I love looking trough the ads! An Apple II, and a color printer from Apple. Compuserve's CB Simulator. Ads for drives that hold Megbytes of data. So many different peripherals and PC makers. UltraPlan Spreadsheet Calculator. An ad for an Assembler. One for Unix Sys V from AT&T. Modem after modem.
Compuserve's CB Simulator sounds like it must've been awesome!
From the beginning of Byte magazine until about 1984 are really fun to read. The ads were probably annoying at the time of release, but not they are fun and interesting to read. I like the 1983 issue with imaging where they are talking about movie effects for "Tron" and "Revenge of the Jedi".
I wished they would of had more UNIX in the issues, however it was usually unaffordable. But a fun look, at least for me, to the history of computing. And who does not like an ad for a 8MB, $3999 disk drive subsystem.
The ads were not annoying at the time of release. I really enjoyed reading those ads and finding out about products specs and prices, remember that we didn’t have the Web back then and Byte magazine was my main source of information about what was available.
Really! the articles where the main point - just whish I had had the nerve to use the $25 diy modem Steve Garcia for one project instead of paying £300 for an answer and £600 for an answer originate.
His BYTE electronics DIY project articles in his Circuit Cellar column were so well-written that I used to enjoy browsing them even though I'm not an electronics guy, gleaning what I could about the topic. He even did one about a 32-bit computer, when 8 and 16 bits were still the standard! The Definicon motherboard/CPU, I think it was about.
I think it “creative computing” or nibble magazine that had a postcard where you could check off interests and send it back. I did this in middle school and would occasionally get mailings about products (and credit card offers).
That was a standard system in the magazine trade back then. It was part of the service to advertisers. They would collect all the queries for each advertiser every month and pass them on.
Those ads were unbelievably lucrative. Each page cost thousands of dollars, and there were hundreds and hundreds of them, plus smaller classifieds. Freelancers were paid fairly generously, but that outgoing was a drop in the ocean compared to the monthly ad income. Byte was posting profits of around $10m/year in the 80s.
Edit to add: many readers saw the ads as informative rather than intrusive and distracting. This was partly because many were creative and fun, but also because they went into far more technical detail than you'd see today, so they were almost a supplement to the official written copy.
The International Journal of PoC||GTFO [0] includes a lot of old tech ads if you're into that thing. A nice touch alongside the hardcore engineering feats you see in the publication.
I remember using the CB Simulator when I was a young teen back in the 80's! That was my first introduction to multi-user stuff. It was cutting edge for the time.
Laying out code in variable width font like a boss :). I love reading these BYTE scans from archive.org, they are from such a different computing world. Yet UNIX is the same.
Use V7 Unix in an emulator and say that. Unix didn't have networking, mmap(), or job control shells back then, and that's about the level some of the benchmarked Unix variants were at.
The VAX was also the size of a wardrobe. Interesting to see that it was still leading the pack, more or less, even though it was a 1977 design compared to the smaller and cheaper micros from the 80s - including the Lisa, which clearly was not a fast computer.
VAX 11/780's were large machines. By the mid 80's you could get a MicroVAX which weren't quite as powerful, but much smaller. In the late 80's, I knew a guy who had one at home.
The 11/23 was one of the lower-priced PDP-11s, based on the F-11 chipset. I'm pretty sure it would have cost a fair bit more than an XT, though, especially fitted out with the necessary memory and peripherals.
That being said, Heathkit offered earlier LSI-11 machines (which used bit-slice processors) for several years. As a student at a high school with an 11/34, I would have loved to have an H11 or H11A at home, but the Apple II+ that we did have served the family well.
A factory-assembled and tested Heathkit H11A, sans memory, storage, or terminal, was $1895 in 1970s money.[1] Buying the kit would save you $700, which would have been well worth it since the CPU board was a stock DEC KD11-HA [2], already assembled and tested anyway.
The 68K had no MMU or even segment registers, so the 68K machines that can run UNIX had, at the very least, some kind of external memory offset adder. I did not know the Apple Lisa had this- it's interesting because Macs didn't have it and could not run UNIX.
The Motorola 68020 has a MMU coprocessor, and the 68030, 68040 have an on-chip MMU. The Macintosh II, SE/30, Quadra, and Centris series were able to run A/UX [1] since 1988. A/UX was a SystemV with X and Finder.
The Byte Benchmark suite can still be downloaded, compiled and run today. It's in pkgsrc, FreeBSD's ports, and can be trivially compiled on common GNU/Linux distros.
The Byte benchmarks are still very useful today. They’re also old enough that it’s doubtful that compiler makers are going to accelerate them (we know Intel does this), because barely anybody uses them any more.
+POS1 [-POS2]
Specify a field within each line to use as a sort
ing key. The field consists of the portion of the
line starting at POS1 and up to (but not including)
POS2 (or to the end of the line if POS2 is not
given). The fields and character positions are
numbered starting with 0.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadStart: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n137/...
Continuation: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n405/...
Results: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-08/page/n411/...
Compuserve's CB Simulator sounds like it must've been awesome!
I wished they would of had more UNIX in the issues, however it was usually unaffordable. But a fun look, at least for me, to the history of computing. And who does not like an ad for a 8MB, $3999 disk drive subsystem.
Byte almost was reverse Playboy: you almost didn’t read it for the articles.
Steve Ciarcia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ciarcia
His BYTE electronics DIY project articles in his Circuit Cellar column were so well-written that I used to enjoy browsing them even though I'm not an electronics guy, gleaning what I could about the topic. He even did one about a 32-bit computer, when 8 and 16 bits were still the standard! The Definicon motherboard/CPU, I think it was about.
Magazine ads where the way to get targeted views.
Those ads were unbelievably lucrative. Each page cost thousands of dollars, and there were hundreds and hundreds of them, plus smaller classifieds. Freelancers were paid fairly generously, but that outgoing was a drop in the ocean compared to the monthly ad income. Byte was posting profits of around $10m/year in the 80s.
Edit to add: many readers saw the ads as informative rather than intrusive and distracting. This was partly because many were creative and fun, but also because they went into far more technical detail than you'd see today, so they were almost a supplement to the official written copy.
[0] https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/
Use V7 Unix in an emulator and say that. Unix didn't have networking, mmap(), or job control shells back then, and that's about the level some of the benchmarked Unix variants were at.
http://gunkies.org/wiki/MicroVAX_II
The VAX ISA was implemented in a wide range of technologies, from TTL (the 1970s VAXen) up through true microprocessors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroVAX_78032
That being said, Heathkit offered earlier LSI-11 machines (which used bit-slice processors) for several years. As a student at a high school with an 11/34, I would have loved to have an H11 or H11A at home, but the Apple II+ that we did have served the family well.
A factory-assembled and tested Heathkit H11A, sans memory, storage, or terminal, was $1895 in 1970s money.[1] Buying the kit would save you $700, which would have been well worth it since the CPU board was a stock DEC KD11-HA [2], already assembled and tested anyway.
[1] https://heathkit.garlanger.com/hardware/systems/H11/ [2] http://gunkies.org/wiki/LSI-11/2
No MMU, sure, but the whole point of this was to benchmark an OS. It's all about the OS overhead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
https://github.com/Katzmann1983/performance_test_shell/blob/...
From the FreeBSD 2.1 man page [1]
[1] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sort&apropos=0&sek...