about this, but one of my favourites who has stuck with me in recent years is Byung-Chul Han with "The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present" It covers other topics as well, but describes the value of physical experiences and serendipitous encounters that occurred before the digital era as we know it today. Having…
Definitely agree! I spent so many hours reading BYTE and Computer World and OMNI - and learned so much along the way. If y'all are interested in visualizing and exploring older computer magazines: https://thestacks.dev :)
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#126Two 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…
My mom was teaching CS in the early 80s, and subscribed to Byte. The ads were of little use for me, as I had zero money, but of course I flipped through them anyway. I devoured Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar and I think it was one of the main influences on my career, along with Goedel, Escher, Bach. I discovered Digi-Key in the ads. That's kind of life-changing when all you had access to was Radio Shack. You can tell someo…
Hey! Computer Shopper had articles, they were just mostly
pretty shallow.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#127I've downloaded the entire thing a while back for nostalgia sake. And I am (of course) the proud owner of a physical copy of the "Smalltalk" issue :-) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
I still have that issue and the threaded languages issue at my office. I also have the blue book and the orange book and the green book of Smalltalk internals.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#128I think this is the full archive: https://vintageapple.org/byte/
yeah, last I looked (a couple of years ago) this was a better and more complete collection than what archive.org had (and is what enabled me to get rid of most of my paper collection, though I kept some particular highlights)
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#129Its 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…
I had a similar experience in the early 90s (im and 1981 kid). I loved going to the magazine stand and get whatever local programming magazine they had at the time. Also, I loved Linux Journal (later years) and Linux Magazine. I got a subscription sent to a cousin who lived in the US (In Alaska!!). She came to Mexico every six months and would bring the stacks of those magazines, which i would read back to back. One…
> You would learn stuff that was related but adjacent to your interests. But it will make you expand your knowledge horizon.
One of the things I like about Hacker News is that it provides some exposure of this kind. The SNR in any given post might not always be high, but the tangential discussions often lead to topics just as interesting, expanding my awareness of what I don't know. There are lots of rabbit holes to explore here.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#130BYTE mag and Creative Computing were the first computing magazines I read, and really kick-started my excitement with computers, even though everything was out of my reach (either too expensive as a kid, or running on computers that were too expensive for me to contemplate). I remember there was a library catalogue system written for the Apple II that I tried to "cargo cult" rewrite for my MicroBee (an Australian Z80-based computer). I had no idea what all the "CHR $4" calls were for, but loved the process of typing in the listings.