I remember how I read about functional programming languages for the first time in the August 1985 Byte issue, which I bought as a teenager because it featured a technical rundown of the new Amiga computer. For me in the early 80'e, Byte was a cornucopia of interesting stuff, much like Hacker News today.
(For example there was a whole issue in 1981 on Smalltalk-80, with an introduction by Adele Goldberg, where the Xerox Palo Alto people from the Smalltalk-80 team explain the implementation, the VM etc.)
Something that fascinated me back in the day (and something that I have not seen mentioned, whenever BYTE comes up here), when I as a teenager read BYTE (initially borrowed from the local Danish municipal library) was the transcripts from BIX [1]. It offered a tantalising view into the world of BBS (and what would come later through Usenet etc), before such things were widely accessible.
Usenet and the pro-Internet/ARPANET in general was more of a parallel Unix-centric universe than something that came later.
BIX, like Compuserve/Delphi/etc., was one of the big commercial services--though possibly more hacker-oriented than some--which was also somewhat separate from the TRS-80 in the bedroom hobbyist BBSs (though some of the PC-based BBSs also became fairly large and commercial latterly).
The single best inspiration for me to become a 'hacker' of sorts was BYTE.
Back in the DOS5/Win3.11 days there was an article about modifying command.com & io.sys so that you could customize the files that were used to load the system.
config.sys & autoexec.bat became (on my system) ipl.sys & ipl.bat (Inital Program Load)
It made the system immune to any virus* [except TSRs] (keeping a dummy config.sys & autoexec.bat let me see programs that tried to modify those files, and generally scored a TONNE of cool points in my mind. It also taught me about "security through obscurity".
This taught me that _MY_ hardware was mine to modify how I wanted. It gave me an incredible sense of power, and capability.
The computer viruses that were the worst in those days were the boot sector viruses. Stoned Empire Monkey and the like. They were so hard to remove from machines and spread like wildfire in computer labs.
I loved Jerry Pournelle’s “Chaos Manor” columns, and Steve Ciarcia’s “Circuit Cellar” — it was nice to have both software and hardware represented. The articles on the Inmos Transputer were fascinating, and sparked my interest in parallel and distributed computing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
Jerry Pournelle's column was very entertaining and well written, but it taught me an important lesson. I knew something about the computers of the day (perhaps more than Pournelle), and I often found him giving bizarre, if not incorrect, advice (and sometimes, when he had a problem, he would just call his bud Bill Gates). Reading the column, it was clear he was the expert, even when he was not. So I learned that it is important to distinguish between good writing as entertainment, and good writing as expertise.
"Just how ridiculous IS the idea of a computer deciding to take over the world and be
its dictator?
Upon hearing this question, most people
who are not computer oriented will laugh
and say "That's only in science fiction
stories." They will be much more likely to
complain about "becoming a number," with
everyone from the grocery store to the government wanting their number instead of
their name.
Those who are more familiar with computers will laugh off the concept and charge it
to paranoia due to ignorance. "A computer
is little more than a lot of wires conducting
currents here and there," they will say. "Besides, if it-gets uppity you can always pull
the plug."
However, that group of people who are
both computer knowledgeable and fans of
the art form known as science fiction, but
more properly called speculative fiction,
might ask "Can you always pull the plug?
Could a computer really seize the reins of
government? And if so, how ?"
In trying to answer these last questions,
let us first speculate on the capabilities the
computer itself would have to have. "
The scans from here differ from the ones on the Internet Archive. These are lower quality (Marks on pages, yellower, compression artifacts, bleed through, inconsistant page sizes) but as a result are much smaller. They are watermarked on each page. This archive also seems more complete than the IA one.
The site (worldradiohistory.com) was just featured on the front page yesterday with TAB books, and is an all around amazing resource.
I have scraped hundreds now of hobbyist electronics magazines going back roughly 100 years.
From time to time, when offline, I'll pull up these old electronics hobbyist magazines that I've culled and skim through them. Occasionally an old circuit like a theremin will catch my eye and I'll make a note of which issue I found it in in a file that I keep.
Otherwise I think I like suffusing myself in the periodicals of those earlier decades (I think the 70's are one of my favorites).
It is rather telling how prevalent the ads are though that show men being browbeaten by wives or bosses — these men are encouraged then to take some kind of correspondence course in electronics to make the big bucks and be their own boss! Apparently selling a product that trades on a reader's feelings of inadequacy has always been a reliable business plan.
Also the ones on world radio history are searchable. They have a search feature on their website to search all their documents as they have all been OCR'ed.
Interesting juxtaposition to today, I bought Byte MOSTLY for the ads. The computer scene was changing so fast in the 80's that the ads were interesting and wanted.
It's interesting to recognise that the ads in these magazines were something many of us positively appreciated. Yet today, we go out of our way to try and suppress ads all over the web.
I guess this is because the advertising industry is no longer satisfied with providing ads related to the content of a publication, in places where people deliberately seek them out because they're interested. Back then, the ad industry could have made a plausible claim that it was providing a useful and valued service to readers.
Yeah. The ads had a different feel, because things were moving so fast. The ads (often) were telling you something new was available, or something improved was available, or something was less expensive. They (often) weren't just trying to manipulate you into buying the same old stuff that you didn't need.
I remember looking through the latest issue, and at least once or twice an issue thinking "Huh, I never even thought of trying to have a computer do that." Issue after issue, month after month, there was brand new stuff that exceeded what I thought computers could do. I read the ads to learn what was happening.
In the mid 90s to early 00s, I loved looking at the ads in the Sunday newspaper from computer stores, and month by month you could see prices coming down for all components, if not week by week.
The pace was so torrid. They stopped even advertising the RAM for my ~3 year old Pentium 100 I had with 8MB of RAM. I was expecting to pay hundreds of dollars for an upgrade, but in the end an upgrade to 72MB was only about $70.
I actually wondered about this on Twitter recently[1]. Do you remember caring about/recognizing the aesthetics of some of these ads at the time, or is that more of a modern perspective?
Reading the ads, it's remarkable how many computer manufacturers there were. Most of them look like pretty small companies too, effectively showing how low the barrier to entry was to start a computer company. Shouldn't it be possible today, too? Why do we have so few manufacturers?
I think about how the "computing world" has changed over the last 40 years. When I was a kid, everything was new. Every couple months a new type of computer, CPU or peripheral was released: Commodore 64, inexpensive floppy drive, affordable 4-color plotter, (this crazy thing called) a mouse, etc. BYTE captured the crazy zeitgeist of the age. The content was a crazy mix of how-to articles and what-to-buy product reviews (and the 1/9 page ads in the back.) The covers by Tinny were always witty and well executed. You can't judge a book by it's cover, but Tinny covers definitely grabbed your attention. When they replaced his covers with pictures of products it was definitely an indication times were changing.
The first BYTE issue I remember was the one with the Star Trek cover (December 77) -- I had just recently seen a Spock ASCII art print out at the local academic computing center and burned most of my DEC-10 time playing the Star Trek game online. TREK and computing and BYTE magazine were all linked in my mind. We were living in the future, no doubt about it...
I recall one of the computing magazines of that era, possibly the Dec 77 issue of BYTE you mentioned, published the entire code in BASIC for a space-oriented game. Inputs were simple letter or letter+number commands and outputs were an ASCII drawing of a sector of outer space (complete with * for stars). You would shoot at an alien then skip to another sector before getting counterattacked.
My high school buddies and I desperately wanted to play this game but ... none of us had a computer! So, sitting in the cafeteria at lunch/breaks in our bell bottom pants, we walked thru the code line by line recording the values of variables with pencil on paper. This was when BASIC only allowed 1 or 2 character variable names and only had GOSUBs instead of proper functions. It was slow going at first but we eventually got to understand what sections of the code was doing and could replace line by line with, oh, its doing this again.
I'll have to look for that Dec 77 BYTE so see it that was the magazine. I didn't know it at the time but it was probably very formative for my future IT career.
Not just "everything was new" but also "everything was better" (well.. except the stuff that wasn't and failed horribly soon after launch). You bought a computer, and (if you had a money) you bought a new one after a few years and the change in performance, graphics etc. was HUGE. Kilobytes of ram went to megabytes, cga, ega, vga all brought huge improvements, then came many 3d variants, storage went from floppies, to a few megabytes to gigabytes.
And now? Have a 5 year old mid-range computer? Buy some ram, and you get basically the same specs as the new ones, but with a slightly worse CPU. Everything (except the newest games) still works, and the biggest resource hog (especially ram) is the browser, which still shows sites with same amount of info as it did in 1990s, but somehow that autoplaying video ad needs a few more gigabytes of ram.
It's still great for my wallet... but I haven't opened a computer magazine (or well.. a youtube clip in modern time) and said "damn, I want this!" in quite a while now (at least not regarding computers).
The same site has a complete archive of "Ham Radio" magazine.
Wayne Green was the publisher of Byte magazine, which he started when he recognized hobby computing that the hams that read his "73" magazine were doing.
I thought it was interesting that the first edition of Byte had an article about hobby computing with a LSI-11, which is a PDP-11 variant.
Last week while on a very long (18+ hour) drive I heard either a podcast or a radio ad for a teeth alignment company and at the end it mentioned their web address: byte.com. They even spelled it out. I was curious and I just looked and it does look like they bought the domain last year. Kind of weird and sad.
Computer magazine/book art from the 70s and 80s is almost an artistic style of its own. I love browsing old issues of Byte, COMPUTE!'s Gazette etc. just to see the imaginative graphical work.
I don't know why but the aesthetics kind of reminds of the soviet space program propaganda posters. Probably because they are of the same time period but not sure.
On page 8 of magazine [0] (from 1977) they are talking about computers taking over the world. The same things people are still talking about still. There are also stories about no-code being the end of programmer jobs etc. The only thing that's not in there is blockchain.
Backpropagation was popularised and named in 1986 (though it was likely a rediscovery, with prior art going back to the 60's), so neural nets got a new wave of interest around then coinciding with home computers fast enough to at least achieve mildly interesting results.
Yeah, AI is a perennial topic and neural nets are an old school approach. When I was in school (not really that long ago) the NN textbook taught as an old fashioned approach that never produced good results, and the professor (from the EE department) would occasionally remark that we are seeing a resurgence of this technique and you never know, it could become popular again. I think at that point it already producing impressive results, but none of us were fully aware of where it was going.
Does anyone know of a similar archive for Personal Computer World which was (sort of) the UK equivalent to Byte? The Internet Archive has a quite a few but is also missing a lot too.
I used to buy PCW religiously every month, starting with the 1st issue which had the NASCOM-1 (kit computer) on the cover, which was my first computer.
I'm not sure you can really compare PCW to BYTE. From what I recall PCW didn't really get into the more abstract computing topics that BYTE did - it was more more focused on products.
Another good magazine from same era was Dr. Dobb's Journal.
Shame that all these geeky magazines have disappeared.
It's interesting watching some of the old c.1980 BBC computer education TV shows that have been uploaded to YouTube. It's funny watching them trying to earnestly explain to TV viewers the difference between a 16-bit computer with a 16-bit bus vs one with an 8-bit bus, etc... I guess back then there was a thought that the general public would be brought up to speed on the nuances of such things!
At least a few scans exist by now.. but very few, compared to American magazines. It could be that scanning initiatives were punched on quickly by the (at that time) passive owners. I used to look everywhere for scans, but could only find one or two, or just an article extracted from an issue. I had at that time thrown out all my years of physical magazines because of absolutely no space to keep them. I used to have all of them from issue 1 until the magazine degraded into the typical "application reviews only" mode, as happened to nearly all of the magazines (Byte included).
Update: That site (see other comment) has quite a few more issues up than when I last checked. That's good to see.
These are hilarious and written in a very tongue-in-cheek manner.
Some favourite quotes:
"XMLDeveloper seeks validation"
"Hang on a minute, this is a 32-bit development environment. What will I do with all my 16-bit code?" "Having seen your code, dump it. However, with Visual C++ 2.0 and MFC, most developers can just recompile"
I work in the health tech space and the last 1994 article talks about how "Computerized Patient Records" might revolutionize the field.
"Plans call for an increase in storage capacity to 30 or 60 GB (supporting one to two months of patient image data) and an increase in the number of supporting workstations from three in the radiology department to 10 or 15 stations distributed throughout the hospital."
I finally made an account to post this comment. But, I love BYTE magazine! It was such an amazing resource during it's time. I first dug into them for a project I've been working on (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m7vDhscGzU), and then I found myself looking at more. It truly captured something special. I wonder if there's anything that comes close these days.
If you spend the time to read through these older ones, you'll see they were doing something special. They'd often share programs and circuits in the magazine that others could recreate at home. I wonder how difficult it was to learn about computers, we have so many resources these days.
>They'd often share programs and circuits in the magazine that others could recreate at home.
Yes. (Steve) Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, for instance, was very popular. I used to read that column sometimes, even though I had no hardware or electronics background. :)
[+] [-] phoyd|3 years ago|reply
(For example there was a whole issue in 1981 on Smalltalk-80, with an introduction by Adele Goldberg, where the Xerox Palo Alto people from the Smalltalk-80 team explain the implementation, the VM etc.)
https://vintageapple.org/byte/ has a (complete?) archive, albeit with slightly lower resolution scans.
[+] [-] bouvin|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Information_Exchange
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
BIX, like Compuserve/Delphi/etc., was one of the big commercial services--though possibly more hacker-oriented than some--which was also somewhat separate from the TRS-80 in the bedroom hobbyist BBSs (though some of the PC-based BBSs also became fairly large and commercial latterly).
[+] [-] UI_at_80x24|3 years ago|reply
Back in the DOS5/Win3.11 days there was an article about modifying command.com & io.sys so that you could customize the files that were used to load the system.
config.sys & autoexec.bat became (on my system) ipl.sys & ipl.bat (Inital Program Load)
It made the system immune to any virus* [except TSRs] (keeping a dummy config.sys & autoexec.bat let me see programs that tried to modify those files, and generally scored a TONNE of cool points in my mind. It also taught me about "security through obscurity".
This taught me that _MY_ hardware was mine to modify how I wanted. It gave me an incredible sense of power, and capability.
* = well at the time I thought it did. =)
[+] [-] jandrese|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amacbride|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fastaguy88|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dark-star|3 years ago|reply
Some are not in that collection yet, so if you search for "BYTE magazine" you might find some more.
Also check out the collection of other computer magazines https://archive.org/details/computermagazines
Even more magazines here: https://archive.org/details/additional_collections https://archive.org/details/magazine_rack
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
>Could a Computer Take Over?
>Ed Rush, 1977
"Just how ridiculous IS the idea of a computer deciding to take over the world and be its dictator? Upon hearing this question, most people who are not computer oriented will laugh and say "That's only in science fiction stories." They will be much more likely to complain about "becoming a number," with everyone from the grocery store to the government wanting their number instead of their name.
Those who are more familiar with computers will laugh off the concept and charge it to paranoia due to ignorance. "A computer is little more than a lot of wires conducting currents here and there," they will say. "Besides, if it-gets uppity you can always pull the plug."
However, that group of people who are both computer knowledgeable and fans of the art form known as science fiction, but more properly called speculative fiction, might ask "Can you always pull the plug? Could a computer really seize the reins of government? And if so, how ?" In trying to answer these last questions, let us first speculate on the capabilities the computer itself would have to have. "
[+] [-] richardjam73|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|3 years ago|reply
I have scraped hundreds now of hobbyist electronics magazines going back roughly 100 years.
From time to time, when offline, I'll pull up these old electronics hobbyist magazines that I've culled and skim through them. Occasionally an old circuit like a theremin will catch my eye and I'll make a note of which issue I found it in in a file that I keep.
Otherwise I think I like suffusing myself in the periodicals of those earlier decades (I think the 70's are one of my favorites).
It is rather telling how prevalent the ads are though that show men being browbeaten by wives or bosses — these men are encouraged then to take some kind of correspondence course in electronics to make the big bucks and be their own boss! Apparently selling a product that trades on a reader's feelings of inadequacy has always been a reliable business plan.
[+] [-] gompertz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brk|3 years ago|reply
I remember ordering computer parts over the phone, delivered COD, because I was 12, and didn't have a credit card or a checking account.
[+] [-] jfk13|3 years ago|reply
I guess this is because the advertising industry is no longer satisfied with providing ads related to the content of a publication, in places where people deliberately seek them out because they're interested. Back then, the ad industry could have made a plausible claim that it was providing a useful and valued service to readers.
That'd be a tough claim to support today.
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|3 years ago|reply
I remember looking through the latest issue, and at least once or twice an issue thinking "Huh, I never even thought of trying to have a computer do that." Issue after issue, month after month, there was brand new stuff that exceeded what I thought computers could do. I read the ads to learn what was happening.
[+] [-] greenbit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevstev|3 years ago|reply
The pace was so torrid. They stopped even advertising the RAM for my ~3 year old Pentium 100 I had with 8MB of RAM. I was expecting to pay hundreds of dollars for an upgrade, but in the end an upgrade to 72MB was only about $70.
[+] [-] jonasmerlin|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://twitter.com/jonasmerlin1/status/1582278969671397377
[+] [-] moorg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fatnoah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingosity|3 years ago|reply
The first BYTE issue I remember was the one with the Star Trek cover (December 77) -- I had just recently seen a Spock ASCII art print out at the local academic computing center and burned most of my DEC-10 time playing the Star Trek game online. TREK and computing and BYTE magazine were all linked in my mind. We were living in the future, no doubt about it...
[+] [-] WeAddValue|3 years ago|reply
My high school buddies and I desperately wanted to play this game but ... none of us had a computer! So, sitting in the cafeteria at lunch/breaks in our bell bottom pants, we walked thru the code line by line recording the values of variables with pencil on paper. This was when BASIC only allowed 1 or 2 character variable names and only had GOSUBs instead of proper functions. It was slow going at first but we eventually got to understand what sections of the code was doing and could replace line by line with, oh, its doing this again.
I'll have to look for that Dec 77 BYTE so see it that was the magazine. I didn't know it at the time but it was probably very formative for my future IT career.
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|3 years ago|reply
And now? Have a 5 year old mid-range computer? Buy some ram, and you get basically the same specs as the new ones, but with a slightly worse CPU. Everything (except the newest games) still works, and the biggest resource hog (especially ram) is the browser, which still shows sites with same amount of info as it did in 1990s, but somehow that autoplaying video ad needs a few more gigabytes of ram.
It's still great for my wallet... but I haven't opened a computer magazine (or well.. a youtube clip in modern time) and said "damn, I want this!" in quite a while now (at least not regarding computers).
[+] [-] loph|3 years ago|reply
Wayne Green was the publisher of Byte magazine, which he started when he recognized hobby computing that the hams that read his "73" magazine were doing.
I thought it was interesting that the first edition of Byte had an article about hobby computing with a LSI-11, which is a PDP-11 variant.
[+] [-] dugmartin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daneel_w|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nielsbot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoingIsLearning|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tluyben2|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/Best-of-Byte-1977...
[+] [-] winstonprivacy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artie_effim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timbit42|3 years ago|reply
Source: https://issuu.com/zetmoon/docs/compute_gazette_issue_79_1990...
[+] [-] vidarh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uxp100|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dark-star|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klelatti|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|3 years ago|reply
Also: https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PC...
[+] [-] HarHarVeryFunny|3 years ago|reply
I'm not sure you can really compare PCW to BYTE. From what I recall PCW didn't really get into the more abstract computing topics that BYTE did - it was more more focused on products.
Another good magazine from same era was Dr. Dobb's Journal.
Shame that all these geeky magazines have disappeared.
It's interesting watching some of the old c.1980 BBC computer education TV shows that have been uploaded to YouTube. It's funny watching them trying to earnestly explain to TV viewers the difference between a 16-bit computer with a 16-bit bus vs one with an 8-bit bus, etc... I guess back then there was a thought that the general public would be brought up to speed on the nuances of such things!
[+] [-] Tor3|3 years ago|reply
Update: That site (see other comment) has quite a few more issues up than when I last checked. That's good to see.
[+] [-] nanna|3 years ago|reply
https://gizmonaut.net/exe/#scans
[+] [-] kichimi|3 years ago|reply
Some favourite quotes:
"XMLDeveloper seeks validation"
"Hang on a minute, this is a 32-bit development environment. What will I do with all my 16-bit code?" "Having seen your code, dump it. However, with Visual C++ 2.0 and MFC, most developers can just recompile"
[+] [-] asplake|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsllc|3 years ago|reply
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/90s/1991/Byte-199... (page 309)
[+] [-] phoyd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] y-curious|3 years ago|reply
"Plans call for an increase in storage capacity to 30 or 60 GB (supporting one to two months of patient image data) and an increase in the number of supporting workstations from three in the radiology department to 10 or 15 stations distributed throughout the hospital."
How very nostalgic. Thank you for posting.
[+] [-] gstrike|3 years ago|reply
If you spend the time to read through these older ones, you'll see they were doing something special. They'd often share programs and circuits in the magazine that others could recreate at home. I wonder how difficult it was to learn about computers, we have so many resources these days.
[+] [-] vram22|3 years ago|reply
Yes. (Steve) Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, for instance, was very popular. I used to read that column sometimes, even though I had no hardware or electronics background. :)