Was an early editor/writer for Byte in the very early days (first few issues), though had to back off due to school load (in college at the time).
Carl Helmers and Dan Fylstra (founder of VisiCorp (publisher of VisiCalc), friend from high school days in San Diego) and I were all working at Intermetrics in Cambridge, and got together to start Byte, visiting Wayne and Virginia Green (big ham radio publisher at the time) in New Hampshire.
I only played a minor role, but it was definitely a lot of fun.
Great publication. I sure wish we had something similar today...
Heck, I would take it printed.
It's how I got into this. Such great times. Thanks.
The Linux whatever’s, PC whatever’s and Mac whatever’s, and even Communications of ACM and the equivalents just aren’t the same thing.
The 386 was an astonishing improvement over the 286. But now, the next generation Intel chip is... kind of nice, I guess? But it's not all that exciting.
Windows 95 was a massive improvement over Windows 3.0. Windows 11 doesn't make many people very excited compared to Windows 10.
A 20 Meg hard drive was miles ahead of floppies. But the last storage improvement was... nice, but not life-changing.
Hercules graphics was massively better than stock IBM PC graphics. The latest graphics card is exciting if you're a gamer, I guess, but it doesn't move the needle much for everyone else.
And so on. It was eye-opening every month to see what was new. It doesn't feel like that any more.
And Moore's Law didn't hurt either, those clock rate increases!
Today's tech is amazing, but the progress is mostly incremental and that doesn't tend to get the blood pumping.
We went from a discussion on how many colors a machine had, whether it flogged a speaker for sound, or had an actual sound system, to multi-media excellence, and it happened QUICK!
I sure enjoyed my trip through those times.
But, there may be more to come!
Custom silicon is on it's way back around the computing circle of life. The way I see it, the different options we've seen hold fairly stable for a decade or so have all converged on similar ground. Differentiation is sometimes more contrived than actual, like the software, or form factor of a device, maybe it's ports, mean more than the actual computing potential it has. Additionally, we've somewhat peaked in terms of sequential compute, and things like multi-media are fairly ordinary, and of sufficient quality many don't see a big distinction between pro efforts and gear and consumer grade gear. Or, it just flat doesn't matter.
And now the dam is breaking!
To gain advantage, and also lock customers in, leverage mindshare and data, other investments users have or are making, custom silicon is looking very appealing now.
On top of that, the bigger players have the resources to do the development, more of what people need to know about doing it is out there, and tools are more available now to the point where mere mortals can play in this game.
A quick look at something relevant?
Consider the Parallax Propeller 2 microcontroller chip. It's done on an older process, 130nm I believe. On that process, the creator and team managed to get an 8 core, 300Mhz plus design with a lot of features. That project took a decade or so, and north of a million. While high, that's not out of line compared to what it all was just a short time before.
Chips are done, available for people to buy and build into projects / products. It's a custom design with particular emphasis on real time, parallel or concurrent programming, and data streaming, measurement with all I/O pins capable of analog or digital operation. For some applications nothing will come close. A great example of what can be done now.
The bigger players have all done, or are working on custom silicon for one reason or another. AI, network, computation, etc...
Soon, we are going to head back to something closer to that era. More highly differentiated devices / machines. Maybe there is room for the kind of work BYTE did in some form...
But, whether that happens or not, we may well see custom silicon push things forward again in dramatic ways.
I got my hands on well over $20000 worth of computers before I was 18 from hand-me-downs. You couldn't hardly resell used computers because they were so out of date by that time...the reason people got rid of them.
If it had not been for the used computers and all the churn (enthusiast grandfather in charge of tech for the family business) I would have never laid hands on one and most likely would have ended up in construction.
I collect and restore vintage computers. I rarely would think of a PC as interesting because, as you go back the past couple decades, it’s essentially the same computer, but slower. And not even that much slower - a surprising amount of my work is done on an 8 year old laptop. It’s not as fast as the new corporate issue MBP, but it’s fast enough. And it has the same amount of memory and twice the storage.
Back then the very idea of working on an 8 year old computer was ludicrous.
I am someone who used to type in code from a magazine before I knew what the SAVE command was. You would never see someone doing something like that today.
"In 1983 an average of one new computer magazine appeared each week. By late that year more than 200 existed."
80s computer magazines were thick too! Compute! magazine published 392 pages in December 1983.
I did this, too, but after being burned again and again with software that didn’t work after hours of typing, I gave up. Disheartening for a child. Of course, I could have been responsible for the problems.
It was almost pure luck if I managed to save the silly little thing, and all i was really interested in were the games.
I do remember to joy of getting a little ASCII slot machine game actually working after like 3 sessions. and the guys at the RS were so impressed that they left it running and used it as a in store demo.
More importantly, they couldn’t track you, nor did their selection rely on any knowlege of you (besides the fact that you were reading byte magazine.)
Was hard to understand all that was going on out there. The ADS made more sense in that way than they do now. Sometimes, when a specific product was needed, those ADS connected people up in a way everyone found to have value.
One thing, perhaps missed today given content marketing, was following the ADS to see who did what. New products, old ones phasing out, where things were, who, and sometimes pretty good reasons why all were found in those ADS. Scanning them was not all fluff. (not always fluff I should say, because yeah. There was fluff)
There was, of course, a ton on innovation on peripherals. Laser, ink jet printers, optical storage seemed to be the future (and it was, for some time), Unix workstations… Even after the PC killed off most of the home computer market, the high-end was still a thriving ecosystem.
A new BYTE would quickly start diluting its value by offering a podcast, YT channel, IG/Snap Stories, affiliate links and a website slathered with Adsense ads. You'll wonder why they bothered rebooting it in the first place.
Steve Ciracia was the guy holding it all together. Every month he published a hardware project that was commercial quality (you could buy it) except for the occasional two month project. It was a running gag that he coded with a soldering iron, struggled with assembly, probably didn’t know basic and logo, forget about it.
Despite that some months he would answer all the letters to the editor which ranged from ‘too bad they don’t document things like this’, to ‘you can buy that from the Jameco catalog’ to ‘here are three ways to fix a corrupted word star disk if you moved it to a subdirectory because it was written for DOS 1 and doesn’t support subdirectories.’
Many of his projects were really a fully realized example of an example circuit from the project datasheet as opposed to an adventure in discrete logic such as Steve Wozniak's "Breakout with 44 chips."
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?&sort=date
I'm not sure what's missing there, but it sounds like this collection fills in some gaps.
> We may experience a gradual drift into a surveillance society ...
> The merging of cellular phones, portable computers, and highspeed networked servers offers many exciting possibilities.
> The Internet will be as ubiquitous in our lives as cable television is today.
https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/199612_Byte_Magazine_Vol_2... - page 86 in the magazine, page 90 in the PDF
Or higher quality scans here: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine
Or Popular Electronics: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Gui...
Creative Computing: https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing
Lots more than just Byte and Popular Electronics.
I had stopped subscribing by then because it was getting more "consumery".
[1] https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198105_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0...
It's also striking to see street addresses in the ads, some of which are local to me. One company used to do advanced graphics display controllers for computer kiosks in what is now a custom cabinets store in a dingy run down strip center.
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9306426,-77.237681,3a,75y,17...
Edit: Better query that seems to mostly get Wired Magazines from 1990-1999. 63 of them, so not all of them, but quite a few.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%28wired%201990...
But wow, to read Jerry Pournelle's column again.
It was a how-to discussing making your system more secure against a virus (boot-sector/TSR).
It explained how to edit your io.sys, and command.com; so that the system would use different files then: config.sys & autoexec.bat to boot.
I failed at this task, and learned a very hard lesson about backups, but it wasn't as painful as it could have been. Format & re-install was rather common back then too (1-3'ish months on average)
But I learned that I WANT to hack on my systems. I learned that I COULD run MY hardware how I wanted. It opened the world to me.
I do not accept a system as it's presented to me, I must find the edge-case and break-out of the conforms that would keep me contained.
I also learned about the difference between obscurity and security too. And that combined they are greater then the sum of their parts.
articles from Dr. Dobb's Journal from January 1988 through December 2008, articles from C/C++ Users Journal from January 1990 through February 2006, articles from SysAdmin from January 1992 through August 2007, and articles from The Perl Journal from Spring 1996 through April 2005
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Unfortunately the source code included is only (often partial) listings that were printed in the magazine, I couldn't find the entire projects that were made available via the 'electronic Resource Center' (which I believe was an ftp site that was never archived).
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Edit: The Internet Archive also has scans of Dr. Dobb's Journal from 1976-1987: https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal
If only there was a tool to offload this static content to a network of peers so bandwidth usage was not an issue. We could call it Flood to emphasize the large amount of traffic.
Joke aside, I refrained from looking around because if the server is struggling, my nostalgia can wait a few days.
Some other Byte mag convos lately:
week ago on cover art https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28607038
Logo language issue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556
another cover archive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26453783
just recently re-read the sep, oct, and nov 78 issues on implementing tiny pascal. what a cliffhanger! they were like send money for the listing of the 8080 machine translator (which is what i was most interested in haha)
Is there any mirror? I'd rather not put more strain on his server. And are there archives of other mags like Dr.Dobbs?
Any time I took coworkers to lunch it was the catalyst to a lot of conversation.
It’s fun to regularly peer into the past and be reminded of what has changed and what hasn’t.
Thank you for the work.
The world has moved a lot in the last 33 years...
Lotus 1-2-3 was considered revolutionary in marketing circles because they spend $1M on their launch.
> Please don't download too much at once
please just torrent it bro.
