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

21–30 of 161 posts

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

#21

Post by II2II »

noosphr wrote: post #15
pjmlp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ads that are well target aren't jarring. They are just part of the magazine. I remember reading ads about a specific make of vacuum pumps next to an article with experiments which used them. Today's ads are so obtrusive because you get toilet seat ads next to an article about general relativity.

The toilet seat ad was well targeted (you have to read somewhere).

More seriously though, print advertising was able to target readers based upon the demographics of the publications readership. They didn't track people across their online life and beyond. (That said, there definitely was some tracking.)

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

#23

Post by PopAlongKid »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #19
smitty1e wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pournelle is so missed.

And Larry Niven, but in a different context.

Unlike Pournelle, Niven is still alive (87 year old), but I don't think he is writing new science fiction these days (although he has collaborated on some stories this century and has made guest appearances at some conferences in the last few years).

https://larryniven.net/

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

#25

Post by tialaramex »

placebo wrote: post #8
tialaramex wrote: post #3

Because I'm an old man, my sister made me a birthday card using an image from the front cover of their fourth issue (Christmas 1975) - corresponding to when I was born. It's a harbinger of a future that was by then inevitable but hadn't yet quite happened, the "personal computer" is very much still a nerd toy, expensive kits that can be assembled by the enthusiast to achieve little of immediate value - but you can mo…

If you're old, I guess that makes me ancient. Byte is what got me hooked on the path I walk to this day, though back then it would be far beyond my wildest dreams to believe that in my lifetime it would be possible to hold an intelligent conversation with software, and everything that entails

The LLMs are the philosophical "box of all conversation" trick, that's not intelligence, it just went from a neat philosophical device to explain why Turing's test doesn't do what you think intuitively it would do to a real world thing that is a mix of fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem.

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

#28

Post by justin66 »

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…

I hope people focus on the nature of the ads as much as the impressive quantity of them. The extent to which quality software and hardware was expensive is probably the main thing people should appreciate. The thing that always strikes me is how long the z80 held on as a thing people would pay for.

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

#30

Post by ksaj »

One thing you can see really clearly, is how the price of specific computing items fluctuated.

The Lisp issue is what got me into said language. Later I was using music software (Cakewalk) and noticed the language was nearly the same, so I started making non-music stuff in Cakewalk as well. CAL was all about programming music logic, but it was a fully fledged language that did whatever text-oriented duties you could think of. It was also super easy to write viruses, although they would only run within Cakewalk of course. Fun times!

Post reply on HN