Byte Magazine Volume 06 Number 09 – Artificial Intelligence (1981) | Hacker News Reader

Byte Magazine Volume 06 Number 09 – Artificial Intelligence (1981)

archive.org

96 pointsbelter39 comments

Michael Wimble wrote a two part AI article that appeared in Byte Vol 2, No 5 and 6. In the article "Artificial Intelligence, an evolutionary idea", Wimble outlined evolutionary computing in a clear and compelling manner, that deserves even more attention today.

Part I - https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-05/page/n27/m...

Part II - https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-06/page/n101/...

Ah, I used to love Byte and other computing magazines of that era.

Despite having access to vast information on any topic now, I still miss the sense of discovery I felt reading new issues.

While I got more utility out of mags like PC Magazine, Byte especially had an unrivaled factor of serendipity delivered to your door

My nerd snipe for the morning: "A High-Level Language Benchmark", p. 180, comparison of the results on p.194 with a few random compilers on the system I'm using today.

All results from my 2013 Mac Pro (12 core), compiled with -O3, "total size" binaries stripped, execution times averaged over 100 runs.

Changes to BYTE C source: add return type / value to main.

Changes to BYTE Fortran source: fix lower bounds on DO loops (FLAGS(0) is invalid), change LOGICAL comparison from .EQ. to .EQV. to silence compiler warning, change WRITE channel to stdout.

  clang (Xcode 14.2)
    Compiled Bytes: 1,096
    Total Bytes: 49,496
    Compile and Load: 0.392 s
    Execute: 0.210 s
    Ratio to PL/I-80: 0.015
    1/(Ratio to PL/I-80): 66.67
  
  gcc 12.2 (MacPorts)
    Compiled Bytes: 1,224
    Total Bytes: 49,496
    Compile and Load: 0.247 s
    Execute: 0.203 s
    Ratio to PL/I-80: 0.0145
    1/(Ratio to PL/I-80): 68.97
  
  icc 2021.9.0 20230302
    Compiled Bytes: 1,582
    Total Bytes: 99,664
    Compile and Load: 0.675 s
    Execute: 0.334 s
    Ratio to PL/I-80: 0.0239
    1/(Ratio to PL/I-80): 41.92
  
  gfortran 12.2 (MacPorts)
    Compiled Bytes: 1,968
    Total Bytes: 49,832
    Compile and Load: 0.239 s
    Execute: 0.00832 s
    Ratio to PL/I-80: 0.000594
    1/(Ratio to PL/I-80): 1,682.69
  
  ifort 2021.9.0 20230302
    Compiled Bytes: 2,467
    Total Bytes: 801,192
    Compile and Load: 0.617 s
    Execute: 0.00667 s
    Ratio to PL/I-80: 0.000476
    1/(Ratio to PL/I-80): 2,098.95

Tentative conclusion: At least on x64 macOS, we should all be writing Fortran 77, compiled with GNU Fortran where code (esp. runtime) size is critical, Intel Fortran otherwise.

YMMV.

Also has Tony Hoare's "The Emperor's Old Clothes" on page 414.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/358549.358561

Thanks so much for sharing this. I'd never read it before. It's sad that his advice predates my existence yet here we are still unwilling to listen.

> The design of a program and the design of its specification must be undertaken in parallel [...] I wish I had followed this advice in 1963; I wish we all would follow it today.

sigh

>>p.58 the Xerox Alto Computer [author Thomas A Wadlow] Some attributes of this research tool will be used in the next generation of personal computers

Good call.

I remember going over every page and every Ad when magazines like this were the news pipeline for what was going on. Before Usenet, Internet etc, that was pretty much it. Dial-up BBS systems were more local than anything.

One thing really hit home with this magazine - the sheer vibrancy of the industry back then. Just about everyone was out there and trying to claim a niche in a corner somewhere. It ranged from somebody with a side project buying ads in Byte or the local users group, through small businesses, and some big ones.

And then came the IBM PC. And then the internet. Sameness happened. There doesn't seem to be anything left that remotely resembles the nascent computer "industry" of the early-mid 80s (except perhaps the tech hubs in China).

Another thing that struck me: writers freely provided their home address for mail replies. Imagine that today?

Great cover, as always for Byte of that era.

It’s a Robert Tinney, as many of the great Byte covers were.

Tangent: TRS-80 Model III was advertised at $8,326.63 in 2023 dollars! (page 36)

At the time it really was a serious decision by nerdy teenagers whether to get a computer or a used car. You generally couldn't afford both. Computers are insanely cheap today.

> Computers are insanely cheap today.

That includes software.

Even as a working engineer a couple years later buying a PC clone (without hard drive) was a major decision. Probably 20+% of before-tax salary. And, yes, something like a C complier was a very non-trivial purchase as well.

I bought one that year for $500 (1981 dollars) from a guy in his garage, my first non-Heathkit computer. I don't know the provenance but don't think it fell off a truck. It had a cassette system for storage. The seller told me he had a 5MB hard disk available for $5,000.

Around that time my dad bought a Z80 S-100 bus system (made by Thinkertoys) with 64k memory, two 8” disk drives, and a terminal for $14,726 in 2023 dollars. Hacking and tinkering with microcomputers could be a very expensive hobby, in the early days.

Hacking and tinkering with AI can be expensive today. A machine with an A100 is about that pricey. Thankfully, now we have the cloud.

The whole magazine is great. The scope and quality are impressive - from the Xerox Alto (and its GUI/mouse/Ethernet) to Tony Hoare's Turing lecture to AI research to programming and circuit projects to product reviews. Even the ads are interesting (and not just in retrospect I think.)

Like an Osborne "briefcase" computer ad on page 33. Cheaper than the Model III, more "portable", and it runs (HN favorite) CP/M out of the box. Less than $6K adjusted for inflation - cheaper than a specced out MacBook Pro!

And since the Osborne's storage (dual 100KB floppy drives) is removable, you could in principle exceed the MacBook Pro's aggregate 8TB SSD storage capacity with only 80 million floppy disks.

That was my first computer, but I had the low end $999 version with 16k and only an only audio cassettes for storage. This is what most people purchased

Over the years, I would upgrade it with third party floppy drives and more RAM to bring it up-to the high end model.

That high end model in the ad was effectively like today’s Mac Pro or Dell Precision and almost certainly include TRS-DOS which on its own was an expensive software

yes, but rent and housing (inflation adjusted) were much cheaper.

Well, it depends where. People were moving out of what we now consider "elite" US cities in droves well into the 1990s. So many of those cities were pretty inexpensive by today's standards. Of course, most of the jobs were out in the suburbs/exurbs where people actually wanted to live.

But, yes, in general anything that's primarily electronic is (relatively speaking) ridiculously cheap today while desirable land and personal services cost a lot.

Higher education was drastically cheaper back then as well.

For example, Berkeley tuition for was $510 for three quarters in 1981 ($1700 adjusted for inflation) vs. $12K for two semesters today.

(Note that nonresidents also have to pay an additional $30K in "nonresident supplemental tuition.")

and we now need 4 ipads and iphones plus a few macbooks per family, but you only needed one of these

The money has to go somewhere. Apple, Disney, Taylor Swift, and many others are very good at grabbing the lion's share of the middle class wallet.

There's actually a much better issue somewhere, where they show a computer writing code. I remember it because I was sorely disappointed that they didn't deliver.

Dang, we think battling adds is something new. Byte magazine was 60% ads.

we think battling adds is something new. Byte magazine was 60% ads.

That was a feature, not a bug.

Advertising is how you found out about most of what was new.

The editorial side could only write about so many things, and when it did, they were often just two or three sentences.

We looked forward to the advertising. Heck, there was an 800-1,000 page magazine called Computer Shopper that was nothing but ads, and people loved it.

There were local publications like this, too. I used to read Toronto Computes! and The Computer Paper mostly for the ads. I loved seeing all the PC parts prices in the ads from local computer shops.

The ads helped me plan my PC builds and upgrades - or, more commonly, they helped me dream about upgrades I wanted but couldn't quite afford!

A couple of critical differences from today though: almost all the ads were of interest to the reader of Byte, and these were often the only practical source of information we had on things. No googling and popping over to their website.

If anyone bought Computer Shopper for the articles, it was rare (or maybe even rare squared).

Computer Shopper had enough low rent articles (what we'd probably consider akin to content farms today) to technically be a magazine. But really it was a huge book of ads.

Back then every niche market big enough to create advertisement demand fueled a market for special interest magazines to match those ads to the audience the advertiser is interested in. Today you can advertise even tiniest niche on content as generic cat videos.

Half the joy of a Byte magazine issue was looking at all the cool products in the ads.

Full page ads for Tektronix Smalltalk workstations, with beautiful shots of exotic windowing systesms? Pages and pages of ads for S100 bus cards with interesting specs, in a city in another country? Yes please.

My elementary school library unloaded all their old issues on me in about 1986, and it was even enjoyable going back through the 1980, 1981 issues 5, 6 years later and seeing the stuff that was current at the time.

Yes, I was a nerd. Hah.

Wish I'd kept those, but they were in bad shape.

I always viewed technical magazines as pages of advertisement because we don't see them on TV and it was the only platform for them to be noticed when there was less adaption of internet.

Less adoption? There was no internet to adopt in 1981.

If by some miracle your computer was on a network, it was CompuServe or Delphi or that one that catered to Apples. If you wanted to send an email, you did it at a public terminal at a university or a hippie tech commune.

more specifically, there were two kinds of centralized network engineers in those days: military trained, and those that named their servers after Tolkien characters. The de-centralized BBS operators over common-carrier telephone lines were supposedly "hobbyists" but the patterns they established grew stronger over time. "hippie" is a slur btw, no one that was one would say that.. The word comes from a Look Magazine article on San Francisco IIR

If you think hippie is a slur, you weren't there.

I greatly prefer BYTE's ads to 99.9% of modern internet advertising.

Enthusiast magazines still seem to work well for having relevant and interesting advertisements.

(1981)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com