Hand drawn covers really made it feel like a zine. I subscribed to Nibble since I was an Apple hacker, and it was more of a garage-hacker chic than the polished Byte, but still had the same style cover art.
It was a different age. Somehow this industry lost something when it became mainstream and as much as I rely on the web it is like drinking from a firehose.
What's interesting is, looking at back issues, it could still be relevant today, with up-to-date content.
Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar is still going (https://circuitcellar.com/), and Hacker News contains links to similar content regarding the latest and greatest hardware and programming languages. I can picture the Byte take on Apple's processors in my head.
The covers bring back memories of how big BYTE got. I often had a look at it at the library, and remember picking up an issue that had to have been an inch thick.
I just had a look in Wiki and 'Byte's 1982 average number of pages was 543.... The October 1984 issue had about 300 pages of ads sold at an average of $6,000 per page.' (Quite a bit of money 40 years ago.)
Yes, that's one of the most famous covers. I got that issue and several others free a few years back - there had been a garage sale and they were just giving away everything that was left over. There were boxes & boxes of Byte magazines. I didn't have room for all of them, but I picked out about 6 of them.
In the Spanish-speaking world, José María Ponce [0] was equally legendary with his equally epic covers for Microhobby [1], a magazine covering the ZX Spectrum in the 80s and early 90s.
Not only the covers are beautiful and witty, he always signed them PONCE but in very non-obvious places, so part of the fun of getting a new issue was to find the signature. Some are very cleverly hidden and ridiculously hard to find [2].
Wow. I am from Argentina, and although not this one, we received some magazines from Spain in the 90s. That's who I learnt that Spain currency was the Peseta (and a few idioms as well!). I have good memories spending some afternoon reading them.
Those covers are great! They remind me of the Choose Your Own Adventure book covers from the 80s. I don't know what what style to call those illustrations other than awesome!!!
Aesthetics change. You similarly couldn’t grab magazine covers from the early 1900s either. That doesn’t mean the work is bad. Everything has a place and time, and in the future the current artwork will look dated as well.
Beg to differ.
From my practice, design and illustration in the analogue times had higher standard due to lack of "technically" available tools, templates and lowest visual standard ever created by corporations or patrons.
You had not be able to produce something without any substantial drawing skill or knowledge.
Today you can. And someone will pay you.
Artwork when done right and with universal message is never dated. This article proves it. Dated are trends created from corporations to sell you some UX and make money. You have to be blind not to see where are we going to end visually - AI generated nonsense which will be publicly accepted as "the only way".
There's always been bad design. Just like there's always been bad art. But that doesn't mean there aren't trends... no one is using analog tools to painting now in the style of the 1200s, and rarely in the styles of even the 1700s in composition, color palette, etc. Trends exist anywhere human creativity exists... those who are good and on the cutting edge will want to put their own stamp & twist on their work. That won't ever end no matter what technology affords in simplifying our world. Similarly, iPhones have made it really easy to take photos anywhere. But most photos are crap -- but that doesn't mean there still aren't people doing interesting photography with them. You can find quite a lot of that on Instagram, which is a world that has its own rapidly shifting trends.
The point that I am making has no connection with your argument. My point is that historically (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/330451.Civilisation) art quality is defined by cultural levels of the elites. Impressionism is the exception from this rule.
Is not about the tech accessibility and ease of use at all.
It is about lack of vision and higher standards in those who pay. :)
There are countless digital artist who are astonishing, and in desperation. Not everybody can do "the audience" trick and create steady stream of followers to survive.
The message and the medium are inextricably linked.
This level of detail is feasible for a paid periodical that can afford to commission original art that would sit on a desk or coffee table for a while. Today I doubt people would even buy a print computer magazine whose information is a month old.
For today's world of instant, disposable information, distributed via video, podcast, web page or serialized via tweets several times a day, this art would also become disposable. It'd be instantly forgotten amidst a sea of templated, corporate-friendly clip art ("assets") from Canva and Adobe Spark.
I'm wondering what topics of computer engineering still fit these types of covers and paper magazines?
I think it has to be some topics that are not easily Googled, otherwise there is no purpose to buy a paper magazine.
Retro computing, Computer virus research, anything else? It should be something deep and niche. The magazines should be monthly and each issue a few hundred of pages.
Granted, it's not a paper magazine (although you can buy paper compendiums of it) and it's free to distribute. I think the world and technology has moved beyond paper for the distribution of knowledge. YMMV, but I see that as largely a good thing.
Yes and some top-end technical stuff, that in many ways you can only get in a bit here and a bit there kinda way upon the web today.
One memory of magazines back then, I enjoyed reading the adverts and it is ironic as I probably spent more time upon adverts in a single edition of Byte than I do upon adverts in over a year upon the web. How times change. But darn, I miss the hardcopy Byte magazine. Also miss my vast collection that got lost over several moves in life. Though still have a few.
However, one magazine of that era I have equal fondness for was Unix World 84-95.
I knew the son of the editor of BYTE back in the early 90s going to college in New Hampshire. Most people probably don't realize that BYTE was headquartered in a tiny NH town about as far from Silicon Valley - both physically and culturally - as you can get. Though it was close to the Boston area - where a lot of computing happened in the early days before mostly moving to California - Peterborough is a quaint New England town that may not have had a stop light back then. When I moved to NH in the late 80s, the public schools were still all using Apple IIs from a decade earlier. The idea that a major tech magazine was being written there pre-internet still makes me shake my head in wonder.
For a while http://tinney.net/ had a catalogue of available prints, then it went down for a while, now it's back with just an email address for people wanting prints. They do come up on eBay too.
I have this cover on my wall too. I believe it was from extra copies that FIG or Forth Dimensions had. I see it every day. There was another version I'd seen that had a bit more color and stars in the background. Not sure whose that was.
Nice. I ordered prints of a pair of my favorite covers back in 1984. Unfortunately I left one of them in a large manilla envelope for decades, and it got stained and yellowed. The other was under glass and it fared better, but still got a few yellow spots.
https://tom-park-share.s3.amazonaws.com/img/tinney_prints.jp...
I see how the C64's, Amiga's and Atari's did so well back then. But I too enjoyed the adverts back then - pure geek porn in those days and back then you would read everything - adverts included. Today, complete polar opposite approach to advertising.
At my company we work with water distribution network modeling. Long before I joined, my predecessors commissioned Robert Tinney for some art for our marketing and literature. You can see some examples here: https://communities.bentley.com/products/hydraulics___hydrol...
I just want to point out that a lot of magazine covers from Popular mechanics to cosmopolitan sort of introduced me to the world of design. I grew up in a really boring little seaside town and outside of the beach, we only had a library. That library is still there and is a treasure trove of 70s-90s magazines in their store room. As kids we'd just spend hours on hours just reading old magazines.
Being born in the early 90s - I grew up in the 00s but there was something very distinct about the 60s-70s style which we call retro-futurism now but it was clean cut, faded beige and straight lines that influence a lot of designers till this day. It hit different.
Holy smokes, you described my childhood fascination with 50s-80s magazines. My elementary school had a very extensive collection of Nat Geo from that era. I could spend hours looking at ads and ad copy to grasp at a design aesthetic that I knew was no longer present in my current world.
Coincidentally, I was just reading "See Wayne Run. Run, Wayne, Run." [0] yesterday. Not sure if it's a character assassination or a valid warning to others. Lots of other interesting reading in the collection regardless.
If you're too young to know what OMNI Magazine was, you should do an image search for their covers. They had a similarly futuristic look, albeit more grandiose.
What are some great computer science magazines to read today? BYTE seems amazingly technical, something like that still in print today would be a dream come true...
I regret throwing out all my old computers and magazines. I was never a hoarder but I should have kept my first 8 bit micro, the first PC I bought to run Linux, my first linux disk set, the BYTE magazines and others.
67 comments
[ 15.7 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadDr Dobbs was great as well.
Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar is still going (https://circuitcellar.com/), and Hacker News contains links to similar content regarding the latest and greatest hardware and programming languages. I can picture the Byte take on Apple's processors in my head.
I just had a look in Wiki and 'Byte's 1982 average number of pages was 543.... The October 1984 issue had about 300 pages of ads sold at an average of $6,000 per page.' (Quite a bit of money 40 years ago.)
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-12
Not only the covers are beautiful and witty, he always signed them PONCE but in very non-obvious places, so part of the fun of getting a new issue was to find the signature. Some are very cleverly hidden and ridiculously hard to find [2].
[0] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mar%C3%ADa_Ponce_Sai...
[1] http://portadasmh.speccy.org/Prev1.html
[2] https://microhobby.speccy.cz/mhf/030/MH030_01.jpg
https://duck.neamar.fr/
Mainly because "the trends" are pseudo stylized 3d or flat shapes with childishly over-saturated colors.
I miss the time when trying to create something unique and deep visually was properly rewarded. And from the looks of it I am not alone.
Artwork when done right and with universal message is never dated. This article proves it. Dated are trends created from corporations to sell you some UX and make money. You have to be blind not to see where are we going to end visually - AI generated nonsense which will be publicly accepted as "the only way".
There are countless digital artist who are astonishing, and in desperation. Not everybody can do "the audience" trick and create steady stream of followers to survive.
This level of detail is feasible for a paid periodical that can afford to commission original art that would sit on a desk or coffee table for a while. Today I doubt people would even buy a print computer magazine whose information is a month old.
For today's world of instant, disposable information, distributed via video, podcast, web page or serialized via tweets several times a day, this art would also become disposable. It'd be instantly forgotten amidst a sea of templated, corporate-friendly clip art ("assets") from Canva and Adobe Spark.
I think it has to be some topics that are not easily Googled, otherwise there is no purpose to buy a paper magazine.
Retro computing, Computer virus research, anything else? It should be something deep and niche. The magazines should be monthly and each issue a few hundred of pages.
Granted, it's not a paper magazine (although you can buy paper compendiums of it) and it's free to distribute. I think the world and technology has moved beyond paper for the distribution of knowledge. YMMV, but I see that as largely a good thing.
Apparently here's some signed artwork:
http://www.smalltalk-80.com
[1]: https://raphlinus.github.io/programming/rust/2018/08/17/unde...
Thank you for reasons to find a collection to go buy.
One memory of magazines back then, I enjoyed reading the adverts and it is ironic as I probably spent more time upon adverts in a single edition of Byte than I do upon adverts in over a year upon the web. How times change. But darn, I miss the hardcopy Byte magazine. Also miss my vast collection that got lost over several moves in life. Though still have a few.
However, one magazine of that era I have equal fondness for was Unix World 84-95.
But at least I have a few copies of them still.
For a while http://tinney.net/ had a catalogue of available prints, then it went down for a while, now it's back with just an email address for people wanting prints. They do come up on eBay too.
https://x0r.be/@mtm/106310373200174194
The ads are my favorite. "386 with 2MB RAM and 10MB hard drive for $5K"
Being born in the early 90s - I grew up in the 00s but there was something very distinct about the 60s-70s style which we call retro-futurism now but it was clean cut, faded beige and straight lines that influence a lot of designers till this day. It hit different.
[0] https://archive.org/details/Wayne_Green_Misc
Robert Tinney is an amazing artist whose work deserves recognition.