Whereas most of us now supply our know-how information on-line, hundreds of thousands globally nonetheless flick their method via a newspaper or journal to maintain updated.
Sadly, print media is a declining trade, in line with figures from Statista, and with a digital world at your fingertips, it’s straightforward to see why you’d go to the myriad (but additionally declining) information websites on the market to maintain your finger on the heartbeat of the worldwide tech scene.
Rewind to the mid-1970s, however, and it was a completely different world – and Byte magazine was all the rage. Launched in 1975, the magazine gained a reputation for its extensive coverage of ‘microcomputers’ and rose to prominence in parallel with the early days of personal computing.
The magazine was published monthly, and readers could subscribe through an annual subscription of just $10 initially. Even by today’s standards that’s cheap, coming in at the equivalent of $59.88 – great value, if you ask me.
By 1979, at the time of its acquisition by the McGraw-Hill publishing group, Byte boasted a paid circulation of over 150,000 readers, making it one of the most popular technology magazines on the scene.
Byte brought back to life
Times change, though, and in 1998 the print version of Byte was issued for the last time. Having been acquired by CMP Media some years prior, the decision was made to cut staff and cease production.
The Byte website finally shut down in 2013 after several ill-fated attempts to revive the site.
Luckily, we’re able to go back and get a glimpse at Byte in its heyday, thanks to a new online archive.
Byte: A Visual Archive brings the journal again to life in all its glory, giving customers entry to each single entrance web page splash, article, and commercial. A fast glimpse on the homepage of the archive offers you an thought of precisely how a lot protection the journal offered through the years.
Decade’s price of content material, numerous hours of typing, and who is aware of what number of moments of author’s block for the plethora of journalists that boasted bylines within the journal.
Plunging into the archive with a single click on, I landed on the September 1983 version – a interval in time once I was only a glimmer in my dad’s eye.
On the left we now have advertisements for Mitsubishi floppy disk drives providing a mighty 6.2k bytes of RAM. Highly effective stuff. Elsewhere, we now have an advert for color printers aimed toward serving to companies visualize knowledge and a evaluate for the Pied Piper private laptop.
Taking place one other rabbit gap, the Pied Piper was launched within the early Nineteen Eighties by Semi-Tech Microelectronics (STM). On the time, it was a low-cost and ‘moveable’ enterprise laptop.
Judging by the scale, it’s undoubtedly not getting a five-star ranking on TechRadar primarily based on that. Regardless, writer Seth P. Bates famous it was a surprisingly cost-efficient possibility for companies on the time.
“The Pied Piper affords actual enterprise options at toy costs,” he wrote. “Though a number of of its options may need been designed otherwise, as with all machine, STM affords a great system for the cash”.
“Fashions II and III are already within the works, and certainly one of them is a 16-bit machine,” Bates added. “These additions to the road, together with the promise of the 20line LCD possibility, make the Piped Piper’s future look shiny.”
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