
Byte Magazine – LISP (1979) - tosh
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1979-08
======
rayiner
I’m always a little sad that I missed the golden age of computing. I read my
first Byte Magazine in the mid 1990s, a couple of years before they stopped
publishing. Even then there was a ton of substance about the upcoming Windows
95 release, various detours in OS design that never panned out like Taligent,
and how RISC was going to take over the world. It’s rare to read articles of
that depth anymore, even on the web much less in published media.

~~~
aj7
Personally, I think there was nothing golden-age about that time. I stuck with
Physics. Monthly breakthroughs, yes. The giants whose shoulders we stand on,
walking the earth, yes. But opportunities and platforms were miniscule
compared to now. IBM’ers sneered at everyone else. This is the golden age of
computing.

~~~
rayiner
> This is the golden age of computing.

I disagree. In 1995, I picked up an issue of BYTE and marveled at the coverage
of microkernel operating systems and RISC processors. New and exciting things
were on the horizon! Now, I see only decadence. Hardware has stagnated for a
decade. Software has less functionality while using exponentially more
resources. Compare the Windows 10 Settings app to the Control Panel, which
first debuted with Windows 95. Or the OneNote UWP app, which is now
discontinued, to previous versions of OneNote. Key functionalities have gotten
worse. Chrome's PDF handling is so awful that I spent weeks searching for a
PDF viewer that's as good as Acrobat 10. To my shock everything was markedly
worse--slower, less reliable searching, etc. I finally installed PDF XChange
Editor and it was like a breath of fresh air. Not only does it search PDFs
correctly, but it highlights the results and shows indicators of hits on the
scrollbar! (Apps these days don't even _have_ scrollbars.)

Apple has given up on the Mac, and now it only gets iOS hand-me-downs. One of
my great regrets is that I didn't get get my first Mac until 2007, and missed
out on a big part of the Mac's heyday. I remember when each new release of OS
X came out, I'd carefully read John Sircusa's intensive review on Ars
Technica. The PDF imaging model in OS X 10.0, hardware accelerated compositing
in 10.2, fine-grained locking in 10.4. That was 15 years ago! Kids who were
born then are stealing alcohol from their parents' liquor cabinets now and the
only cool thing to happen to OS X in their lifetime is APFS.

There are highlights, no doubt. Rust is a breakthrough. Apple's Ax processors
bring desktop computing power into impossibly small form-factors. Pervasive
mobile broadband has enabled a lot of new applications. (But the best software
stack for leveraging that capability is a direct descendant of NeXTSTEP.) But
it's few and far between now.

~~~
coliveira
There is a very simple reason for that, which I learned when I was in college:
the end of Moore's law. During the 80s and 90s Moore's law was in full force,
and every few months hardware doubled in speed and halved in price. This was
the heyday of computing! With the end of Moore's law we won't see that
happening again anytime soon, the future is to do incremental improvements in
computer architectures, unless we find something fundamental to fuel the next
generation of computing.

~~~
nnq
You're gonna get the "lots of progress in hardware part" back soon, even
without Moore's law :|

...but you're likely _not_ going to like it: will be a rain of exotic
heterogeneous computing platforms first, with various ML/AI-accelerators all
tailored to specific areas, at first used in IoT and mobile, then everywhere
else. Thinks like NN-accelerators you now see in some mobile chips and
"secondary chips" like T2s and what ever will become the dominant sources of
computing power in systems, dwarfing the general-porpose-and-portable CPUs.
And all software interacting with these will stop being portable in the way we
know it, and as a result of network effects apps will no longer be portable
across the many OS-flavours we'll have.

Second wave will be when ML gets to the point where it is heavily used to
_design_ hardware: you'll have an explosion of hardware architectures with
non-(human-brain-comprehensible) instruction sets (plus maybe even with analog
computing modules), to the point that compilers will likely not even be able
to be coded by hand in "assembler", we'll need to have evolved compiler-
generator-genrate-generators too etc.

 _Progress is coming back, and it will accelerate..._ just that it will not be
the ape-brain-comprehensible kind of progress we knew before...

~~~
coldtea
> _Progress is coming back, and it will accelerate... just that it will not be
> the ape-brain-comprehensible kind of progress we knew before..._

It also wont be the kind of progress we desire, either.

It's like we asked for jetpacks, but we get self-driving cars instead...

------
dang
Discussed in 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033439).
(Reposts after a year are fine. This is for the curious.)

------
breck
I love this issue.

If you think LISP is cool (here comes a shameless plug), I think you might be
interested in Tree Notation
([http://treenotation.org](http://treenotation.org)), which you could call
LISP without parentheses. In the same way that a Tesla is a car without gas,
LISP without parentheses can be drastically better. Imagine you get the power
of LISP but you also get clean data, program synthesis, visual programming and
more...

------
guytv
I just went over a sample of the advertising companies. Some of them were
acquired, most of them no longer exist, with the exception of Apple and Xerox.
It might not be surprising, after all its been 40 years, but it is a strong
testament to the fact that companies need to constantly evolve together with
their markets. Being in the right place, at the right time, with the right
product, is just the beginning.

------
charlescearl
Wow, it was that issue that inspired me to save every dime for a PC. Took me a
couple years but eventually got an Osborne (!) and ordered a Lisp interpreter
for it...I forget the name of the vendor.

~~~
throwawayForMe2
I too bought an Osborne 1 as my first computer. I bought a copy of MuLisp, I
think the product eventually became Microsoft Lisp.

------
martyvis
Page 36 - "2c a byte". Very thankful for my $80M phone!!

------
bloopernova
Link to the PDF of the 3rd scan of this issue. It should be higher quality,
and allow offline viewing.

[https://ia801009.us.archive.org/0/items/BYTE_Vol_04-08_1979-...](https://ia801009.us.archive.org/0/items/BYTE_Vol_04-08_1979-08_Lisp/BYTE_Vol_04-08_1979-08_Lisp.pdf)

------
pgtan
Speaking of, I'm wondering about the down of LOGO? When and why LOGO went
unpopular?

~~~
rwmj
Logo was always regarded as a "kids language" by association with schools and
turtles. It was very much a niche even in the mid 1980s when I learned it. Of
course it was in reality a fairly sophisticated LISP relative, but programming
languages are driven by fashion rather than facts.

~~~
braythwayt
Logo was designed to be a children’s language, so the direction of causality
between it being regarded as a “kid’s language” and its association with
schools and turtles goes the other way!

It used a turtle because Wally Feurzeig, Cynthia Solomon, and Seymour Papert
thought this was a good device for teaching about geometry, and Logo was
associated with schools (and Lego!!!) because they were trying to change
education.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_\(programming_language\))

Of course, you are also right in that once it has momentum along these lines,
people tend to put it in a little box marked “children’s language” and not
build on it in a more general-purpose language direction.

A few folks have tried, but like squeak and pharos and so many other dialects
of Lisp and Smalltalk, it has never gained serious traction outside of its
original purpose.

------
galaxyLogic
[https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1981-08](https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08)

~~~
galaxyLogic
Looking at these old BYTE magazines makes me think that magazines these days
simply look much better. Graphics design has has simply gotten better. Not
sure if this is just my subjective opinion but somehow I believe there must be
some truth to that.

~~~
Arcanum-XIII
What amaze me the most is that half of it is ad. Those and the content seem to
have a very similar production value, which did muddle the reading a bit...

I don’t miss this.

~~~
chadcmulligan
I used to buy it half for the adds - this was one of the few places you could
find that stuff.

Edit: Actually, I remember buying the digital logic books on page 144,
probably not from this issue.

~~~
BeetleB
This should be a reminder to everyone that regardless of how annoying ads are,
they did serve a very useful purpose!

------
retrocryptid
One more historical / nostalgic tid-bit: If you flip to page 156, you have
Carl Helmers (or possibly Gary Kildall) trying to describe a spreadsheet to
readers. In 1979, the concept of a spreadsheet was still new...

------
MR4D
Wow - 266 pages in a computer magazine!

I had forgotten what computer magazines used to be like. Thanks for sharing!

~~~
coliveira
Well, several magazines would be like that until the age of the internet. The
90s was the last time when we saw a flourishing magazine market. Nowadays the
very few magazines that survive are nothing more than a leaflet.

~~~
fit2rule
German tech magazines still seem to be surviving .. same with synth mags and
sound/audio-engineering mags too ..

------
aj7
Thanks.

------
frej
How women are represented in these ads. It is just awful....

~~~
OskarS
"A Beautiful Way to Interface". Ugh. Yeah, it's really terrible.

~~~
jgalt212
or you can think, at least some parts of the culture are moving in the right
direction--even if we're not where we should be.

