The first computer mag I encountered was Creative Computing. I've always had a soft spot for that friendly, easy going magazine. I corresponded with David Ahl (founder of the magazine) and he sent me a mint box of the first year run.
Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
141–150 of 161 posts
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#142So, I’ve had to collect PDFs from various locations to assemble a complete archive, but:
Now, I’ll need to check what is on archive for each issue and make sure I have the highest quality for each one…
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 :)
love your work on this!
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#144Two 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…
Byte was interesting because it editorially covered everything from home computers to high-end workstations. Byte was a favorite for me (at the time I was in high school) because it covered things that platform specific mags didn't.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#145Its 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.
Yeah, I've got a complete collection from October 1978 to December 1991 (by which time they had became just another x86 PC rag). I bought a fair few individual copies myself from 78 or 79 until the late 80s, but the bulk of my collection I got for free from an elderly engineer in I think the late 2000s.
Here's a tweet I made packing them up when I was moving overseas in April 2015:
https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/586675607087419394/photo/1
I also have a 1984 Encyclopædia Britannica, all 30 volumes.
Will anyone want them when I can't house them?
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
My take. I knew the PDP-11 pretty well, I never got my hands on a high-end CP/M machine. The PDP-11 came out around 1970, the OS I always used on it was RSTS/E which was provided an interactive BASIC programming environment. You might have 15 terminals and each user got their own 64k address space. It was a lot like using BASIC on a Apple ][ but a little better, especially because you got to keep files on a hard driv…
> CP/M did have a sort of revival in that it became common in low-end machines like the C-128
Amstrad were good late 80s CP/M machines. We got both those and C128 in New Zealand.
> the one RISC/CISC CPU thing that really mattered!
Not only indirect addressing, but also multiple memory operands in the same instruction — more than one VM page, really, though a single unaligned operand crossing a page boundary is also bad. Many machines trap on that case to this day and let software emulate it.
Not being able to easily tell how long an instruction is (and thus where the next one starts) is also bad, but can be overcome at some cost in the front end, and the back end is unaffected. Unlike x86 and VAX the 68k does actually tell you everything you need in the first 16 bits, but yes the complex addressing of the 020/030 were what killed it.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#147Two 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…
There came a point for me in the 90's, I think, where BYTE kind of jumped the shark - it became THICK, but not informative - where there was just so much advertising. In those days, even the ads could be informative, but it seemed that as BYTE struggled to be relevant, it became thicker and thicker - pretty much guaranteeing its own demise. I still value a massive collection when I see it, in atomic form, in the real…
It became just another MS-DOS rag. In the early days it covered EVERYTHING, all ISAs, all programming languages (very famous Lips and Forth and Smalltalk issues, for example).
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#148Its 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…
> While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.
I've got a few great memories from the mid-80s...
Being on school-vacation trip with my teacher and classmates at about 11 years old and sending a letter to my mom with a BASIC program I asked her to type on my computer at home and then calling her to ask her the result of the program.
Then pedaling on my BMX clone bicycle to go meet strangers I'd meet through classified ads in a local newspaper where ads read like this (in french but I'll translate):
"Have 120 games for the C64, listing on demand. Send your listing."
At 13 years old or so, we'd buy an ad in the local newspaper and run ads like that, with our phone number and (snail) mail address.
Many games we didn't care about but we load them again and again to see and re-see the "cracktro" before the game (except they weren't yet called cracktro: the term hadn't been coined yet).
Salivating in front of shops displaying computers: but those looking too "serious", as kids we didn't dare to enter those so we'd watch through the window.
Fast-forward 10 years to the mid-nineties and I find myself working with a person whose books (in french) about computing I used to buy and read to learn about computers and programming.
These were the days.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#149Byte's first mention of the 6502 (6501) I think: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/m...
Interesting (but understandable pre-silicon) to see a couple of errors about the 6502 in that e.g. SBC needs SEC before it not CLC. The code examples could be improved too e.g. the 6502 memory copy has no need to use both index registers and increment them in lockstep with the same values. And better still, since you're copying fewer than 256 bytes, initialize one index register to COUNT-1 and copy from last to first.
On the other hand the 6800 code is buggy too. It's incrementing only one byte of the FROM and TO pointers — and the MSB at that on a bigendian machine — with no provision for crossing a page boundary, when the normal thing is to
LDX FROM
LDA 0,X
INX
STX FROM
LDX TO
STA 0,X
INX
STX TO
LDA FROM,X
STA TO,X
INX
Also no mention is made of `(ZP),Y` addressing mode which takes 6502 to another level entirely.
Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Larry Niven, but in a different context.
I've met both, Niven, twice, briefly. He was a grand story teller, but not really approachable. Pournelle was always pleasant. I had the opportunity to share a dinner with JP. I was on BIX, Byte Information Exchange, their "BBS" or "CompuServe"-ish service. And Jerry would occasionally sponsor small get togethers. So there was about 8 of us just sharing dinner at a Chinese place in the Valley. It was a great time. Th…
I was also on BIX, then NLZ, same name as here. Even made it into the "Best of BIX" in the back of BYTE a couple of times.
Living in New Zealand, it wasn't easy to meet people — or for that matter to access BIX! I was fortunate that from mid 1986 my employer paid for access via X.25 [1] for several years until telnet was possible from Actrix BBS.
jdow took me to LASFS once in 1989 and I think I saw JP from a distance. But in 2004 I spontaneously caught a flight to LA for the historic SpaceShip One 100km high flight. jpistritto picked me up at the airport and we drove to Mojave. Parking at the XCor hangar david42 and his wife Rita pulled up next to us in an RX7. There was a party in the hangar that evening, I got to talk with JP and LN and many others, at one point helped Doug Jones (can't remember if he was on bix) make LN2 icecream. A lot of us slept in the hangar. In the morning I helped shadow cook bacon&eggs for everyone, before we all went out to watch the flight.
Also at other times got to meetups in Phoenix, New York (a lot of C++ crowd there), New Haven (people came down from Boston), Seattle.
Good times.
[1] NZ$13.20 per kilosegment (ISTR even more at first!) .. up to 64k bytes if you filled the packets, but possibly as little as 1000 bytes if there was only 1 byte per packet e.g. sitting there and hitting return: so I always filed all new messages to scratchpad and then did either SHOW or else download via X/Y/Z modem.