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BYTE Magazine

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Re: BYTE Magazine

#51

Post by mistrial9 »

peapicker wrote: post #24
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…

Do you mean none of them predicted the web? We were already calling it the internet when I started college in 88 and after all, it ran on TCP/IP(the latter stands for Internet Protocol) which ARPANET adopted in 1983.

this is not making the point well -- in 1988 there were multiple, competing protocols that ran over whatever the carrier medium was.. TCP/IP was nascent, and did not route as we know it today.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#52

Post by diego_moita »

peapicker wrote: post #24
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…

Do you mean none of them predicted the web? We were already calling it the internet when I started college in 88 and after all, it ran on TCP/IP(the latter stands for Internet Protocol) which ARPANET adopted in 1983.

> Do you mean none of them predicted the web?

I mean the whole social, cultural and economic impact and, yes, the web is a very important part of it.

But there were a few more things in that early era, besides the web (e.g.:ICQ, IRC, Napster).

Re: BYTE Magazine

#54

Post by 9erdelta »

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…

Wow Bill Gates' perspective is interesting because what is radical now is for a phone to NOT be continuously connected. If my phone has no internet, that is a bad time. So easy to become complacent and rely on an internet connection for pretty much all useful information.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#55

Post by da02 »

dylan604 wrote: post #48
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…

I recently found myself in Boston needing computer stuff, and wound up at Micro Center in Cambridge. It was interesting in that they had pictures of the computing legends. Your list reminded me of that, as most of your list was represented in these portraits.

What were the prices like? Anything interesting for sale there that is not found in other stores?

Re: BYTE Magazine

#56

Post by smacktoward »

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…

Gates' blind spot regarding connectivity and the Internet was still in full effect five years later, when his book The Road Ahead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_boo...) came out. I vividly remember sitting there in 1995 reading the hardcover first edition and thinking "man, this guy just does not get it."

Fortunately for Microsoft, he eventually did get it, though only just in time -- not long after the book hit the shelves.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#57

Post by southern_cross »

I was a Byte subscriber at the time, and IIRC one of its last issues (which I can't seem to find in the archive) had a big article which compared Unix to Windows and came to a pro-Unix, anti-Windows conclusion. I was quite surprised at this because at the time the industry had reached a point where you dare not say anything against Microsoft, otherwise you would feel the full wrath of Bill Gates. And I remember thinking to myself "Wow, I bet Bill is really going to be unhappy about this!" So it came as no real surprise to me when in short order Byte was bought up and then just abruptly shut down.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#58

Post by southern_cross »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #36
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.

Jerry Pournelle I could have easily lived without. He had piles of his hardware and software given to him, and he had high level access into various companies when he had a problem because of his position at Byte. Couldn't relate, and never understood why people enjoyed his articles that much. OTOH, Steve Ciarcia was like a god to me. The variety and scope of his projects was crazy. I built his BASIC-52 controller bo…

One thing I liked about Jerry Pournelle was that whenever he reviewed something he usually gave a blow-by-blow description of all of the problems that he ran into and how he worked around them. Some folks gave him grief about this, but I could relate because I often ran into exactly the same problems that he did. Meanwhile other reviewers usually either glossed over this stuff or just ignored it completely, lest they offend the vendor or Microsoft or whoever. This gave unsuspecting users the impression that installing and running this stuff was a piece of cake, when in fact it could be a real nightmare.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#59

Post by dylan604 »

da02 wrote: post #55
dylan604 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently found myself in Boston needing computer stuff, and wound up at Micro Center in Cambridge. It was interesting in that they had pictures of the computing legends. Your list reminded me of that, as most of your list was represented in these portraits.

What were the prices like? Anything interesting for sale there that is not found in other stores?

Nothing to make it any different from any other computer store, except for one thing. It was 5 minutes away from me. I was able to run in, find the needed thing, and then go back to doing what was needed. Didn't need to wait for UPS to show up the next day. I was very thankful that MicroCenter has not been forced to close from websites like most of the other brick&mortar stores have had to do.

Re: BYTE Magazine

#60

Post by jim_lawless »

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 issues they're in, but a couple of other memorable articles include a fast CRC32 calculation which introduced the table-lookup to speed up the process that quickly became the norm.

The other article that I really enjoyed was the Circuit Cellar article where Steve Ciarcia had locked himself out of his house with brownies baking in the oven. He was going to have to break in to his burglar-proof house before the brownies began to burn and his high-tech smoke-detection system would automatically call the fire department. If I remember right, there's a picture of Steve in soldier gear, complete with a bandolier with IC chips where bullets would normally have appeared.

It was a great magazine.

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