

BYTE, the most beloved computer-magazine brand of all, is coming back. - technologizer
http://technologizer.com/2010/12/22/good-grief-byte-is-coming-back/

======
cpr
The back story of Byte (if anyone cares) is that Carl Helmers, who was working
at Intermetrics at Fresh Pond in Cambridge, MA at the time (1973? 74?--forget
details at this late date), was publishing a little samizdat Intel 4004/8008
hobbyist newsletter on the side (mimeographed, etc.).

I was working at Intermetrics (mostly a government compiler house at the time)
as a consultant on a competitor language to ADA, as a sophomore in college.
Dan Fylstra, a friend from San Diego high school days, and the future founder
of VisiCorp (publisher of VisiCalc), was also working there, and we were both
interested in what Carl was doing.

Somehow, he dragged us both into talking to Wayne Green, then the somewhat
eccentric publisher of the most popular ham radio magazine, up in
Peterborough, NH, and we three got Byte off the group with Wayne's help. (Carl
was the main editor, and I was just a part-time editor/writer.)

As much as I enjoyed the work, I was still in school full-time, and also
working more than full-time at Intermetrics (hey, it was fun work and paid
well), so I had to drop out later that fall. Not sure what happened to Dan's
involvement, but I think he also was then at Harvard Business School after
undergrad at MIT (and soon thereafter starting VisiCorp), and thus pretty
short on time.

The very early Bytes were completely "golly, gee whiz, look what you can do
with this thing!" and more like Carl's newsletter--very amateur. I guess it
eventually got a lot more professional, but I never really kept up with it.

(Edit: Hunh, looking at some of these scans, I managed to stay on the masthead
as an associate for quite some time after I dropped off the map.)

------
comatose_kid
All Byte fans (and 20-somethings that have never heard of Byte) - some guy is
scanning issues to pdf here:

<http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/167235-byte-magazine/>

Get them. Read them. You're welcome :)

~~~
aw3c2
Isn't it sad how this is absolutely not legal? I wish copyrights would expire
as quickly as their original intent would justify. Maybe 5-10 years.

~~~
rbanffy
The original copyright holders would probably just state that their intent has
always been for them to last forever.

What BYTE would need is a "OK. You sat on this copyrighted material for very
long. It's now time for this knowledge to be available again" mechanism that
would prevent abandoned works from remaining abandoned.

------
jhrobert
I am french. At the time reading Byte was basically like having the Internet
today, suddenly amazing things were "available". The magazine was not easy to
find in France in the early 80's. I read all the back issues I could find.

Nothing is perfect. I blame the (in)famous 1990 article "Is Unix dead?" for
keeping me away from Unix for years.

------
thristian
The article includes a picture of the December 1975 cover issue:

[http://technologizer.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/bytecover.j...](http://technologizer.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/bytecover.jpg)

The first listed article is "What is a Character"; it amuses me that thirty-
five years later, with the invention of Unicode, you could still fill a few
pages with an article under that headline.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Case in point: <http://diveintopython3.org/strings.html>

------
julian37
The story of what happened to BYTE in 1998, from Jerry Pournelle's point of
view:

<http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/fiasco.html>

And from the perspective of Tom R. Halfhill, BYTE Magazine senior editor:

<http://www.halfhill.com/bytefaq.html>

------
michael_dorfman
I loved BYTE, but I could lose the hyperbole: _What’s the most-loved computer
magazine of all time? There’s really only one contender: BYTE,_

Creative Computing, Kilobaud, and Dr Dobb's Journal are all strong contenders,
in my book.

~~~
code_duck
Amiga World? It's the only one I've ever actually had a subscription to.

~~~
protomyth
Antic was the Atari camp's equivalent. It amazes me how many programs I typed
from magazine listings.

------
jaskerr
I loved BYTE, back in the day. At one point, I lugged around ten years' worth
of back issues, before giving them to the local library.

I'm not very hopeful for the new edition. From the press release: the new BYTE
"will serve as the professional’s guide to consumer technology, providing
news, analysis, reviews, and insight across the media gamut."

Not reaching very high, are they? This doesn't sound like the publication that
gave us in-depth articles on every bus type from S-100 on, languages such as
Forth and Smalltalk, and Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar ...

------
shortformblog
When I was twelve years old, I read these magazines cover to cover at my local
library (even the really old ones), and ESPECIALLY loved Jerry Pournelle's
"Chaos Manor" columns in the back. To see its name being mentioned again warms
my heart, even if Pournelle isn't involved.

~~~
kazuya
When I was 12, I was a regular reader of _bit_ magazine.

No, not a joke. It was a Japanese magazine similar to BYTE in spirit, but more
of CS taste. I remember articles about concurrent Prolog, machine translation
using pivot representations, distributed systems etc.

I stopped reading it when I got to the university, where I was able to be up-
to-date with such kind of information without it.

And then, its publishing ceased in 2001.

------
imaginator
I loved Byte.

As a kid growing up in South Africa, Byte was my connection to the outside
world. International sanctions made computers incredibly expensive. Byte gave
me hope that if I could just get abroad...

I would sit for hours in the local library and read 6 month old issues and
live in hope that I would one day be able to play with the machines mentioned
in there.

------
kentbrew
It won't be the same without Chaos Manor. :(

~~~
comatose_kid
Here's a silly send-up of his writing style:
<http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/95q1/jpreviews.html>

------
tsotha
Still won't be good unless they bring back _Ciarcia's Circuit Celler_ as a
regular feature.

~~~
joe_bleau
You know that he's been doing his own magazine, Circuit Cellar Ink, right? (I
think it recently hooked up with Elektor, at least in the US market.) Worth
checking into.

~~~
tsotha
Yeah, actually. He has a website too.

------
efutch
As a CS student in Guatemala in the 80s, Byte was like news from the cutting
edge of technology. We used to get like 5-10 copies for the only store that
sold them, and they went fast. I had to literally keep up with their shipping
schedule in order to get my copy.

I've missed the deep technical articles, and fighting with my PC Magazine-
reading friends about the superiority of our magazine.

Just recently, I was wrestling with the idea of discarding my old Byte
magazines, but I really couldn't throw them away, some of the articles are
still very good to read. I still have the Byte CD-ROM, wonder if it would
still work?

~~~
efutch
Oh yeah, and I have a Tinney signed print of the robot coming out of the
eggshell. I also have the magazine.

------
blue1
I hope this is not the usual resurrected brand disappointment, Amiga-like.

~~~
steveklabnik
Or Atari. Or Commodore. :/

~~~
rbanffy
Be fair - that new C-64-named PC looks like a C64.

------
turbodog
Two words, young folk: "Cover painting"
<http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/169>

------
mtkd
Crash magazine will always be my most beloved.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_%28magazine%29>

------
timthorn
The announcement makes it sound as if the magazine isn't coming back - just a
relaunched website. Anyone know if this is the case? I'm one of those people
who likes to have a physical magazine to flick through.

I paid for a three year Byte subscription with my first pay cheque and got two
issues before the magazine folded, so am keen to get back to it!

------
JoeAltmaier
I think I still have the 1st two years' edition packed up in a box in the
shed...moved from home, to college, thru 3 apartments, then 3 houses, and now
in my shed. Never opened the boxes, but they survived many, many cleanouts.
Don't really know why.

------
norswap
I don't want to break anyone's hopes but this doesn't really sounds good to me
:

"[BYTE] will serve as the professional’s guide to consumer technology,
providing news, analysis, reviews, and insight across the media gamut"

------
stretchwithme
Loved Byte. What a dense collection of enjoyable articles every month. I'd
subscribe and I don't get any paper magazines any more.

I don't understand the business case for gutting this fine publication.

------
Imagenuity
I hope they are able to bring back their archive of stories back to the
beginning of the magazine. That is a tremendous amount of information
documenting the beginning of the personal computer era.

------
patrickaljord
Never heard of it.

~~~
Zev
Its from the mid '70's and stopped publishing in the late 90's. I suppose that
you'd have to either be slightly old (late 20's) or a computer history geek to
know about it. I'm the latter -- they stopped publishing when I was 9 (!)
years old

~~~
mindcrime
Heh, it's always funny to hear youngsters talk about what's "old" to them. And
even funnier, is that pretty much every group has an older group looking back
and going "you kids don't know what old is yet, now get the hell off my lawn."

Late 20's is young as shit to me.... now you 60+ year old fossils who might be
hanging around can go write some COBOL or whatever it is you do...
<tongue_firmly_in_cheek />

------
arjn
Yay!!!

