Hacker News Reader

At some point somewhere between the late 80's and the mid '90's the entire computer magazine series of rags became little more than the video game wall to wall advertisements, including the gushing of over praise in all their "journalism articles". When they failed to offer the service they were supposed, they claimed to offer their grave was dug. It's been 30 years of nonsense nothing-but-ads computer magazines, surprised they lasted this long.

View on HN

I was a Byte subscriber. The ads were part of the content as they gave me a feel of the market. From big companies to the little guys in the back pages, you could see what people were selling and how it related to the magazine's own content.

Byte's articles were rarely critical, they couldn't be or they'd risk advertisers business.

I didn't mind that much. For example when IBM introduced their Micro Channel Architecture, the "reviews" of machines such as the PS/2 Model 80 were pretty much matter of fact, explaining the technical details and with some decent photos. And this was still useful in pre-WWW times and even beyond.

That's alright. Byte's articles aimed more at connecting the state of the art, both academic and commercial, to actual problems being solved. You didn't read Byte for first-hand review of products but for insights on the computing world as a whole.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com