alt Hacker NewsArchive of Byte magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
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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 every page. It's interesting to look back at those ads from today but it's also a jarring experience to some extent.
Also make sure to read the letters to editor part! Always fun
Byte was great. For years it was the highlight of my month. And I thought the cover art was amazing. The Smalltalk hot air balloon logo came from the cover of the August 1981 issue, which was devoted entirely to Smalltalk.
Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February:
I had from around 1982 to 1990, and a random scattering of older issues.
All lost during a move from one city to another - except for one Byte book: Threaded Interpreted Languages.
https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...
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 more or less feel what's about to happen.
So someone else saw this comment, then? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47805825
I still have a physical copy. I'll ship them (700 kg?) to you if you pay the cost. Email in profile.
I also have lots of the actual machines and parts, especially Apple, Commodore. Ship them too?
I've downloaded the entire thing a while back for nostalgia sake. And I am (of course) the proud owner of a physical copy of the "Smalltalk" issue :-) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
The two characterizations of people in the introduction are timeless?
> A person with a primary interest in software will oftentimes be the person who purchases a kit computer because the kit minimizes the amount of hardware knowledge the person is required to have.
That’s how I came into my first computer - built from a kit in 7th grade.
And, yeah, I understand more about hardware than I did back then, but it’s all about the software to me still… okay, maybe some electronics and mechanics, too.
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!
I think this is the full archive: https://vintageapple.org/byte/
It was my favourite magazine. The only way I could access it was by going to the US Information Services Library attached to their consulates.
I learned a tremendous deal from it and I will forever be grateful.
vintageapple.org also has a really great collection of scans fwiw
Chaos Manor always seemed like this mystical place to me as a kid. Limitless budget and always messing with hardware and software, whether necessary or not :-)
I started reading Byte when I had no way to understand what it was talking about. There were technical terms that I simply had no reference for. What the heck is an assembler?
I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.
Jerry Pournelle's column alone was worth the price of admission.
It’s hard to beat this interface:
Here's an index of sorts. I couldn't find anything better.
Holy cow. Thank you, JP. I enjoyed your high-level writing while monkeying on your new-fangled machines.
From these comments, what does the discussion suggest about Byte magazine’s role in the early computing community?
Has anyone archived the foreign language editions?
As a young hacker in the 70's and 80's, magazines were my primary source of docs. I lived in a remote community where such technology was really, really foreign at first. My relatives lived in other parts of the state, some very remote, some in the city. I had a HAM-/CB-enthusiastic hacker uncle I'd regularly visit in one end of the state (outback) and plenty of relatives in the major city and countryside where I lived, so my docs-collecting mission during a routine adventuring between these family areas went something like this:
1. If in the city/small town: go to the library, read latest BYTE magazine, Radio Electronics, a few other electronics (then computer-) magazines, and so on[1]. Then, browse back issues - my library had them all in the first few years - find code that I might adapt to my machine, copy notes or - remember it - for when I got home later. I usually didn't check anything out because I never, ever gave back BYTE magazines I loaned from the library, just because I never knew when I'd be back (or that was my excuse). So, the library was just for reference/note-taking. This actually made going on those boring family visits quite palatable.
2. If in the city: Go to every newsagent/magazine dealer in my route, read every single tech magazine - BYTE, Dr. Dobbs Journal, ZAP, etc. as quickly as possible, before being asked to leave. Buy something if possible, but only if a review finds something interesting. Usually, leave with a BYTE, at least. If I could afford it, always with a DDJ too. Repeat at every newsagent in the city.
3. If I am in the country, at Uncle Hacker-Shacks: In between hacking on his radios and amplifiers, burning my fingers on some new Fun Way Into Electronics Dick Smith kits, and with those toasty digits browsing his extensive magazine collection, including every BYTE issue since the beginning (it's the 70's/80's, I'm a teen) .. do chores (lawns/wood-chopping/fishing/cleaning/reading-to-little-kids) and save coins for photocopying .. take uncles magazines to get photocopies of interesting things, create my own ring-binder full of such things to take back home with me. Somehow, my uncle always had really great magazines and books and things, way, way out there beyond the dusty horizon... and I'd go home after the holidays, with copies of the best of it.
Usually BYTE magazine articles for systems (Apple/C64/etc.) similar enough to mine (Oric-1) to have some use for me, later, when I got back home to my computer. During those long bus, car, train, plane rides, I'd often spend more time reading and re-reading the listings, than I did typing it in when I finally got home.
BYTE was huge to me, it was my first real foray into cross-platform/multi-discipline software development, I literally had no choice but to port things to the Oric-1, if I wanted to do anything with it. I really wish I still had those old ring-binders, it'd be a blast to see my old notes and printouts (had the Oric printer for such things, it was my long-term archive, which I've long-since lost..)
The skills I gained, basically from 8 years old to 18 years old, by reading these magazines - truly informed an important part of my professional toolbox, which have stuck with me for years of course, since this was an era where a significant part of computing technology was being worked out.
I really wonder how kids these days get access to the evolutionary, real-time nature of the fields they're interested in. I guess MAKE filled that hole for a while.
EDIT: Just wanted to say, Issue #1 of BYTE is really worth a read .. "Assembling your own Assembler", and "Recycling used IC's" is so resonant with my Sunday-afternoon musings about the perils of AI and ML on my teenagers' mindset .. seems like someone else is gonna get some burned fingers, soon enough ..
[1] - (I think I read my first 2600 this way also...)
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 started building/rebuilding my mini-tower every few months.
While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.