In its glory days Byte magazine was a good 1/2 - 3/4 inch thick (and printed on very thin paper). It was also densely packed with information.

People had more time to read I guess (or maybe now we do all our reading on the internet)

It was not normal.

The demand for advertisements targeting readers interested in personal computers grew very quickly in 1979 and the early 1980s. Byte was able to capture much of the quickly growing advertising revenue because it took years for high-growth-capable competitors to Byte to get off the ground.

(Byte was mostly ads back then.)

PC Magazine started in Feb 1982. Its issues quickly became as thick or almost as thick and ad-filled as Byte's.

There were other magazines in the same market in the 1970s, e.g., Dr Dobb's Journal, but for some reason they never expanded their "portfolio" (terminology?) of advertisers the way that Byte did.

I guess the mainstream magazine publishers considered (probably rightly so at that stage of the industry) personal computers too niche to be worth their while. PC Magazine for example was started by an enthusiast, not a mainstream publisher.

Graphic design was done by hand in those days. They literally cut and pasted images and text for the pages. My parents were both graphic designers and I watched them do this as a child before computers took over the industry. You can imagine how digital publishing tools made this process easier to iterate on.

DTP was a major revolution, even if it's rarely called DTP these days.

They do look better, but I must say BYTE and friends packed one hell of a punch.

I've almost zero interest in magazines today, but I would still subscribe to BYTE, COMPUTE and a couple others, given their editorial focus was similar to what made them great then.

You’re absolutely right, although I believe the information density in today’s magazines is quite a bit lower.

What amaze me the most is that half of it is ad. Those and the content seem to have a very similar production value, which did muddle the reading a bit...

I don’t miss this.

Holy cow, I like this old BYTE more. Like Computer Chronicles. I like how direct and no-bullshit the layout and all the graphics are. Ads are creative and fun, and the content is rich in ideas. Modern magazines often lack substance and soul, including graphics design. What modern computing magazine can compare, is there a single example?

Looking at this BYTE mag pretty much confirms to me the old adage that the Earth's population is increasing but the IQ levels are staying the same.

On page 158 of the linked issue, it points out that they just started using digital typesetting. (I totally disagree with you, by the way; I like my content front and center, and my design well to the rear, which I think BYTE does very well indeed.)