Archive of Byte magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975

There was also almost nothing to read, so when my monthly issue of Byte appeared (2-3 months later than most people would receive it), I devoured that thing. I would read it literally cover to cover, including all those ads, several times.

I wasn't (then) working in IT, so a lot of the content (like Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar) went way over my head but it didn't matter, I read it anyway, often by the light of my kerosene lantern. I learned a huge amount: object-oriented programming, this new thing called the Internet (capitalized back then, and before the WWW), and how Jerry Pournelle was a self-important jerk (but boy, did I envy the toys he got to play with!).

This was the age of big, fold-out Gateway 2000 ads, 20MB hard drives, and Turbo Pascal kicking other compilers' butts.

I would read the magazine, then write out programs (in BASIC, the only language I had learned at that point). On my monthly trips to the capital city I would go to a local NGO and in exchange for helping with their IT issues they would let me play (i.e type out my programs and try to get them working) on their computers.

I devoured Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar and I think it was one of the main influences on my career, along with Goedel, Escher, Bach.

I discovered Digi-Key in the ads. That's kind of life-changing when all you had access to was Radio Shack. You can tell someone's age from the thickness of their first Digi-Key catalog. It was like only 30 or 40 pages.

At the time, there were two primary alternatives for buying a computer. The first was a computer store. The second was buying an issue of Byte or a competing publication called Computer Shopper that was 100% ads. When I was in grad school, students would share a single copy of Computer Shopper and debate the best choices of parts to assemble for a new machine. Virtually all were MS-DOS based.

Access to BBS was super expensive unless you were lucky to afford a modem, and live on local call distance.

European magazine like Computer Shopper were of similar size and ads ratio.

That's how you know what the industry was doing, and if you want to buy new hardware, these magazines were the main source of information.

Maybe ironically, for better independent content, as in actual articles rather than ads, hobbyist and video game magazines did better. There was a time where video game magazines taught you about programming! If anything, by having you copy lines of BASIC because there was no digital support available.

The classified/small ads section alone was enormous. And then you’d have companies that sold computer components include huge swathes of their catalogues and price lists in multi-page adverts. Would have been a real boon for system builders, but I didn’t have the cash back then. I was still in the world of 8-bit micros and 16-bit machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco [1]

prominently. That stuff was barely talked about in the editorial which was much more about ‘home computers’ like Apple and TRS-80 and Atari and TI up to 1983 or so. Up until then there were a few good ‘computer magazines’ like Creative Computing [2] that were platform agnostic but around that time they started to become more specific to platforms like I was subscribing to Rainbow for my color computer and there were a lot of mags for the C-64 [3] and emerging for the IBM PC and clones. Byte got more focused on the PC and low end CP/M machines with a little interest in high-end workstations and also 68k computers like Mac an Amiga… but just a little.

By the late 1980s the cool kids (some of those “kids” were adults) were already online on BBSes and you didn’t need magazines to keep up with free and ‘free’ (pirate) software. I think computer magazines were struggling, the PC kept growing. Computer Shopper became dominant because boy you could find good deals in it. Then the WWW came along and computer magazines were obsolete overnight.

[1] I saw plenty of PDP-11s and other minicomputers but never saw a high end microcomputer of that era outside the pages of Byte…. But somebody bought them.

[2] loved it at the time but it doesn’t have the staying power of Byte, there is a lab in the EE building next door donated by David Ahl who founded Creative Computing, some issues of CC in the 1978-1979 period are wild.

[3] the c-64 was a huge hit in terms of third party software and having friends who had them, but I don’t think it was talked about in Byte like other home computers because Byte was going upmarket then.

NO Internet back then.

People still had a massive thirst for information. Even the ads where interesting and read by many to learn more ....

https://archive.org/details/PcWorld2010

The difference in amount ads is really insane...

I certainly can't think of any magazines remotely like the big computer mags today. Taken to the extreme of Computer Shopper, no one is buying a magazine in large part for the ads today.

Value Added Tax is a tax putatively on, as the name suggests the value you've added. For a consumer you don't care whether you paid £15 for this product because it was £10 plus 50% VAT, or it was £15 with zero VAT, that's the same to you, and so the law says the advertiser can't say that's a £10 product even if there is 50% VAT, 'cos consumers can't buy it for £10, so you're lying to them.

However, if you're selling products for businesses, they're going to claim back the VAT on inputs to their business, only the added value gets taxed and that's implemented by charging the tax on their sales and allowing them to claim back the tax they paid for inputs. As a result it is allowed in that context to display the explicitly without VAT prices, your buyers potentially won't pay that tax anyway. So for a business you can say it's a £10 product.

The question in these magazines was: Are the products for businesses, or, are you actually selling to the hobbyists who often buy the magazine. You obviously want to advertise the lower prices with just an asterisk leading to a disclaimer about VAT to be paid, but if in reality most customers are hobbyists they're all paying VAT so maybe you're breaking the law by advertising the lower price?

Actual adverts definitely varied in how plausible the two categories of buyer were. How many businesses need to buy this slightly nicer Joystick for the Commodore 64? On the other hand, what hobbyist needs to buy hundreds or thousands of 10MB hard disks or SIMMs (yes the DIMM's predecessor was named the SIMM) for a discounted volume price ?

Hobbyist computing grew out of hobbyist electronics with the Altair 8800 kit featured on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975 being one of the first personal computers. My own first computer was also a kit (bag of components and a bare circuit board), the NASCOM-1, introduced a couple of years later in 1977 and featured on the cover of the first issue of Personal Computer World, which was the first UK magazine dedicated to this new hobby of computing.

Another great magazine of this era was Dr Dobbs (Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia. Running Light without Overbyte), which was also aimed at hobbyists, featuring lots of program listings. These American magazines like Byte & Dr Dobbs were easy to buy in high street newsagents in the UK.

Steve Ciarcia was incredibly influential to young me. His projects were wild. I only built one of his designs: an 8052AH-BASIC microcontroller board that I still have in the basement. He did more "mainstream" stuff like the series of articles on building your very own 8088-based PC compatible (a huge effort back in the day). But then he'd do crazy stuff like an 8051-based board that calculated the Mandelbrot set networked to a PC, and the more of the boards that you built and connected to the network, the faster the computation of the result.

Radio Electronics was gold for articles on cable & satellite TV descramblers. The only problem was that too often, the parts list would have one inductor that was basically made of Pure Unobtainium where I lived :-(