So, I’ve had to collect PDFs from various locations to assemble a complete archive, but:

https://absurd.wtf/byte/

Now, I’ll need to check what is on archive for each issue and make sure I have the highest quality for each one…

Its hard to express what it was like in the early/mid-80s (before I had my drivers licence) to bike a few miles to the bookstore at the start of every month and see all the new computer magazine covers for that month. It was so exciting.

I didn't have much money so I stuck with Micro Cornucopia as it had the biggest signal to noise ratio (and before that Rainbow Magazine). I did pickup Computer Shopper later when I started building/rebuilding my mini-tower every few months.

While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.

Two things always stood out for me about Byte

1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore.

2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after every page. It's interesting to look back at those ads from today but it's also a jarring experience to some extent.

Also make sure to read the letters to editor part! Always fun

For those in the Seattle area, the Seattle Public Library has an excellent periodicals collection, including what appears to be a complete collection of BYTE, bound into volumes (apparently in house?) They also have a complete collection of Compute!

The first computer mag I encountered was Creative Computing. I've always had a soft spot for that friendly, easy going magazine. I corresponded with David Ahl (founder of the magazine) and he sent me a mint box of the first year run.

Byte was great. For years it was the highlight of my month. And I thought the cover art was amazing. The Smalltalk hot air balloon logo came from the cover of the August 1981 issue, which was devoted entirely to Smalltalk.

Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982354

I had from around 1982 to 1990, and a random scattering of older issues.

All lost during a move from one city to another - except for one Byte book: Threaded Interpreted Languages.

https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...

I think this is the full archive: https://vintageapple.org/byte/

Because I'm an old man, my sister made me a birthday card using an image from the front cover of their fourth issue (Christmas 1975) - corresponding to when I was born. It's a harbinger of a future that was by then inevitable but hadn't yet quite happened, the "personal computer" is very much still a nerd toy, expensive kits that can be assembled by the enthusiast to achieve little of immediate value - but you can more or less feel what's about to happen.

I've downloaded the entire thing a while back for nostalgia sake. And I am (of course) the proud owner of a physical copy of the "Smalltalk" issue :-) https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

I still have a physical copy. I'll ship them (700 kg?) to you if you pay the cost. Email in profile.

I also have lots of the actual machines and parts, especially Apple, Commodore. Ship them too?

Looks like https://www.byte.com/ has changed so many hands

So someone else saw this comment, then? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47805825

2600 magazine was another fun one to dig through:

https://archive.org/details/2600magazine/2600_1-1/

One thing you can see really clearly, is how the price of specific computing items fluctuated.

The Lisp issue is what got me into said language. Later I was using music software (Cakewalk) and noticed the language was nearly the same, so I started making non-music stuff in Cakewalk as well. CAL was all about programming music logic, but it was a fully fledged language that did whatever text-oriented duties you could think of. It was also super easy to write viruses, although they would only run within Cakewalk of course. Fun times!

Byte's first mention of the 6502 (6501) I think:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/m...

It was my favourite magazine. The only way I could access it was by going to the US Information Services Library attached to their consulates.

I learned a tremendous deal from it and I will forever be grateful.

I absolutely love that these are all available online.

But it does call into question my decision to haul 100's of kg of these things around every time I moved residence over the last 40+ years.

Chaos Manor always seemed like this mystical place to me as a kid. Limitless budget and always messing with hardware and software, whether necessary or not :-)

My favourite, Volume 06 Number 08

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08

There's a great display wall of Byte mag at the Computer Museum of America in Atlanta, they've got original cover artworks and possibly every issue. Loved it. Also more Crays than you've ever seen in one place.

Absolutely love the one on Forth. Issue 5 I think? Has a build it yourself modem for under 50$ in it.

Holy cow. Thank you, JP. I enjoyed your high-level writing while monkeying on your new-fangled machines.

The two characterizations of people in the introduction are timeless?

> A person with a primary interest in software will oftentimes be the person who purchases a kit computer because the kit minimizes the amount of hardware knowledge the person is required to have.

That’s how I came into my first computer - built from a kit in 7th grade.

And, yeah, I understand more about hardware than I did back then, but it’s all about the software to me still… okay, maybe some electronics and mechanics, too.

It’s hard to beat this interface:

https://byte.tsundoku.io/

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002)

Jerry Pournelle's column alone was worth the price of admission.

Byte was an amazing magazine in it's heyday.

FWIW, the German magazine ct from Heise is a good modern replacement.

Here's an index of sorts. I couldn't find anything better.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date

BYTE mag and Creative Computing were the first computing magazines I read, and really kick-started my excitement with computers, even though everything was out of my reach (either too expensive as a kid, or running on computers that were too expensive for me to contemplate). I remember there was a library catalogue system written for the Apple II that I tried to "cargo cult" rewrite for my MicroBee (an Australian Z80-based computer). I had no idea what all the "CHR $4" calls were for, but loved the process of typing in the listings.

I saved every issue. Boxed them up when I moved out of my childhood home. Moved them 13 times and they ended up in a shed in field on my farm (some success in Silicon Valley) where they mouldered into rot over 20 years.

Hard to express what that monthly compendium of electronic and computer hobbyist articles meant, to a farm boy thousands of miles from anywhere.

I got into computers in 1978 when I started high school and they had two Wang 2200 computers, each with a whopping 8KB of RAM.

Although I was 14 I asked my parents for a subscription to Byte. Every so often I'd get an offer in the mail to join a "wine of the month" service, or life insurance, etc. Clearly they had sold their mailing list and they just assumed anyone with a subscription must be an adult.

Anyway, I loved Steve Ciarcia's column and hated Jerry Pournelle's column that got too much space. His schtick was that he was a power user using the hardware/software for doing real work. But he was far from normal -- he'd write florid articles about having a software or hardware malfunction and then calling up the owner of the company and they next morning the guy who wrote the malfunctioning app would be at Jerry's house debugging it. "XYZ Corp produces quality software that they really stand behind and you should buy it too." Yeah, Jerry, you didn't buy it, and the average Joe doesn't get personal attention like that. I found him to be an insufferable, self-important twat. 45 years later I still feel the same about him.

From these comments, what does the discussion suggest about Byte magazine’s role in the early computing community?

vintageapple.org also has a really great collection of scans fwiw

man... I was programming 8080 at school... time passing so fast

I remember Wayne well, W2NSD = never say die... He did well in ham radio magazines, and entered computer magazines running full speed with byte and others. His accountant advised him to put Byte in his wife's name for tax reasons. This later came back to 'byte' him when they divorced and she was adjudicated as the owner, but he never said die and went on to other things but never overtook Byte. I recall him at the Atlantic city hamfest, where the Apple launched. Woz and Jobs were there, at set-up and they had a problem, no solder or iron and a 74366 had failed when the card involved was pulled under power = failed. This was before there were low cost, low power 74LS366 were available cheaply. This part had to be desoldered and replaced. They had no chip, solder, iron or wick. John Ramsey had a booth there, so he lent them the solder iron etc and he was also selling a wide range of TTL parts = the rest is history. I also had a table selling diverse ham radio bits/pieces. Wayne was operating his magazine booth, more Wayne details here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green

Has anyone archived the foreign language editions?

You might be interested in UnixBench, the original BYTE UNIX benchmark suite

https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench

I started reading Byte when I had no way to understand what it was talking about. There were technical terms that I simply had no reference for. What the heck is an assembler?

I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.

As a young hacker in the 70's and 80's, magazines were my primary source of docs. I lived in a remote community where such technology was really, really foreign at first. My relatives lived in other parts of the state, some very remote, some in the city. I had a HAM-/CB-enthusiastic hacker uncle I'd regularly visit in one end of the state (outback) and plenty of relatives in the major city and countryside where I lived, so my docs-collecting mission during a routine adventuring between these family areas went something like this:

1. If in the city/small town: go to the library, read latest BYTE magazine, Radio Electronics, a few other electronics (then computer-) magazines, and so on[1]. Then, browse back issues - my library had them all in the first few years - find code that I might adapt to my machine, copy notes or - remember it - for when I got home later. I usually didn't check anything out because I never, ever gave back BYTE magazines I loaned from the library, just because I never knew when I'd be back (or that was my excuse). So, the library was just for reference/note-taking. This actually made going on those boring family visits quite palatable.

2. If in the city: Go to every newsagent/magazine dealer in my route, read every single tech magazine - BYTE, Dr. Dobbs Journal, ZAP, etc. as quickly as possible, before being asked to leave. Buy something if possible, but only if a review finds something interesting. Usually, leave with a BYTE, at least. If I could afford it, always with a DDJ too. Repeat at every newsagent in the city.

3. If I am in the country, at Uncle Hacker-Shacks: In between hacking on his radios and amplifiers, burning my fingers on some new Fun Way Into Electronics Dick Smith kits, and with those toasty digits browsing his extensive magazine collection, including every BYTE issue since the beginning (it's the 70's/80's, I'm a teen) .. do chores (lawns/wood-chopping/fishing/cleaning/reading-to-little-kids) and save coins for photocopying .. take uncles magazines to get photocopies of interesting things, create my own ring-binder full of such things to take back home with me. Somehow, my uncle always had really great magazines and books and things, way, way out there beyond the dusty horizon... and I'd go home after the holidays, with copies of the best of it.

Usually BYTE magazine articles for systems (Apple/C64/etc.) similar enough to mine (Oric-1) to have some use for me, later, when I got back home to my computer. During those long bus, car, train, plane rides, I'd often spend more time reading and re-reading the listings, than I did typing it in when I finally got home.

BYTE was huge to me, it was my first real foray into cross-platform/multi-discipline software development, I literally had no choice but to port things to the Oric-1, if I wanted to do anything with it. I really wish I still had those old ring-binders, it'd be a blast to see my old notes and printouts (had the Oric printer for such things, it was my long-term archive, which I've long-since lost..)

The skills I gained, basically from 8 years old to 18 years old, by reading these magazines - truly informed an important part of my professional toolbox, which have stuck with me for years of course, since this was an era where a significant part of computing technology was being worked out.

I really wonder how kids these days get access to the evolutionary, real-time nature of the fields they're interested in. I guess MAKE filled that hole for a while.

EDIT: Just wanted to say, Issue #1 of BYTE is really worth a read .. "Assembling your own Assembler", and "Recycling used IC's" is so resonant with my Sunday-afternoon musings about the perils of AI and ML on my teenagers' mindset .. seems like someone else is gonna get some burned fingers, soon enough ..

[1] - (I think I read my first 2600 this way also...)

I was always more partial to Compute magazine

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