Discussion
Byte Magazine Volume 00 Number 01 - The Worlds Greatest Toy
pcblues: Holy cow. Thank you, JP. I enjoyed your high-level writing while monkeying on your new-fangled machines.
lysace: It’s hard to beat this interface:https://byte.tsundoku.io/(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002)
tialaramex: Because I'm an old man, my sister made me a birthday card using an image from the front cover of their fourth issue (Christmas 1975) - corresponding to when I was born. It's a harbinger of a future that was by then inevitable but hadn't yet quite happened, the "personal computer" is very much still a nerd toy, expensive kits that can be assembled by the enthusiast to achieve little of immediate value - but you can more or less feel what's about to happen.
haunter: Two things always stood out for me about Byte1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore.2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after every page. It's interesting to look back at those ads from today but it's also a jarring experience to some extent.Also make sure to read the letters to editor part! Always fun
pjmlp: Those ads were the only way to actually know what software and hardware was available to buy, including information related to "open source of the day", shareware, PD,...Access to BBS was super expensive unless you were lucky to afford a modem, and live on local call distance.European magazine like Computer Shopper were of similar size and ads ratio.
markus_zhang: Ads back then were entertaining. I actually sometimes went to archive just to read those Ads instead of articles.
piker: As a kid who was interested in stuff like this in the 90s, the ads were part of the enjoyment for me. You could look at components, have rounds-to-zero idea what they did but let your imagination soar at the possibility of stringing them together into something new.
loloquwowndueo: Most trade magazines of that era were pretty similar in size and number of ads , eg. PC Magazine. Pre-Internet they were one of the only ways to keep up with industry news, topics and products.
JSR_FDED: Chaos Manor always seemed like this mystical place to me as a kid. Limitless budget and always messing with hardware and software, whether necessary or not :-)
smitty1e: Pournelle is so missed.
SanjayMehta: And Larry Niven, but in a different context.
pkphilip: It was my favourite magazine. The only way I could access it was by going to the US Information Services Library attached to their consulates.I learned a tremendous deal from it and I will forever be grateful.
justin66: [delayed]
PopAlongKid: Unlike Pournelle, Niven is still alive (87 year old), but I don't think he is writing new science fiction these days (although he has collaborated on some stories this century and has made guest appearances at some conferences in the last few years).https://larryniven.net/
delichon: I remember an article about a new thing called a mouse. It was a kind of pointing device. There were instructions for building one and writing a driver for it. It seemed like a good idea, but with such a silly name it would never catch on.
noosphr: Ads that are well target aren't jarring. They are just part of the magazine.I remember reading ads about a specific make of vacuum pumps next to an article with experiments which used them.Today's ads are so obtrusive because you get toilet seat ads next to an article about general relativity.
II2II: The toilet seat ad was well targeted (you have to read somewhere).More seriously though, print advertising was able to target readers based upon the demographics of the publications readership. They didn't track people across their online life and beyond. (That said, there definitely was some tracking.)
morphle: I still have a physical copy. I'll ship them (700 kg?) to you if you pay the cost. Email in profile.
placebo: If you're old, I guess that makes me ancient. Byte is what got me hooked on the path I walk to this day, though back then it would be far beyond my wildest dreams to believe that in my lifetime it would be possible to hold an intelligent conversation with software, and everything that entails
tialaramex: The LLMs are the philosophical "box of all conversation" trick, that's not intelligence, it just went from a neat philosophical device to explain why Turing's test doesn't do what you think intuitively it would do to a real world thing that is a mix of fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem.
ksaj: One thing you can see really clearly, is how the price of specific computing items fluctuated.The Lisp issue is what got me into said language. Later I was using music software (Cakewalk) and noticed the language was nearly the same, so I started making non-music stuff in Cakewalk as well. CAL was all about programming music logic, and making dialog boxes, but it was a fully fledged language that did whatever you could think of. Fun times!
ratg13: I was always more partial to Compute magazine
justin66: I hope people focus on the nature of the ads as much as the impressive quantity of them. The extent to which quality software and hardware was expensive is probably the main thing people should appreciate. The thing that always strikes me is how long the z80 held on as a thing people would pay for.
tangus: Here's an index of sorts. I couldn't find anything better.https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date
