
Byte Magazine: Future Computers (1981) - kick
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-04
======
GoofballJones
I really miss Byte. I used to read it all the time. They had many diverse
articles in it, not just about computers in general. For instance, Byte was
where I first learned about Pixar's Renderman. They also had positive coverage
of the Amiga.

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tobmlt
Wow - I am surprised and delighted to see an article on recurrence relations
with an implementation for Bessel functions. They don't make 'em like this
anymore!

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TheOtherHobbes
Byte was an unusual mix of hands-on EE with soldering, marketing hype,
tinkering-level programming, with occasional undergrad or even grad-level CS.

Also thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of ads.

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jacquesm
Those ads were how you kept current in those days. Between the big computer
trade shows there was a gap of 6 to 9 months, the only way the news would
trickle out was through the ads and articles and there were many more ads than
articles. And they were a great source of inspiration too, if you couldn't
afford what was advertised you could at least try to build it.

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ghaff
Look at Computer Shopper. People actually paid for it even though the
editorial content was lightweight at best.

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geocrasher
I wish I had more time to thumb through this whole magazine page by page. Some
interesting things I noticed in the first 100 pages or so: A Microsoft CP/M
Z80 board for the Apple II; A 5.25" Floppy drive: A BARGAIN at $479 (About
$1300 in today's currency) and a full 2 page CompuServe advertisement which
included pictures of their data center, complete with major Big Iron.

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rb808
Yeah I noticed CompuServe was just $5/hr, plus your call charges I guess.

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philiplu
Sure, but they’ve got the Colossal Cave Adventure game on there, and there’s
always one more twisty little passage to explore, and before you know it,
you’ve blown through $100 in connect charges, even though you’re a poor
college student. Not that I’d know anything about that, I swear!

I miss the 80s, too. Such a great time to get in on the ground floor of the
technology wave. And spend money I couldn’t afford to spend.

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WalterBright
> Such a great time to get in on the ground floor of the technology wave.

I coulda been a billionaire if I'd done things slightly differently!

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Koshkin
Being Bill Gates, John Carmack or Steve Jobs is not “doing things slightly
differently.”

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WalterBright
John Carmack is special. He's a programmer's programmer. He did so much I
never could have done. I never think "I coulda written DOOM!"

But BASIC, DOS, etc., were fairly straightforward. The magic there was
recognizing the opportunity. Maybe I would have failed to execute that
properly that as a businessman, who knows, but failing to see the opportunity
was where things went into the ditch. Note that Jobs took a while to learn how
to run a business. The Apple II made so much money it gave him runway to
learn.

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Koshkin
Well, point is, even with the hindsight I still don’t know if I could make a
billion trying to sell DOS. (Maybe it does take being Gates.)

~~~
ncmncm
It only takes monopoly power, and enough evil to apply it absolutely.

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johnnycab
The entire archive of Byte Magazine.

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

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rb808
Looks like inflation makes $1 in 1982 about $2.67 today.
[https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1982?amount=1](https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1982?amount=1)

So the Apple II+ were $4000+ in today's money. Still doesn't make the new Mac
Pro look reasonable. :)

Those 80 column mono-color screens though, nice.

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brandonmenc
> So the Apple II+ were $4000+ in today's money. Still doesn't make the new
> Mac Pro look reasonable. :)

A rich hierarchy of professional-grade desktop-ish-sized computers no longer
exists because the PC architecture replaced everything.

The Mac Pro is the modern equivalent of an SGI workstation or - if we're
talking late 1970s, when the Apple II was introduced - maybe a DEC VAX - both
of which could cost up to a quarter million dollars.

It's actually unbelievable how cheap the Mac Pro is if you think in those
terms.

~~~
PostOnce
SGI workstations had software that only ran on SGI workstations, they had
hardware that did things that consumer PCs just didn't (like 3D hardware
before that became a consumer item)

The Mac Pro isn't different enough to categorize it along the lines of SGI. It
doesn't run software that regular Macs don't, it doesn't have any particularly
special hardware, it's "prosumer" equipment, not "professional" in the sense
that SGI and similar were. In other words, it's a PC.

That's not a bad thing, by the way; we all have amazing computers now, and we
should be glad.

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brandonmenc
> it's "prosumer" equipment, not "professional" in the sense that SGI and
> similar were

Does the average consumer purchase a Mac Pro? No. Is the Mac Pro being used in
every professional setting previously dominated by SGI? Yes.

> The Mac Pro isn't different enough to categorize it along the lines of SGI.

Uniqueness of architecture is orthogonal to the argument - which is that the
cost of handling professional-grade workloads on the desktop is lower than
ever.

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cobbzilla
Please turn to page 170 and enjoy the best ad ever published, for game
publishing house Crystal Computer.

I'd love to play "Galactic Quest" the self-proclaimed "ultimate space
adventure" in which "Vegan warships attack and fire in real time simulation"

The artwork used in the ad reminds me of concert posters for 80's high school
bands.

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mixmastamyk
Didn’t know that word existed back then. I do remember a console game we joked
about called, “advanced communist mutants from space!”

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reaperducer
"Vegan" in this context means warships from the star system Vega, not self-
imposed herbivores.

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themew
Thanks so much for posting this link. The ads in the back pages bring me back
to the early 80's and remind me where we came from (acoustic modems, 16K ram)
to today. Geez, I feel so old...

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jacquesm
How many of the companies named in those ads are still around in one form or
another?

Mine goes back to 1986, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these are still
around today.

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GoofballJones
Well, there was an ad for the Apple II in there. "Now with upper/lower case!"

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andrewstuart
I picked up a collection of several hundred byte magazines the other day going
back to 1984.

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zozbot234
Did you check if all of them are on the IA already? The archive collection
seems to have some weird gaps where random issues appear to be missing, while
others have been scanned and uploaded multiple times. The metadata are also
not perfect for some reason, so it's hard to search for an issue in the whole
collection.

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pronoiac
I think I have a physical copy of one with a bad scan; suggestions on
scanning? I'm in San Francisco.

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zozbot234
These days you can "scan" magazines and books with great results simply by
taking photos of the pages with a high-quality digital camera. (This is a
method of "scanning" which used to be reserved for rare and valuable
artifacts, but has now become quite feasible in general.) There's even
software like Hugin that will help merge multiple photos of a page into a
single image, while correcting for distortion.

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ghaff
>"great results"

Sort of. You can get a pretty functional copy by just opening it up on your
dining room table. (Though magazines are more likely to stay wide open than
books are.) An evenly lit and flat to the spine copy probably requires some
sort of copy stand.

At times I've thought of buying or making one but concluded it wasn't worth
the effort to me.

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kyberias
That issue has a article about "building your own Turing machine".

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montyboy_us
Pg. 211 - Battelle Labs researching Credit Cards with built-in microchips.
1981. Guess sometimes adoption is ... slow

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Gibbon1
Friend of mine in the mid 1980's did some PCB layout work for some guys that
wanted to put RF ID's on products to replace barcodes. The idea was you just
roll your shopping cart past a reader station. He said they got it sort of
working. Worked but the cost was too high. And the reader RF power was way too
high.

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sehugg
They don't remove hidden lines like that anymore, do they? Nor do they solve
Go quite the same way.

~~~
ngcc_hk
The pages on programming of Go is a surprise good read.

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ChrisArchitect
upvoting for the reminder to revisit all the great Byte cover art -- I mean,
there were a lot of giant black floppy disks flying around back in the day!

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kyberias
Check out the black-hole diode on page 362.

