Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 161 posts

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#151

Post by pseudohadamard »

dynamicwebpaige wrote: post #125
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #107

Earlier 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 :)

One sad thing is that at some point these digital archives are all we'll have left. I have an almost-complete set of Byte magazine as molecules, as well as 80 Micro and a few others, and a large collection of ACM and IEEE journals going back to the early 1960s, passed on from people who were getting rid of them due to storage constraints. When I was at Uni I would carry 10kg loads of them home on the bus over an extended period of time. I don't know how many of these collections still exist, and I'm pretty sure my one will get pulped once I'm no longer here.

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#152

Post by ethan_smith »

haunter wrote: post #7

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…

The ads are honestly one of the best parts to read now. You can trace the entire trajectory of the PC industry through them - watching prices drop, new categories emerge, companies appear and vanish. It's like an economic fossil record of personal computing.

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#153

Post by bombcar »

xtracto wrote: post #79
dugmartin wrote: post #66

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…

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…

> One thing I miss from this type of magazines was the high SNR ratio and most importantly the information "push" character of it.

This was so important - you'd get your monthly copy, and you'd read all the parts you were interested in, but after a few days, it'd still be a month until the next issue and all that was left to read were the ads and the parts you weren't really into. But there wasn't anything else, so you'd read them, too.

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#154

Post by rasz »

BirAdam wrote: post #142

So, I’ve had to collect PDFs from various locations to assemble a complete archive, but: https://absurd.wtf/byte/ Now, I’ll need to check what is on archive for each issue and make sure I have the highest quality for each one…

Are those all OCRed correctly? /checks

"A McGraw-Hlll PIIIJIICGIIOI1/0360-5280" " and dBonk erformance nc ie and t load ng ter 1 even " doesnt appear so

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#156

Post by guenthert »

pjmlp wrote: post #11
haunter wrote: post #7

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…

Those ads were the only way to actually know what software and hardware was available to buy, including information related to "open source of the day", shareware, PD,... Access to BBS was super expensive unless you were lucky to afford a modem, and live on local call distance. European magazine like Computer Shopper were of similar size and ads ratio.

Indeed. How else would we have been able to know that there is a Mind Prober! Circle 200 on Inquiry card.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11/page/n173/...

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#158

Post by MichaelRo »

sixothree wrote: post #138
morphle wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you Matthew Dugal, but no thanks. You just created a bad GUI of a bloated database as a shaky web server. 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 fro…

You can literally upload CSV files to this. Or zip files with folder structures. But ok, you do you. Thanks for the insults jerk. But let's clarify something. You say you are using my photos. Are you referring to the hosted version of my personal photos, without attribution? Or are you referring to the images in the github repo, which themselves have CC attribution in the readme? Also why did you bloviate so much abo…

>> But ok, you do you. Thanks for the insults jerk.

ROFL. Didn't you notice he's Dutch? And old (add insult to injury).

Expect extreme absence of delicacy from the Dutch, they simply lack that gene.

Then again, your comment was a complete, shameless plug of promoting your own crap, in total disregard of what the man said. Someone had to say it to you.

>> Also why did you bloviate so much about yourself here? Was it to make yourself seem more important? Because honestly you come off as a real asshole Merick.

I would bet on "I'm old and I don't care".

What I'm curious though is why would he sell the physical collection.

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#159

Post by bombcar »

brucehoult wrote: post #145
morninglight wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/586…

Nobody wants those things - but some may need them.

What do I mean? If you posted them for free you might get a taker, but probably not.

But it's possible you might identify the right child at the right time who could appreciate them.

1991 Byte might be too old, but a 1984 Britannica has something even an offline copy of Wikipedia doesn't.

Re: Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

#160

Post by sixothree »

MichaelRo wrote: post #158
sixothree wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can literally upload CSV files to this. Or zip files with folder structures. But ok, you do you. Thanks for the insults jerk. But let's clarify something. You say you are using my photos. Are you referring to the hosted version of my personal photos, without attribution? Or are you referring to the images in the github repo, which themselves have CC attribution in the readme? Also why did you bloviate so much abo…

>> But ok, you do you. Thanks for the insults jerk. ROFL. Didn't you notice he's Dutch? And old (add insult to injury). Expect extreme absence of delicacy from the Dutch, they simply lack that gene. Then again, your comment was a complete, shameless plug of promoting your own crap, in total disregard of what the man said. Someone had to say it to you. >> Also why did you bloviate so much about yourself here? Was it t…

> Then again, your comment was a complete, shameless plug of promoting your own crap, in total disregard of what the man said. Someone had to say it to you.

It was, it's fine. But it's also something I spent 6 months on, purpose built for his scenario, and most importantly released under MIT license without charge.

And yeah, I totally didn't notice he was Dutch. I'm used to rude, but the whole pivot to his life accomplishments was quite gross and repulsive.

Post reply on HN