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.
Thank you. I read it for years. In college we had an extensive collection that went back many years and I lost count of how many hours I spent reading them in the library.
BYTE was amazing. Feel proud of what you helped create. I met Wayne in the mid 2000s and had him on my radio show multiple times. Amazing character. I miss him.
Nostalgia indeed. I was a long time Byte subscriber, and along with Dr Dobbs, it was my 'source of truth' for tech news. I've spent far to long reminiscing today over these Byte issues, ah the memories, a real blast. Now back to work ;(
It is incredible what percentage of an issue of Byte was full page ads. They should have been paying the readers.
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.
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)
Looking at one of these now I remember how magazines made technology very exciting (I don't think it was just because I was younger). I think a lot of it was down to the visuals. You just won't get illustrations like that on someone's blog. The illustrations made the technology seem more real and certainly more glamorous.
I don't think it was just because we were younger. I also don't think it was just because of the visuals (though those helped). I think a lot of it was because things were moving so fast.
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.
I think the HDD vs floppies comparison is more sensibly analogized to SSD vs HDD. That was a massive change. I think the Apple Silicon vs Intel upgrade is pretty exciting (although a lot of that feels like promise of what might be coming in the M2 and beyond), but yes, it's definitely a different world than it was in the 90s which was probably the period of most rapid technical advancement in personal computing.
The speed difference is really quite dramatic. When I replaced the boot hard drive on my Mac Mini with a SSD after it died, it was an immediately obvious increase in performance.
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.
Agree. I started with personal computing in 1983 and what was so exciting about that time, I think, was that each new generation of hardware could do something incredibly cool the prior generation fundamentally could not. I remember feeling a nearly constant level of excitement about tech, always so stoked to see what was coming next and what incredible new capability it would bring to the table.
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.
Yeah. $10k on a machine that was old hat by the time it got dusty and people just kept buying and buying. We will never see anything like that again.
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.
The Windows 3.11 -> 95 transition was built on user research, but the Windows 10 -> 11 transition was build to enable market research. There are many competing interests that get in the way of building things that the users actually want.
What users want is usually boring. We express what we want in terms of what we know. The real kick comes from what we never knew we wanted.
My last Symbian phone was objectively better than the first iPhone, but we never suspected the fluid multi-touch UI was what we wanted until after we saw that Jeff Han demo.
A future of computers that are just faster, with more pixels, is very boring.
> I think a lot of it was because things were moving so fast
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.
A digital-only publication cannot survive without playing the same content strategy games as all the other publications out there.
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.
No one can resist adsense. "Yeah let's just skip out on that $50k a month, our customers don't want to see all those ads." The incintive, like free money for corporate stock buybacks, is just irresistible.
A printed publication, perhaps with audio supplement (podcast type thing), would not be a venue. And at the same time, may well be super compelling, given it has an industry voice and perspective similar to what BYTE had.
MIT Technology Review is subscription-based and they have podcasts and YT channels. You could run expensive ads in print mags like Scientific American or Harvard Business Review, but you'll reach a far bigger audience online.
This will be true even if the subscription fee was hundreds of dollars per year. Podcasts and short videos are effectively low-cost infomercials for your product. Their purpose is not to make revenue by reading out intermittent ads, but attract an audience that might subscribe.
I still get magazines...mostly for the building trade. Fuck digital. There is something about print that makes people get their shit together and produce quality content. You can't just wing it with some fluffy clickbait and Google ad-sense.
Well, getting this up on HN certainly re-kindled my nostalgia for dial-up connections - the images are loading piecemeal, and the table is slowly growing as it's laid out...
People complain about ads , but browse any volume and count the number of ads (may be easier to count the number of non-ads). And you had to pay for that stuff.
But those ads are static. They have no animated gifs or videos, having to rely on typography and still images to catch your attention. As a result, they are much less intrusive.
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.)
I agree with you, except some of the ads were loose inserts that fell out when you shook the magazine, which was almost as annoying as animated gifs/videos.
People like ads in magazines because they are relevant and informative of the progress of the industry. I learn nearly as much from ads reading "Fine Home Building" as I do reading the excellent technical articles.
Remember, paying for that stuff had value in those times. People would buy directories and or pay for advice / direction from others in the know too.
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)
Aw, I have a copy of the 1988 Byte issue on Lisp that I ought to scan and contribute, though probably to the Internet Archive, as I'm not sure how to send it in here.
Looking at some of these, it's kind of sad how it went from a deeply technical magazine (the earliest publication had an ad to join ACM, and it has several circuit diagrams) to a pop-tech supermarket mag (with tons of ads, lots of high-level hit pieces (how to get ready for y2k, for example), and A BAJILLIONTY ADS. I'm glad that they kept some semblance of technical content towards the end.
One of my fondest memories of BYTE is why I have the career I have today.
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.
This is well timed. I was actually going over the Internet Archive's collection just the other day. It's a bit sad to watch the decline in quality as you move through the volumes. Somewhere around 1985 - 1986 BYTE shifted towards becoming just another magazine hocking hardware/software. It got so bad that some issues started to look like a rip-off of Ziff-Davis's PC Magazine. Around that point I'm betting a lot of BYTE readers left for greener pastures at Circuit Cellar Ink and Dr. Dobb's.
As PCs consolidated the market, a lot of the initial diversity died. When the hardware platform consolidated, so did the software and it became much less important to be able to program for the platform you chose because there were very few to choose from.
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.
I grew up in tech-hostile environment but somehow i got to buy a few volumes of byte in the 90s. I remember reading Jon Udell's column and for some reason liking his expose of web technologies. It is so weird , i even remember certain sentences. It's fair to say that I owe him my web 'career'
Hey guys, Peter here from vintageapple.org. My server is experiencing a bit of a hug of death from this. Please be kind and don't try to download everything all at once. I've had to apply a rate limit to that site for now to make sure the applications I'm hosting continue to work.
95 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 56.6 ms ] threadWas 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.
[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...
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.
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)
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.
On a tech level, sure. But not something the majority of users have even noticed. (Less noise, maybe.)
> Apple Silicon vs Intel upgrade
I've had a hard time explaining to someone the meaning of this (and why they should care).
So, no, there is no comparison to the level of innovation and the general excitement around the computer tech they saw back in the 80s.
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.
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.
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.
My last Symbian phone was objectively better than the first iPhone, but we never suspected the fluid multi-touch UI was what we wanted until after we saw that Jeff Han demo.
A future of computers that are just faster, with more pixels, is very boring.
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.
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.
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...
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.
A printed publication, perhaps with audio supplement (podcast type thing), would not be a venue. And at the same time, may well be super compelling, given it has an industry voice and perspective similar to what BYTE had.
This will be true even if the subscription fee was hundreds of dollars per year. Podcasts and short videos are effectively low-cost infomercials for your product. Their purpose is not to make revenue by reading out intermittent ads, but attract an audience that might subscribe.
I fail to see how doing those things has to dilute the main product.
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1980-11
But wow, to read Jerry Pournelle's column again.
> 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
Fun thing: my 9yo daughter learned what a commercial break is on YouTube. We haven’t watched live TV since the 2010’s or so.
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)
I had stopped subscribing by then because it was getting more "consumery".
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.
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.
Lotus 1-2-3 was considered revolutionary in marketing circles because they spend $1M on their launch.
Joe. joe@via.net