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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It kind of recaptures part of the intangible sense of flipping through the old physical pages to see what catches the mind's interest. This feels substantively different from the current way that we discover and stumble upon things in the modern web and especially mobile app ecosystems with infinite scroll and algorithmically curated feeds.
Or catalogs. But scanning them in archival quality is a massive pain in the ass. And don't get me started on all the scalpers, who sell catalogs at prices beyond good and evil.
(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)
Cell (journal) also makes all their stuff accessible, but they don't provide the front matter or cover... was going to grab that too. Quite alot of everything's up on archive.org if there's anything in particular anyone wants.
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[...]"
Regardless, this is just a really fantastic example of this whole kind of project, and the fact that it was done with BYTE is the cherry on top.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Robert Tinney the artist who illustrated many of the covers. His work is pretty amazing, and seemed to capture all sorts of interesting ideas.
I met him once at a computer show. I was in too much in awe that I didn't really talk with him, but was able to give him some praise for his artwork. Also, I bought one of the t-shirts with his artwork.
Strangely, I don't get much nostalgia from this. The situation kind of sucked.
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
I think it's only in German, but perhaps the AI can auto-translate the pdf's.
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.
I'm curious: if you remember - which years would you describe as the best ones for Byte and PCW?
Nominally, the offices were located sorta near Boston, which at the time had some important tech companies like Digital and Lotus, amongst others. But Peterborough was a small, rural, old-fashioned New England town about as far away from Silicon Valley as you could get. How a publication from that area was able to be so relevant to the tech industry is almost a mystery!
Other than that, I had forgotten what a shameless exercise in marketing these magazines were. You were basically buying a book of ads. Even the articles feel like copy under the thin veneer of "Oh, look at this cool thing!".
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 :-).
Connects well to the Halt and Catch Fire syllabus that was posted yesterday :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007414
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.
What killed Modula-2?
I get 136 results, from that query.
For me anyway (and it sounds like a few of you as well), whiling away looking through a random BYTE issue from the past can be enjoyable.
(I have in fact now close to a TB of magazines as PDFs downloaded/offline just for this sort of reminiscing. Magazine packs make it easy [2].)
Found the following zoom levels:
0. byte (Deep Zoom Image) (868480 x 453747 pixels, 376956 tiles)
...
I think, I'll skip downloading this
pdfs/ 12.5 GiB
pages/ 91.96 GiB (Each page as a .png)
text/ 365.03 MiB (Each page as text)
byte_files/ 55.98 GiB (The 1024x1024 tiles as .jpeg)
I had not heard of https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify-rs before, that's really cool!
Might still be worth taking a look at as an experiment since this codec separates text, background and images into different layers, even when converted from another format.
