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BYTE Magazine

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Re: BYTE Magazine

#101

Post by 8bitsrule »

HocusLocus wrote: post #68
whitten wrote: post #46

Another great magazine that helped me get up to speed on computers was Kilobaud Magazin. I guess it's name is kinda dated in the days of Gigabaud transmissions, as a kilobaud was 1024 bits per second, or 128 bytes per second. Anyway, you can review Kilobaud Magazine on Internet Archive using the URL : https://archive.org/search.php?query=Kilobaud

Wow I remember Kilobaud April 1979, that introduction to Quicksort with examples in BASIC, copying it down to carry around with me in a little notebook. Shell-Metzer was also popular at the time. I had a TRS-80m1(Z80) and Kilobaud was like a bible.

Publisher Wayne Greene (good guy) had actually started Byte magazine (sordid details) ... but Kilobaud (as Wikipedia notes) was definitely for more technical readers ... down-to-metal hardware and software wisdom. (I only recently parted company with ish's #1 and #2.)

Re: BYTE Magazine

#102

Post by pcurve »

walrus01 wrote: post #61

It is really interesting looking at older ads from 1993, how much home PC/workstation stuff has dropped in price. A fairly ordinary Gateway 2000 486DX2/50 desktop PC with 8MB of RAM, adjusted from Dec. 1993 to today's date for inflation ( https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm ) is $5200 US dollars. At that time it's kind of a mid range offering since Gateway and others were also selling much more costly 4…

you are right. I think that was part of the appeal. Even though I didn't have a PC nor could I afford one as a teenager I religiously read these computer magazines cover to cover including all the ads. in fact I enjoyed reading ads more.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#104

Post by jonhendry18 »

protomikron wrote: post #84
darren_ wrote: post #78

Interesting reading these in the light of excessively intrusive advertising on websites being one of HN's favourite dead horses to beat. I'm reading the smalltalk issue and the introductory editorial has a hyphenated word split over a two page ad spread plus a half page ad on the page it finishes on. Which is also opposite a full page ad. (the next two pages are ads)

I wanted to mention the same thing, it is littered with ads. However I remember reading some gaming related magazine way back in the early 2000s and there were also many ads (and still are I guess), so it's not a BYTE specific thing, but print-media in general.

Those ads are how they could publish a 500 page monthly magazine for $2.50.

And at the time, the ads were to some extent also useful information about the industry, in a period where there wasn't much available.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#105

Post by jonhendry18 »

jim_lawless wrote: post #60

I started reading Byte in the mid-80's, while at tech school. It was a great source of information on all kinds of computing subjects. It began to lose it's attraction (for me) when they stopped publishing source code. I still have a paper copy of Volume 5, number 11. The Huffman encoding article showed a very creative way of recursively writing out the code-tree for static Huffman encoding. I can't remember which is…

Circuit Cellar is still around. It was owned by a Dutch company for a while but Ciarcia bought it back.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#106

Post by stevesimmons »

leejoramo wrote: post #11

I have always felt that Jerry Pournelle’’s Chaos Manor and Steve Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar were highly influential on the whole idea and style of blogging. The way of writing about technical topics based on personal experience from one’s passion is at the heart of good blogging.

I learnt everything I know about computers from reading Byte magazine cover to cover as a teenager. Steve Ciracia's Circuit Cellar was always the highlight for me.

My favourite project was the video camera he made from a 64kb DRAM chip from Micro called the IS32. Rather that the usual opaque cap, it had a transparent quartz lid. Photons accelerated the charge leaking from DRAM cells. So by writing ones, waiting a calculated period, then reading out the new DRAM values, you could get a binary image. Repeat for multiple exposure periods for greyscale.

As a 15 year old, I bought one of these chips, designed my own circuit board, drew the tracks with etch-resistant pen from Tandy Radio Shack, etched it in ferric chloride, hand drilled the holes, and soldered the components. Needless to say, it didn't work. And without access to an oscilloscope, I never managed to figure out the problem.

Part 1: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-09

Part 2: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-10

Here are PDFs,including circuit diagrams and code listing:

ftp://alvarestech.com/pub/electronics/circuit_cellar/BYTE_Projects/D-Cam1.pdf

ftp://alvarestech.com/pub/electronics/circuit_cellar/BYTE_Projects/D-Cam2.pdf

(for those interested in computer nostalgia, the first of those full issues was a special on portable computing. And the second is a mammoth 480 page issue with dozens of articles on all aspects of the Unix operating system).

Re: BYTE Magazine

#107

Post by speakeron »

stevesimmons wrote: post #106
leejoramo wrote: post #11

I have always felt that Jerry Pournelle’’s Chaos Manor and Steve Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar were highly influential on the whole idea and style of blogging. The way of writing about technical topics based on personal experience from one’s passion is at the heart of good blogging.

I learnt everything I know about computers from reading Byte magazine cover to cover as a teenager. Steve Ciracia's Circuit Cellar was always the highlight for me. My favourite project was the video camera he made from a 64kb DRAM chip from Micro called the IS32. Rather that the usual opaque cap, it had a transparent quartz lid. Photons accelerated the charge leaking from DRAM cells. So by writing ones, waiting a cal…

> My favourite project was the video camera he made from a 64kb DRAM chip

My first job in computing was as a bench repair engineer for shop-returned Sinclair Spectrums. (Pretty busy time since they had a huge failure rate mainly due to an under-specified transistor in the DC-DC converter).

Since we had plenty of components available, I had a go at doing this by lifting the lid of a ceramic 4164 (might have been a 4116) with a soldering iron and hacking together a bit of stripboard to plug into the expansion bus of a Spectrum.

It worked a treat with a few frames per second refresh rate. (I had to remap the non-sequential ram lines in software to get a sensible image.)

Re: BYTE Magazine

#108

Post by vram22 »

jim_lawless wrote: post #100
vram22 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I still have a paper copy of Volume 5, number 11. The Huffman encoding article showed a very creative way of recursively writing out the code-tree for static Huffman encoding. I remember reading that article in an old copy of BYTE that I picked up at a used book shop. The article was really good. It was early in my career and I remember being thinking what a cool algorithm it was, and felt good that I could understa…

Yes it was! They have the issue at the archive: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05

Great, thanks. Will check it out.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#109

Post by vijucat »

antod wrote: post #42
vijucat wrote: post #29

Love it. I grew up reading these. Somehow, they made their way to Hyderabad, India, and were sold on the roadside [1] for mere rupees, but had the top 20% of the front cover torn off. I never got that...Maybe a way to prevent re-sale in the US? Anyway, 13-year old me absolutely loved BYTE and PC Magazine from the US and a bunch of Sinclair ZX Spectrum assembler and BASIC books from the UK ("Shiva's friendly micro ser…

Assuming it worked the same in India, magazine sellers 'returned' unsold copies by sending back just the cover titles to the distributor instead of the whole thing. You were buying the unsold 'returns'.

Ah, I see, thanks. So these unsold copies somehow made their way to India. Interesting.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#110

Post by hakfoo »

dmazin wrote: post #30
diego_moita wrote: post #12

My favourite number, that I kept for years later, was from September/1990. It had interviews with everyone that was "important" back then (Gates & Allen (MS), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Doug Engelbart (mouse & GUIs), Tony Hoare (quicksort), Brian Kernigham, Donald Knuth, Bob Metcalfe (Ethernet), Philipe Kahn (Borland), Bob Noyce, Dennis Ritchie (C), Bjarne Stroustroup (C++), Wolfram) predicting the future. None of them pre…

Gordon Bell and Engelbart were surprisingly spot-on regarding connectivity. It seems that for the people who are canonically regarded as visionaries, massive connectivity through tiny devices was obvious. For Bill Gates, not so much. BYTE: Let's discuss the subject of porta­bility. Do you think we'll have notebook computers or pocket computers? How do you think the size will evolve? Gordon Bell: The computer will dis…

Honestly, a continuous connectivity model was an ambitious bet early on. Wasn't cellular data at the time basically using the phone as a 9600bps modem at astronomical per-minute prices?

If continuous connectivity was unavailable, I could imagine an somewhat different ecosystem developing. We could still have sexy phone/PDA devices, but with software optimized around caching and making use of a transient connection.

For example, "feed" based apps like HN/Reddit/any typical news sources tend to pull the latest feed when you open the app, then load individual articles on request. In a limited-connectivity world, you'd see the app sitting in the background, waiting for Wi-Fi or a sync cable or however it was hooked in, and then pulling as many articles as it could to a local cache, so you could read them completely without data later.

I'm actually surprised this didn't happen much more in countries where data was spotty or expensive and limited.

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