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BYTE Magazine

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Snippet from Wikipedia: Byte (magazine)

Byte (stylized as BYTE) was a microcomputer magazine, influential in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage.

Byte started in 1975, shortly after the first personal computers appeared as kits advertised in the back of electronics magazines. Byte was published monthly, with an initial yearly subscription price of $10. Whereas many magazines were dedicated to specific systems or the home or business user's perspective, Byte covered developments in the entire field of "small computers and software", and sometimes other computing fields such as supercomputers and high-reliability computing. Coverage was in-depth with much technical detail, rather than user-oriented.

The company was purchased by McGraw-Hill in 1979, a watershed event that led to the rapid purchase of many of the early computer magazines by larger publishers. By this time the magazine had taken on a more serious journal-like atmosphere and began to refer to itself as "the small systems journal". It became an influential publication; Byte was selected as the medium used by Xerox PARC to publicize Smalltalk in 1981.

Like many generalist magazines, Byte suffered in the 1990s due to declining advertising sales. McGraw-Hill's publishing arm was sold to CMP Media in May 1998, and the new owners immediately laid off almost everyone in the magazine arm, ending publication with the already-complete July edition. The associated website continued to draw 600,000 page views a month, prompting the owners to re-open the magazine in a pure online format in 1999. It continued as an online publication until 2009, when it shut down, only to be revived in 2011 and then shut down for good in 2013.

Vintage Byte Magazine Library

While Macworld and MacUser capture the history of the Macintosh, Byte nicely captures the history of the entire personal computer industry from the early days (September 1975) through July 1998 (just two issues shy of 23 years).

Here for your reading pleasure are the first and second installment of the Byte archives, now including the entire run of the magazine.

While some of these magazines are available on Archive.org or as torrents, we've added quite a bunch of issues that had never been scanned before, and all issues have been lovingly restored by Steve M. to look as good as is possible from a magazine scan.

To give you an idea of what work went into the painstaking restoration, here are some stats:

  • Issues thru 1989: 179
  • Total pages: 67,224
  • Restoration time: 109 days (3 1/2 months)

Add to that the additional 9 years from 1990-1998.

  1. Thumb Title Year

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byte_magazine.txt · Last modified: 2024/04/28 03:51 (external edit)