
BYTE Magazine - edward
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine
======
vijucat
Love it. I grew up reading these. Somehow, they made their way to Hyderabad,
India, and were sold on the roadside [1] for mere rupees, but had the top 20%
of the front cover torn off. I never got that...Maybe a way to prevent re-sale
in the US? Anyway, 13-year old me absolutely loved BYTE and PC Magazine from
the US and a bunch of Sinclair ZX Spectrum assembler and BASIC books from the
UK ("Shiva's friendly micro series"). I used to wait for Sunday to go a-book
hunting: a couple of MAD magazines and a BYTE magazine made for a perfect
weekend in 1988 :-)

I remember my grandfather's chagrin when he heard that I wanted to spend money
on an IBM PC-XT clone rather than a Panasonic VCR (Video Cassette Recorder)
[2]. What IS a computer, anyway?? A foolish, expensive toy, pah! He wasn't
entirely wrong, of course :-)

I went nuts authoring an Editor in raw machine code, writing TSRs, and trying
to hack the higher levels of Montezuma's revenge's by fiddling with it's
machine code for a couple of years.

1\. [https://www.whatshot.in/hyderabad/forgotten-book-bazaars-
of-...](https://www.whatshot.in/hyderabad/forgotten-book-bazaars-of-
hyderabad-c-2664)

2\. "The price of Christmas past: £599 for a VHS recorder":
[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/19/price-c...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/19/price-
christmas-past-boots-catalogue)

~~~
antod
Assuming it worked the same in India, magazine sellers 'returned' unsold
copies by sending back just the cover titles to the distributor instead of the
whole thing. You were buying the unsold 'returns'.

~~~
13of40
Can confirm. When I was a teenager you could find dumpsters full of perfectly
good books other than that they had their front cover torn off.

------
cpr
I was a minor figure in the starting of Byte back in, what 1974? Can't
remember the year.

I worked with Carl Helmers (original editor, who had a hobbyist micro
newsletter already going, dealing with 8008's, etc.) and Dan Fylstra (a friend
from high school days in San Diego, later founder of Visicorp, publisher of
Visicalc, the first "killer app" in the PC world) at Intermetrics in Cambridge
(Fresh Pond), a gov't consulting firm.

Carl and Dan and I went up one summer day to Wayne Green (ham radio magazine
publisher)'s place in New Hampshire and hashed out the basics.

I only wrote a couple of articles, helped with editing, and then school hit (I
was starting junior year, I think) and I faded out. (Was also working more
than full-time at Intermetrics (much more fun than school) while also
attending Harvard full-time.)

But it was fun while it lasted...

~~~
cpr
I knew Dan from systems hacking in high school ('72?) on the IBM 360 out at
San Diego State (no idea how I got involved there). Lynn Brock was the head of
the systems group there, and Henry Burgess was involved as well.

Dan went on to found Visicorp after MIT and Harvard Business School, Lynn
worked with him there to make VisiOn, a much ahead-of-its-time windowing OS
for the PC, which eventually brought down VisiCorp, and Henry ended up at
Microsoft as Gates's right-hand man for years.

Odd group.

------
diego_moita
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 predicted the Internet.

[1] [https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1990-09](https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09)

~~~
dmazin
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 disappear by another 10 years in [its present
form]. There will be zero-cost notebook-size computers with one chip in them
that will have about 32 megabytes. So people will be carrying around these
sort of minicellular, really connected, computers that go into their own
databases somewhere.

Doug Engelbart: Everyone’s going to have a computer-carried around, or
surgically implanted, or sitting on your hat or your spectacles or what-and
they’re all going to be connected into networks just totally, [and] those
networks will be wireless.

BYTE: This sounds more like a portable office than a portable computer. Do you
really think cellular phones and faxes will enter the notebook arena?

Bill Gates: That's a little radical. I don't think it's necessary. If you can
connect up every few hours, that's good enough. The machine in the office will
just have this op­tic fiber that will go off to the world net­ work out there.
It will directly connect to some kind of server and will have a lot of
storage.

~~~
smacktoward
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_\(Bill_Gates_book\)))
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.

------
leejoramo
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.

~~~
MegaDeKay
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 board (point to point
wiring FTW!) and hung a 2x16 LCD display and SPO256-AL2 speech synthesizer off
of it. I marvelled at his "parallel processor" Mandelbrot generator. Every
month was one amazing design after another, and I credit him as one of the
people that sent me on my path to my EE degree.

~~~
chadcmulligan
Was that the 8052-AH Basic one? (Funny I still remember the numbers). I worked
for a place where I built a commercial system using that. We used it for a
couple of things, a nurse call system, a datalogger, just GP IO, was a great
time.

~~~
MegaDeKay
Exactly. And it is still out there if you want to download it (and the
source!), burn an EPROM, and relive some memories. The code, along with some
cool hardware designs, can be found here:.

[http://www.dos4ever.com/8031board/8031board.html#dialects](http://www.dos4ever.com/8031board/8031board.html#dialects)

------
protomyth
BYTE's language issues were always amazing (Smalltalk, Lisp, Modula-2). I also
love Byte Magazine Volume 10 Number 13 - Computer Conferencing for an
interesting set of articles on ways computer conferencing might go that never
happened. I wonder about bringing back some of these ideas given the current
social media landscape.

------
kjhughes
Loved BYTE growing up -- a great hacker's magazine.

Robert Tinney's covers were amazing:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+tinney+byte&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+tinney+byte&tbm=isch)

------
zuminator
BYTE was great, sort of a microcomputing version of the more upmarket
mini-/mainframe Datamation magazine. But as a hobbyist I was more drawn to
Creative Computing [1] and the even funkier Compute! [2] magazine in its
exclamation point heyday.

1\.
[https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing](https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing)

2\. [https://archive.org/details/compute-
magazine](https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine)

~~~
vram22
CUJ (C User's Journal, but it covered C++ too) and DDJ (Dr. Dobb's Journal)
were great too. Not sure about CUJ, but DDJ stopped a few years ago.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/C%2B%2B_Users_Journal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/C%2B%2B_Users_Journal)

Both of them used to have really solid programming content for quite a while.
BYTE, IIRC, became much commercial and ad-oriented in its later years, with
less of quality tech content for makers, and more of product reviews and such,
instead.

~~~
vram22
>but DDJ stopped a few years ago.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal#End](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal#End)

[http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-
dr-d...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-dr-
dobbs/240169421)

------
walrus01
It is really interesting looking at older ads from 1993, how much home
PC/workstation stuff has dropped in price. A fairly ordinary Gateway 2000
486DX2/50 desktop PC with 8MB of RAM, adjusted from Dec. 1993 to today's date
for inflation (
[https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm](https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm)
) is $5200 US dollars. At that time it's kind of a mid range offering since
Gateway and others were also selling much more costly 486DX2/66 and Pentium
60/66 MHz machines.

Today for $5200 (sans monitor) you can build one hell of a beast of a
Threadripper machine with factory-overclocked GTX1080 Ti, probably 1TB of
Samsung NVME M.2 SSD, etc.

~~~
pcurve
you are right. I think that was part of the appeal. Even though I didn't have
a PC nor could I afford one as a teenager I religiously read these computer
magazines cover to cover including all the ads. in fact I enjoyed reading ads
more.

------
sehugg
Notable article from BYTE May 1977: "The Apple-II System Description" by
Stephen Wozniak ([http://ethw.org/w/images/0/03/The-Apple-II-by-Stephen-
Woznia...](http://ethw.org/w/images/0/03/The-Apple-II-by-Stephen-Wozniak.pdf))

~~~
abecedarius
Hard to measure up to that one, but Abelson & Sussman's from 1988 (iirc)
article-length compression of SICP made a strong impression on me.

~~~
gglitch
Drat - that issue (Feb 88, according to Sussman's CV at
[https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/gjs.html](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/gjs.html))
doesn't seem to be in the archive.

~~~
abecedarius
Here's a pdf:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5468189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5468189)

------
whitten
Another great magazine that helped me get up to speed on computers was
Kilobaud Magazin. I guess it's name is kinda dated in the days of Gigabaud
transmissions, as a kilobaud was 1024 bits per second, or 128 bytes per
second.

Anyway, you can review Kilobaud Magazine on Internet Archive using the URL :
[https://archive.org/search.php?query=Kilobaud](https://archive.org/search.php?query=Kilobaud)

~~~
HocusLocus
Wow I remember Kilobaud April 1979, that introduction to Quicksort with
examples in BASIC, copying it down to carry around with me in a little
notebook. Shell-Metzer was also popular at the time. I had a TRS-80m1(Z80) and
Kilobaud was like a bible.

~~~
8bitsrule
Publisher Wayne Greene (good guy) had actually started Byte magazine (sordid
details) ... but _Kilobaud_ (as Wikipedia notes) was definitely for more
technical readers ... down-to-metal hardware and software wisdom. (I only
recently parted company with ish's #1 and #2.)

------
joezydeco
BYTE kept up on industry developments _way_ better than any other mainstream
magazine of the era. They were covering SIGGRAPH when nobody else was.

For a middle school kid to know about Pixar's hardware architecture? That was
pretty unique.

------
curtis
I probably learned as much from BYTE as I did from my CS classes in college.

~~~
CamperBob2
I know I did. I went to the university library one afternoon to look up an
article by Lebling and Blank on interactive fiction in the December 1980 issue
of Byte, but I got distracted looking at decades' worth of archives of
everything from Popular Electronics to Playboy. Ended up killing the whole
afternoon in the magazine archive.

They eventually dimmed the lights to indicate that the library was closing in
a few minutes, so I figured I'd better quit messing around and copy the
article I was originally after. Couldn't find it, so I asked a librarian. "Oh,
we had to drop that subscription. Budget cuts, you know," was the response.

Didn't see much point in the whole college thing after that. They had their
priorities, and I had mine.

------
donaldihunter
I grew up reading BYTE and Your Computer

[https://archive.org/details/yourcomputer_magazine](https://archive.org/details/yourcomputer_magazine)

------
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.

~~~
vram22
>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 remember reading that article in an old copy of BYTE that I picked up at a
used book shop. The article was really good. It was early in my career and I
remember being thinking what a cool algorithm it was, and felt good that I
could understand how it worked. IIRC, the author's name was Jonathan
Amsterdam.

~~~
jim_lawless
Yes it was! They have the issue at the archive:

[https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1986-05](https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05)

~~~
vram22
Great, thanks. Will check it out.

------
darren_
Interesting reading these in the light of excessively intrusive advertising on
websites being one of HN's favourite dead horses to beat.

I'm reading the smalltalk issue and the introductory editorial has a
hyphenated word split over a two page ad spread plus a half page ad on the
page it finishes on. Which is also opposite a full page ad. (the next two
pages are ads)

~~~
protomikron
I wanted to mention the same thing, it is littered with ads. However I
remember reading some gaming related magazine way back in the early 2000s and
there were also many ads (and still are I guess), so it's not a BYTE specific
thing, but print-media in general.

~~~
jonhendry18
Those ads are how they could publish a 500 page monthly magazine for $2.50.

And at the time, the ads were to some extent also useful information about the
industry, in a period where there wasn't much available.

------
peterkelly
Skimming through these today is the first time I've ever found the ads just as
interesting to read as the articles themselves.

------
ape4
It was great when almost the entire industry was in one magazine.

------
kohala
I like the headline for the issue from September 1992:

Is Unix Dead?

Soon Unix will face its most powerful adversary to date: Microsoft Windows NT.
Will Unix Survive?

~~~
sbjs
If AWS didn't use Linux for servers and Apple chose to buy BeOS instead of
NeXT, would Unix be around as prominently as it is right now?

~~~
MegaDeKay
Before AWS, Apache running on Unix / Linux was the absolutely dominant web
server, pretty much crushing Windows IIS. I don't think Apple factors in at
all - they've barely budged the needle in terms of influencing this particular
battle, IMHO.

~~~
krrrh
You’re correct on Linux’s (and I would argue SunOS’s) dominance as a web
server being the major factor, but Apple helped the popularize slick Unix
workstations for developers, allowing us to live in Unix at a time when it was
rarely possible to convince IT depts to support Linux on the desktop. This
goes back to the eighties if you retroactively fold NeXT into the Apple
lineage. Even though NeXTSTEP was never very popular in industry, it gained a
substantial footprint in academia, and had an outsized impact on the internet.
Berners-Lee even developed the web on a NeXTStation.

This early OS X ad shows how important continuing to serve and develop this
market was for Apple:

[http://www.mackungfu.org/dump/apple_unix_ad.jpg](http://www.mackungfu.org/dump/apple_unix_ad.jpg)

------
chasingthewind
I took a look at the IBM PC issue from Fall 1984. One of the first quotes that
made me smile was this:

"But the euphoria of a faster disk drive and seemingly limitless disk space
eventually gives way to the realization that you can fill up even 10 megabytes
sooner than you think." [0]

Especially if you read back issues of byte at ~200mb per PDF :D

[0] [https://ia800701.us.archive.org/1/items/byte-
magazine-1984-0...](https://ia800701.us.archive.org/1/items/byte-
magazine-1984-09/1984_09_BYTE_09-09_Guide_to_the_IBM_PCs.pdf)

------
jkestner
Long before copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow was a thing, I was copy-
typing code from Byte. Made a cool spiders game that blew my mind with use of
PEEK and POKE.

------
css
The only magazine I grew up with was MacAddict; was it normal for magazines to
routinely be over 300 pages (and mostly full of ads)?

Edit: they have archived MacAddict too:
[https://archive.org/details/macaddict?&sort=date](https://archive.org/details/macaddict?&sort=date)

~~~
supernovae
yeah, you should have seen computer shopper magazine in its hayday.

------
cyberferret
One of my favourite magazines from years ago. One of the first magazines that
I actually treated as a book, and not because of its thickness. I used to
relish spending the entire month slowly going through the magazine page by
page and learning so much.

------
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.

------
ffdixon1
I grew up on Byte magazine. Love the covers and the articles on programming.
My parents had bought me a TRS-80 Model I with Level III Basic and learned
programming by typing in programs (and then debugging them) from Byte and
other magazines. Did anyone ever type in the Scott Adams Treasure Island
adventure game from the December 1980 issue?
[https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1980-12](https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-12)

------
JoeDaDude
Along these lines, who remembers Algorithm magazine? Published by computer
scientist and author A. K. Dewdney. It only ran for a couple of years in the
mid 90's. [1] is the only reference I've found. If anyone has issues, please
contact me.

[1]
[http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/StreetTech/Algorithm.h...](http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/StreetTech/Algorithm.html)

------
tonyedgecombe
The thing I remember from that era was most of what I read about in Byte being
out of reach financially. The open source movement has made software much more
accessible. If I want to learn to program in Go or Haskell I don't need to
start by reaching for my wallet.

------
discreteevent
I couldn't afford to buy every issue. But when I did I read it cover to cover.
It's hard to believe now, but apart from Byte and Dr Dobbs there just wasn't
any other source for tech news where I lived (at least for someone who was
half programmer - half build your own pc/local network)

------
gglitch
In another universe I’m mining these for ideas for retrofuture/cyberpunk rpg
and short fiction ideas.

------
reaperducer
Just minutes ago I was reading the November, 1975 issue of Byte. The cover
splash is about someday in the futuristic future when we’re all driving around
in flying cars and eating meal pills, you may possibly be able to buy
_calculators and computers_ in a STORE!

Crazy!

------
ehudla
A prescient issue that I think is missing from the archive was the one on the
work at Xerox on ubiquitous computing. It stuck in mind my mind when I first
read it, and I am reminded of it from time to time when I reach for my iPhone.

------
dosy
What particularly interested me was this August 1981 ad for "Palantir"
business software.

From page 31: [https://vgy.me/YYyBSg.jpg](https://vgy.me/YYyBSg.jpg)

------
unicornporn
So, this is obviously still in copyright. Pointing the light at these items in
the archive should be a sure way to make the copyright trolls aware and
eventually have them removed from there?

------
skookumchuck
This is fantastic, but I'm curious why it isn't more complete. 1988 has only 4
issues. Surely those copies aren't hard to obtain.

~~~
enf
Looks like there may have been some DMCA takedowns, judging from what some of
the missing URLs like
[https://archive.org/details/BYTE-1988-03](https://archive.org/details/BYTE-1988-03)
display.

------
ehudla
Too bad Dr Dobbs isn't also available.

------
JabavuAdams
Oh wow! I I actually forgot about BYTE. BYTE and Dr. Dobb's Journal are what
made me who I am.

------
kyberias
Page browsing is horribly broken.

~~~
culot
Seems to work well for me in Firefox.

------
sizzzzlerz
One of the most influential magazines from the early days of personal
computing.

------
transfire
The Amiga issue. I held on to that one forever.

Also learned Prolog from Byte magazine.

Really miss that mag.

------
ngcc_hk
Really the only source here in Hong Kong in 1980s. Nothing else compared.

------
guard0g
Brings back fond memories! Have to dig out my cassette drive...

------
Jenz
I wish someone could revive this.

------
wedesoft
Thanks a lot for sharing this!

------
8bitsrule
Bah.

By far the cooler 'hacker's magazine' (as someone put it) was _Transactor_.
Available at the same source!
[https://archive.org/search.php?query=transactor](https://archive.org/search.php?query=transactor)

Byte was so ... conventionally-oriented. "A friend to all is a friend to
none." Scrambled ... or _benedict_?

