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Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine (byte.tsundoku.io)

423 points by chromy ↗ HN
A while ago I was looking for information on a obscure and short lived British computer.

I found an article[1] in the archives of BYTE magazine[2] - and was captivated immediately by the tech adverts of bygone eras.

This led to a long side project to be able to see all 100k pages of BYTE in a single searchable place.

[1]: https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198502-381

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683184

54 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 68.1 ms ] thread
thomasjb
Love this! Part of why I went into electronics is reading archives of Byte and Popular Electronics
wood_spirit
I remember having just a couple of issues of Byte but reading them cover to cover and basing my whole understanding of possibilities on a deep dive into a Silicon Graphics workstation they had an article on… happy fuzzy distant memories :)
mbirth
Wow, that’s the first digital Microfiche implementation I’ve seen. Well done!
elcapitan
Oh wow, this is absolutely amazing. It's one thing to read about computers like the Altair in history overviews, but to see ads for it and how they were discussed at the time, that's really interesting.

Connects well to the Halt and Catch Fire syllabus that was posted yesterday :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007414

browningstreet
So much of my childhood in one zoomable image. This is incredible.
wkjagt
BYTE is awesome. And this project is awesome and really well done. I miss the BYTE days. Is there a modern day equivalent?
lysace
(!)

I only have a few issues that I bought as a kid. I've been re-reading them lately and I noticed that that while e.g. a 1987 issue is (still!) deeply intellectually stimulating, a 1989 issue is kind of boring in comparison.

It seems like it went from being focused on computer science/engineering to commercial uses of computing quite quickly.

spankibalt
Interesting. German publisher Heise avoided this largely by fielding two sister publications: the "c't" (1983 onwards, aimed largely at the general, computer-literate audience) as well as the mentioned above "iX" (1988 onwards, aimed at professionals and pro-level amateurs).
fsiefken
Thank you for doing this, it also has a nice microform feel when browsing. I remember that in the pre internet days I went to the library to find the microfiche in the drawer en folder of the newspaper I wanted to read. I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6P9FhSkd0I

I wonder what's the reason for the decline in length over the years and why the peak size years seem to be '82-'83.

As an image format alternative, there's avif and webp, but png has the advantage it was in existence during in the lasts BYTE years (1996-1998). "The full specification of PNG was released under the approval of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on 1 October 1996, and later as RFC 2083 on 15 January 1997"

The funny thing is, when I search I can't find mention of the GIF/PNG discussions or PNG introduction, while I do find mention of things like WebNFS, OLiVR/VDOLive (wavelet video) and FIF (fractal image format). Perhaps it was out of scope?

mwexler
82-83 was the peak of hobbyist computing where articles and ads were in-between components and software.

As the tech improved, it moved into "appliance" mode of being a box you plug in, not a heathkit you assemble. By 86, Gateway and Dell and other packagers sold the "box". As demand shifted, all the mags shrunk from phone-book proportions (PC Mag, Compute, SoftDisk, etc etc). Some survived longer as business software fought for the office and marketing moved to peripherals (mice, monitors, printers) but things got anemic by the 90s.

os2warpman
>I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer.

My library had two forms of microfiche.

One was a cartridge containing a single spool, which upon being inserted into the reader would unspool onto an internal mechanism. You used two jog wheels, one fine and one coarse, to control the speed at which you traversed the tape, and there were numeric inputs so you could go to an arbitrary page. (it got close enough)

The second were flat rectangular sheets with pages laid out in a grid, and you placed the flat sheet onto a glass bed, pulled down a cover and slid the plate into the reader, using etch-a-sketch-like controls to move along the x and y axis.

In either case you could insert a dime and a single page of whatever was on the screen would spit out from an attached printer.

bcrl
The decline in monthly print medium is universal, mostly due to a loss of advertisers. Once advertisers leave, magazines and newspapers have to start cutting costs which reduces the amount and quality of the content included. The feedback cycle continues until there's nothing left. In the 1980s magazines were the primary medium through which information about new technology products spread. Then in the early 1990s people began moving online to the internet and the world changed.

In Byte's case specifically the large space devoted to ads for mail order services started to decline significantly in the 1990s. In part it was a change in the kind of reader that was interested in computers. There was no longer a need to publish the price of CPUs, SRAM and other ICs in the back of Byte as that wasn't what people were buying. Plus the mail order houses had built up their own lists of customers by then, and would directly mail flyers and catalogues. Computers were no longer easily built from scratch as 32 bit CPUs became more complex and out of reach of most hobbiests.

I loved Byte magazine in the 1980s, and learned so much from it... The monthly hardware project from Steve Circia was fascinating, and there were articles about data structures, languages and even filesystems. I am sad for the loss of that enjoyable monthly experience.

oidar
Beautiful. What a wonderful way to navigate a periodical. Any chance you could open source this implementation? There are plenty of magazines that I'd love to search in this format (eg Sound on Sound).
don_searchcraft
Its certainly beautiful to look at but the search capability itself is not very good.
kmoser
I was unable to find information mentioned in some ads, and couldn't figure out why. The scanned text was reasonably legible that I would assume it would have OCRed correctly.
__fst__
Amazing overview!

It's interesting how the level of public computer/computing knowledge changed. The Byte magazine goes into deep details of hardware, software and programming.

I feel that nowadays a lot of it is taking for granted or very few people care how things work under the hood. But probably at the time of the Byte magazine only very few people cared too :-).

grimgrin
a nice feature would be similar to what searching google books does. the results highlight in yellow (though I'd prefer a way to clear highlighting after seeing where I'm supposed to stare)

I searched for "MUDs" and found a few results, clicked one, but it didn't appear the centered page was the one I was looking for

this is a wonderful idea though, and I'm happy you made it!

edit: perhaps also a nice feature is putting the search query in the URL, so I can link folks

rcarmo
I love that this exists. I bought BYTE for many years and this is bringing back fond memories.

The best printed ads I’ve ever seen, though, were on WIRED. Doing the same for that might be impossible until copyright expires, but I would love it.

bdcravens
Kinda meta, but I found it fascinating seeing the ads that were presumably bought up well in advance, with the same company on the same page in the first few pages of the issue, at least early on. Seeing how it changed over time, I can't help but wonder if that in itself is a bit of a historical record about the growth and death of parts of the industry.
throwup238
That’s why I find old publications so interesting. I have several copies of Scientific American from the 19th century and watching the advertisements evolve at the pace of the industrial revolution is really fun, as are all the letters to the editor debating stuff like the nature of comets from a 19th century layperson’s perspective.

(You can get the same experience from the Scientific American archives but holding the 170 year old bound copies with all the prints is something else)

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encom
I'll echo all the praise from other posters, and offer one tiny bit of criticism: I don't like the motion damping (or whatever it's called) when panning/zooming around. It feels like wading through mud. I'd prefer it much reduced, or removed entirely.

EDIT: From 12/1989: "Will Clock Speeds Top Out at 50 MHz? An issue that computer designers can't seem to agree on is the ultimate potential speed limit of microprocessor clock rates. The more conservative argument, put forth at the Microprocessor Forum by Microprocessor Report editor Michael Slater and several other conference speakers, maintained that clock speeds will top out at about 50 MHz[...]"

placebo
Thank you. Was subscribed to it around 1981-1983. Eagerly waited every month for it to make its way across the Atlantic so I could dig into all the fascinating new technologies. I'm sure it had a great influence on my interests and eventual career.
rayiner
I loved BYTE! The articles were so much more technical and interesting than anything you find in a computer magazine (or equivalent) today.
embedded_hiker
That is most of how I learned how computers worked when I was a teenager. I had no other resources of this quality, not even access to a computer most of the time.

Strangely, I don't get much nostalgia from this. The situation kind of sucked.