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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One thing I liked about Jerry Pournelle was that whenever he reviewed something he usually gave a blow-by-blow description of all of the problems that he ran into and how he worked around them. Some folks gave him grief about this, but I could relate because I often ran into exactly the same problems that he did. Meanwhile other reviewers usually either glossed over this stuff or just ignored it completely, lest they offend the vendor or Microsoft or whoever. This gave unsuspecting users the impression that installing and running this stuff was a piece of cake, when in fact it could be a real nightmare.
Ciarcia helped inspire my career. I was in high school, had learned programming, but was also interested in electronics, math, physics, etc. I got an internship at a computing center, where the work just seemed terribly boring. Of course one person's boredom is another person's excitement. But "programming with solder" was exactly the thing that pulled it all together for me.
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.
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:.
On the other hand, Jerry Pournelle was notorious for threatening companies with bad reviews (and carrying out his threats) if they didn't give him free products.
So in that sense, he was a pioneer in the field of Entitlement Blogging.
>The sense of entitlement is just too strong in the blogging community and the nastiness, hissy fits and general hate displayed after one of your members was not granted her request for a freebie is giving your whole industry a bad name. I never thought we would be inundated with negative reviews for the simple reason that somebody was required to pay for goods received or services rendered.
Not only did he feel entitled to free (as in LOTS OF beer) hardware and software, but also to free ARPANET access, which he bragged about in Chaos Manor.
And then he would make incoherent drunken accusations and threats in public to his benevolent benefactors at MIT, who finally got sick of him and flushed him.
He was so far ahead of his time, he would be working for the Trump administration if he were younger. They would have loved his enthusiasm for social darwinism. "Think of it as evolution in action." -POURNE
"So what do I do? I agree with nearly everything he is for, but I’m better qualified to make it happen. I avoid some issues, but I go for his most popular ones and say, yeah! Want that! And I can make it happen better than he can. I’ve got the experience of working in government, but I’m not the establishment any more than Mr. Trump is. Heck, I’ll offer him a cabinet post. I could use his energy in my administration." -POURNE
"But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated." -POURNE
"One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee." -POURNE
The real reason POURNE was so unpopular with the people running the MIT-AI Lab during the 1980's had to do with the fact that he was a belligerent alcoholic who acted entitled to the free computer services and expert advice that he was taking for granted and criticizing, rather than his politics.
In spite of the fact that many of those people who he accused of being "communists" went far out of their way to spend their precious time patiently answering his questions, tutoring and helping him (RMS even personally wrote some free software for him at his request -- how communist is that??!):
Pournelle I always hated, because his column was soooo loooong and rambling, and it was inevitably an advertorial for some super-expensive not particularly interesting product he got for nothing and then received exemplary support for, usually directly from the CEO. And then, just as inevitably, there would be a prominent mention of his next and/or last books.
Considering how much money Byte made from ads, I suspect Pournelle was incredibly well paid for his efforts - in addition to all that free hardware.
Nice gig.
Ciarcia was superb - back when many developers understood the hardware down to component level. So much cool and creative skill, month after month.
I learnt everything I know about computers from reading Byte magazine cover to cover as a teenager. Steve Ciracia's Circuit Cellar was always the highlight for me.
My favourite project was the video camera he made from a 64kb DRAM chip from Micro called the IS32. Rather that the usual opaque cap, it had a transparent quartz lid. Photons accelerated the charge leaking from DRAM cells. So by writing ones, waiting a calculated period, then reading out the new DRAM values, you could get a binary image. Repeat for multiple exposure periods for greyscale.
As a 15 year old, I bought one of these chips, designed my own circuit board, drew the tracks with etch-resistant pen from Tandy Radio Shack, etched it in ferric chloride, hand drilled the holes, and soldered the components. Needless to say, it didn't work. And without access to an oscilloscope, I never managed to figure out the problem.
(for those interested in computer nostalgia, the first of those full issues was a special on portable computing. And the second is a mammoth 480 page issue with dozens of articles on all aspects of the Unix operating system).
> My favourite project was the video camera he made from a 64kb DRAM chip
My first job in computing was as a bench repair engineer for shop-returned Sinclair Spectrums. (Pretty busy time since they had a huge failure rate mainly due to an under-specified transistor in the DC-DC converter).
Since we had plenty of components available, I had a go at doing this by lifting the lid of a ceramic 4164 (might have been a 4116) with a soldering iron and hacking together a bit of stripboard to plug into the expansion bus of a Spectrum.
It worked a treat with a few frames per second refresh rate. (I had to remap the non-sequential ram lines in software to get a sensible image.)
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.
Definitely a gem. Here's a bit on Kapor founding the EFF, while law enforcement compares hackers to rapists:
Lotus founder Mitch Kapor and several industry colleagues have formed an organization they say will fight to ensure the Bill of Rights covers computer-based communication and electronic information. The purpose of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (California, MA), is to combat violations of civil liberties, Kapor says, as well as educate government policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and the public about computers.
The EFF has taken heat from some members of the industry because they see it as simply a "hacker defense fund," and some law enforcement officials are not necessarily in favor of it. "It's as if NOW started a foundation to come to the assistance of [people charged in] rape cases," says Don Ingraham, chief of the high-tech crime team and an assistant district attorney for Alameda County in northern California. "We don't know what to think of it." He says he doesn't understand why the computer industry would defend people trying to break into their systems.
We were already calling it the internet when I started college in 88 and after all, it ran on TCP/IP(the latter stands for Internet Protocol) which ARPANET adopted in 1983.
this is not making the point well -- in 1988 there were multiple, competing protocols that ran over whatever the carrier medium was.. TCP/IP was nascent, and did not route as we know it today.
The article is in the September 1990 issue, and the first webpage was deployed a few months later. Obviously, if any of those people envisioned the web or anything like it, they would have done it themselves. 'Obviously' is usually used in hindsight.
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.
Wow Bill Gates' perspective is interesting because what is radical now is for a phone to NOT be continuously connected. If my phone has no internet, that is a bad time. So easy to become complacent and rely on an internet connection for pretty much all useful information.
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...) 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.
Honestly, a continuous connectivity model was an ambitious bet early on. Wasn't cellular data at the time basically using the phone as a 9600bps modem at astronomical per-minute prices?
If continuous connectivity was unavailable, I could imagine an somewhat different ecosystem developing. We could still have sexy phone/PDA devices, but with software optimized around caching and making use of a transient connection.
For example, "feed" based apps like HN/Reddit/any typical news sources tend to pull the latest feed when you open the app, then load individual articles on request. In a limited-connectivity world, you'd see the app sitting in the background, waiting for Wi-Fi or a sync cable or however it was hooked in, and then pulling as many articles as it could to a local cache, so you could read them completely without data later.
I'm actually surprised this didn't happen much more in countries where data was spotty or expensive and limited.
I recently found myself in Boston needing computer stuff, and wound up at Micro Center in Cambridge. It was interesting in that they had pictures of the computing legends. Your list reminded me of that, as most of your list was represented in these portraits.
Nothing to make it any different from any other computer store, except for one thing. It was 5 minutes away from me. I was able to run in, find the needed thing, and then go back to doing what was needed. Didn't need to wait for UPS to show up the next day. I was very thankful that MicroCenter has not been forced to close from websites like most of the other brick&mortar stores have had to do.
There is one close to me in the DC area. The biggest thing is that they have just about everything you would want a computer/electronics store to have ... machines (PC and Apple), components, networking gear, highend gaming peripherals, hobbyist electronics/computers, repair services and a bunch of other related products and toys. Sometimes at work we are looking up server components for an upgrade/replacement, network switch and I think even rails for a server once then realize microcenter just down the street has it at about the same price. Most of this stuff just isn't available anywhere else in one place except online at this point.
Yes, by me locally within a 30 mile radius. There's a few mom & pop style Computer Repair places, but I'm not expecting them to have an inventory. There are actually 3 Fry's within that 30 mile radius, but I don't even consider Fry's anymore. They are pretty much a joke to me at this point. CompUSA and other such big box stores were worth my time and money back when I had no money.
It certainly wouldn't be as prominent, and the ecosystem wouldn't be as rich. But it would still exist - the things that people like about it would still be there, and it had momentum before those things you mentioned.
Funny people credit AWS or Apple... Neither really convinced people unix was worth it in such a way that Sun Solaris did. Too bad they collapsed and oracle of all places snagged 'em.
Solaris superseded SunOS in 1993 and let's be honest, Solaris 2.6 is when Sun "shined". most of us linux beards just see it as a linear progression until oracle murdered it.
Unix-type servers have always dominant as web servers and this alone made is so a substantial portion of CPUs in the world boot with such kernels even in the 90s I think.
With Unix-like-oses having some inherent advantages over Windows, and the successful open source model making Linux and BSD free and in constant development, in hindsight the extension of Unix-like-oses to more and more domains seems inevitable.
The only thing standing in the way of a Unix/Linux future really was the potential of microkernel OSes but over many years, these have failed to live up to their hype (GNU began development of HURD before Linux was announced).
I mean, Google using Linux internally and using it for the development of Android seem like more obvious breakout moments to me. But there many such moments says to me that no one of them mattered that much.
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.
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:
Yes, but BeOS was a lot less Unix-ish than Linux. Most of the details are fuzzy now, but there were a few big differences you could run into trying to port, notably around networking. (The never officially released BeOS 5.1 would have added a BSD-compatible networking environment, though.)
I think on the contrary, if AWS didn't use Linux it wouldn't have taken off. Everyone was on a linux stack back then with few exceptions. Microsoft had to spend millions in advertising to convince people they offered something other than windows.
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)
I know that the magazine (The Rainbow Magazine) that was dedicated to the computer I had (the Tandy Color Computer) was easily over 250 pages during its heyday (mid-80s). And it's not like the Color Computer was one of the more popular computers like the Atari 400/800, Apple ][ or Commodore-64.
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.
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'.
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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[ 142 ms ] story [ 2459 ms ] threadThey 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.
Robert Tinney's covers were amazing:
https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+tinney+byte&tbm=isch
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.
http://www.dos4ever.com/8031board/8031board.html#dialects
http://circuitcellar.com/how-it-all-began/
On the other hand, Jerry Pournelle was notorious for threatening companies with bad reviews (and carrying out his threats) if they didn't give him free products.
So in that sense, he was a pioneer in the field of Entitlement Blogging.
https://www.facebook.com/WhiteMooseCafe/posts/20490133087126...
>The sense of entitlement is just too strong in the blogging community and the nastiness, hissy fits and general hate displayed after one of your members was not granted her request for a freebie is giving your whole industry a bad name. I never thought we would be inundated with negative reviews for the simple reason that somebody was required to pay for goods received or services rendered.
Not only did he feel entitled to free (as in LOTS OF beer) hardware and software, but also to free ARPANET access, which he bragged about in Chaos Manor.
And then he would make incoherent drunken accusations and threats in public to his benevolent benefactors at MIT, who finally got sick of him and flushed him.
"How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPANET": http://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html
He was so far ahead of his time, he would be working for the Trump administration if he were younger. They would have loved his enthusiasm for social darwinism. "Think of it as evolution in action." -POURNE
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/trump-is-the-candi...
"So what do I do? I agree with nearly everything he is for, but I’m better qualified to make it happen. I avoid some issues, but I go for his most popular ones and say, yeah! Want that! And I can make it happen better than he can. I’ve got the experience of working in government, but I’m not the establishment any more than Mr. Trump is. Heck, I’ll offer him a cabinet post. I could use his energy in my administration." -POURNE
http://voxday.blogspot.nl/2016/04/jerry-pournelle-on-donald-...
"But he has never wavered on his desire to fill the Supreme Court with Justices as near in scholarship and view to Scalia as possible; that alone would be enough to get me to the polls for Trump if he’s nominated." -POURNE
"One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee." -POURNE
The real reason POURNE was so unpopular with the people running the MIT-AI Lab during the 1980's had to do with the fact that he was a belligerent alcoholic who acted entitled to the free computer services and expert advice that he was taking for granted and criticizing, rather than his politics.
In spite of the fact that many of those people who he accused of being "communists" went far out of their way to spend their precious time patiently answering his questions, tutoring and helping him (RMS even personally wrote some free software for him at his request -- how communist is that??!):
https://www....
Considering how much money Byte made from ads, I suspect Pournelle was incredibly well paid for his efforts - in addition to all that free hardware.
Nice gig.
Ciarcia was superb - back when many developers understood the hardware down to component level. So much cool and creative skill, month after month.
My favourite project was the video camera he made from a 64kb DRAM chip from Micro called the IS32. Rather that the usual opaque cap, it had a transparent quartz lid. Photons accelerated the charge leaking from DRAM cells. So by writing ones, waiting a calculated period, then reading out the new DRAM values, you could get a binary image. Repeat for multiple exposure periods for greyscale.
As a 15 year old, I bought one of these chips, designed my own circuit board, drew the tracks with etch-resistant pen from Tandy Radio Shack, etched it in ferric chloride, hand drilled the holes, and soldered the components. Needless to say, it didn't work. And without access to an oscilloscope, I never managed to figure out the problem.
Part 1: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-09
Part 2: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-10
Here are PDFs,including circuit diagrams and code listing:
ftp://alvarestech.com/pub/electronics/circuit_cellar/BYTE_Projects/D-Cam1.pdf
ftp://alvarestech.com/pub/electronics/circuit_cellar/BYTE_Projects/D-Cam2.pdf
(for those interested in computer nostalgia, the first of those full issues was a special on portable computing. And the second is a mammoth 480 page issue with dozens of articles on all aspects of the Unix operating system).
My first job in computing was as a bench repair engineer for shop-returned Sinclair Spectrums. (Pretty busy time since they had a huge failure rate mainly due to an under-specified transistor in the DC-DC converter).
Since we had plenty of components available, I had a go at doing this by lifting the lid of a ceramic 4164 (might have been a 4116) with a soldering iron and hacking together a bit of stripboard to plug into the expansion bus of a Spectrum.
It worked a treat with a few frames per second refresh rate. (I had to remap the non-sequential ram lines in software to get a sensible image.)
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
Lotus founder Mitch Kapor and several industry colleagues have formed an organization they say will fight to ensure the Bill of Rights covers computer-based communication and electronic information. The purpose of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (California, MA), is to combat violations of civil liberties, Kapor says, as well as educate government policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and the public about computers.
The EFF has taken heat from some members of the industry because they see it as simply a "hacker defense fund," and some law enforcement officials are not necessarily in favor of it. "It's as if NOW started a foundation to come to the assistance of [people charged in] rape cases," says Don Ingraham, chief of the high-tech crime team and an assistant district attorney for Alameda County in northern California. "We don't know what to think of it." He says he doesn't understand why the computer industry would defend people trying to break into their systems.
We were already calling it the internet when I started college in 88 and after all, it ran on TCP/IP(the latter stands for Internet Protocol) which ARPANET adopted in 1983.
I mean the whole social, cultural and economic impact and, yes, the web is a very important part of it.
But there were a few more things in that early era, besides the web (e.g.:ICQ, IRC, Napster).
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.
Fortunately for Microsoft, he eventually did get it, though only just in time -- not long after the book hit the shelves.
If continuous connectivity was unavailable, I could imagine an somewhat different ecosystem developing. We could still have sexy phone/PDA devices, but with software optimized around caching and making use of a transient connection.
For example, "feed" based apps like HN/Reddit/any typical news sources tend to pull the latest feed when you open the app, then load individual articles on request. In a limited-connectivity world, you'd see the app sitting in the background, waiting for Wi-Fi or a sync cable or however it was hooked in, and then pulling as many articles as it could to a local cache, so you could read them completely without data later.
I'm actually surprised this didn't happen much more in countries where data was spotty or expensive and limited.
By anywhere else, do you mean _near you_? In a word, Frys. hahah
For a middle school kid to know about Pixar's hardware architecture? That was pretty unique.
https://archive.org/details/yourcomputer_magazine
Is Unix Dead?
Soon Unix will face its most powerful adversary to date: Microsoft Windows NT. Will Unix Survive?
With Unix-like-oses having some inherent advantages over Windows, and the successful open source model making Linux and BSD free and in constant development, in hindsight the extension of Unix-like-oses to more and more domains seems inevitable.
The only thing standing in the way of a Unix/Linux future really was the potential of microkernel OSes but over many years, these have failed to live up to their hype (GNU began development of HURD before Linux was announced).
I mean, Google using Linux internally and using it for the development of Android seem like more obvious breakout moments to me. But there many such moments says to me that no one of them mattered that much.
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
Edit: they have archived MacAddict too: https://archive.org/details/macaddict?&sort=date
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-...
2. "The price of Christmas past: £599 for a VHS recorder": https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/19/price-c...
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
Byte was so ... conventionally-oriented. "A friend to all is a friend to none." Scrambled ... or benedict?
Crazy!
Anyway, you can review Kilobaud Magazine on Internet Archive using the URL : https://archive.org/search.php?query=Kilobaud
[1] http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/StreetTech/Algorithm.h...
1. https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing
2. https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine
There were also Ahoy! And Ahoy!'s AmigaUser:
https://archive.org/details/ahoy-magazine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal#End
http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/farewell-dr-d...