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.
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!
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.
Byte was basically a holdout from the early personal computer hobbyist days and, except perhaps at the end, never really succumbed to becoming a magazine for corporate buyers and users.
It was a magazine for all the eclectic stuff someone interested in computers, especially from a hobby perspective, might like to read. So, as you say, you had low-level hardware hacking (Circuit Cellar), a lot of random PC hardware, programming, algorithms, etc.
It was always a bit of an odd mix and probably wasn't as "useful" for me as PC Magazine was at the time. But I appreciated the breadth even if some of it was pretty random. Dr. Dobbs occupied a somewhat similar space but pretty much exclusively on the software side.
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.
At one point, the editor-in-chief of PC Mag coined something that came to be called "Machrone's Law" that the computer you wanted always cost $5,000 dollars (in then current dollars). This is clearly still possible and more--vis-a-vis the latest Mac Pro. But it used to be very possible to spend something like $10K in today's money to but a pretty basic PC.
Depends on what you define as basic, but that price point was always the absolute top of the high end for PCs (albeit not for e.g. UNIX workstations).
In my first job (in 2001) some expensive piece of equipment was controlled by a compaq deskpro 386 with a proprietary ISA card + some hardware dongle that only worked on old computers running DOS (wouldn't work on Win9x DOS).
My boss at the time told me they spent $10k on that computer alone when they bought it in the 80s but that replacing the equipment it was controlling would cost upwards of a million $, so we had to keep that old PC alive.
I'm mostly talking quite a while before that. When I bought my first IBM PC clone in the early 80s, it was probably $3K or something like that and it didn't even have a hard drive. (I bought a 5MB hard drive with company money around the same time and it was $5K all by itself.)
I think the general idea was right, except I would put the price at $2500-3000 as the sweet spot. Back then if you spent $5000 on a system you'd be able to buy it for 2/3 that price in six months to a year. Anything less than $1500-2000 was near obsolete.
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.
In the 70's, I worked for a small company that made custom single board computers for various customers. In doing so, we had developed all kinds of software for our own use, like assemblers, linkers, debuggers, etc. All first class stuff. I even designed, built, and programmed video drivers for monitors.
We had EVERYTHING needed to build an Apple II. Everything except being able to see what was right in front of our face.
One of the other employees (Hal Finney, you might have heard of him) wrote a BASIC interpreter that fit in a 2K PROM. We did nothing with it. Never occurred to us that it was worth anything.
So what do I do? I go into the compiler business, which paid well, but had zero prospects of big money :-)
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.
I didn't remember the exact numbers but, yeah, you connected at slow speed if you were going to do something interactive like chat and "high" speed if you were just going to download/upload and disconnect.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It has access to local cpu, cooling resources and ecc ram amounts that aren’t available to the masses. Agreed, not as deep a moat but there still is one.
In terms of what it's used for, a more fitting comparison would likely be a Scitex and Hell prepress suite. You could pour a couple of million into that and feel there were things you'd left out.
My father refused to pay money for the Apple // and IBM PC because they were too expensive. The Atari 2600 PC upgrade was a bust so he didn't like Atari 8 bit computers, so we got a Commodore 64 instead. I think Atari and Commodore made inexpensive computers that were part video game console. The video games were the real market.
Apple countered with the IIc but it was not cheap enough. IBM countered with the IBM PCJr which Tandy licensed to get the graphics and sound for their Tandy PC 1000 series.
If you look at the Wikipedia description, it was the Mac Pro of its day. It came with hardware that was rather extreme. I remember the lust I felt over reading about it in Macworld. It had two 10Mhz specialized 65C02 chips just to control IO. I was rocking an Apple //e at the time with a 1Mhz 65C02.
Two years later, I got a Mac LCII with a 16Mhz/68030. A year after that, I got a 40Mhx accelerator for it and ran Speedometer to discover at least in the benchmarks, it ran about the same speed.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
