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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

I miss Byte. I’m a second-gen programmer and in the late 80s and 90s my dad had a subscription to Byte and a few UK computing trade papers. I’d read it cover to cover even if I didn’t really understand most of the contents, but Jerry’s column always stood out against the rest. He seemed to be a natural communicator.

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He was, after all, a professional writer. He brought in the perspective of a user who wants to use the computers and, occasionally, needs to program them. He always tried to be a couple years ahead of the market, using stuff that'd be insanely expensive for just about anyone, but that suppliers sent him because being featured in his column was a great sales driver.

Byte was the magazine that had things I dreamed about and pointers to learn about new things. I started reading it in the 80's and lost track sometime in the 90's. It with Antic, Dr. Dobbs Journal, and Creative Computing defined what was computing to me in my jr high and high school years. I don't really think any website has given me the same feelings as those magazines.

It is interesting to compare Byte's 1985 Computer Conferencing issues with what we have now: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-12

[edit: page 181 has an ad that is a real piece of history]

Are you referring to Swyft Card or Raskin? How are either significant, for the uninformed?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7544389

I just thought it was cool to see Raskin and Woz in the same ad post-Macintosh.

Ah ok, yes that's cool now that you've highlighted the context.

Since the 80's I would eagerly wait for monthly releases of Microhobby, Crash, Amiga Format, DDJ, CUJ, Computer Shooper (UK edition), Gamasutra, Linux Journal, MS Systems Journal.

Now we just have blog posts.

I learned so much good stuff from DDJ and CUJ.

Same. I LOVED Byte back in the late 80s and early 90s. I also read PC Magazine, but Byte was so much better.

I love the web, and the broad accessibility of information, but the way it absolutely destroyed the technical periodical is bittersweet.

Steve Ciarcia was my big reason for reading Byte. He was an incredibly skilled hardware hacker. I subscribed to Circuit Cellar Magazine after he left Byte. He once built a purpose-built board for calculating and generating fractal images, and you could parallel up the boards to generate the image faster.

Pournelle never did much for me. He spent most of his time rambling about esoteric problems he was having and how he worked around them.

> Pournelle never did much for me. He spent most of his time rambling about esoteric problems he was having and how he worked around them.

Exactly why I liked him. His column was unlike anything else, a geeky grampa doddering around chaos manor.

As a disconnected aside, I'm a bit sad my first exposure to Jerry Pournelle was when he was a guest on This Week in Tech podcasts. By the time I picked them up, he certainly was long in years and I felt he rambled more than made coherent points. In prime, he would have been great to hear from every few weeks on technology news.

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