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.
The hobbyist arena tended to fall more towards magazines like Popular Electronics, and the focus was much more the lower circuit levels. Byte dipped their toes into that arena via a few of the regular columnists, but that was not their target (despite the fact that many of us subscribers were "computer hobbyists" by most any definition of that term).
FWIW, the German magazine ct from Heise is a good modern replacement.
Although I was 14 I asked my parents for a subscription to Byte. Every so often I'd get an offer in the mail to join a "wine of the month" service, or life insurance, etc. Clearly they had sold their mailing list and they just assumed anyone with a subscription must be an adult.
Anyway, I loved Steve Ciarcia's column and hated Jerry Pournelle's column that got too much space. His schtick was that he was a power user using the hardware/software for doing real work. But he was far from normal -- he'd write florid articles about having a software or hardware malfunction and then calling up the owner of the company and they next morning the guy who wrote the malfunctioning app would be at Jerry's house debugging it. "XYZ Corp produces quality software that they really stand behind and you should buy it too." Yeah, Jerry, you didn't buy it, and the average Joe doesn't get personal attention like that. I found him to be an insufferable, self-important twat. 45 years later I still feel the same about him.
https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine?page=2&sort=dat...
Also Compute!' Gazette:
https://archive.org/details/computes.gazette/Compute_Gazette...
The most amazing magazine of all, though, was The Transactor. Exclusively Commodore, and for programmers. Very few ads, too. Their "Inner Space Anthology" was an incredible resource for everything technical. Memory maps, ROM listings, and much, much more.
Hard to express what that monthly compendium of electronic and computer hobbyist articles meant, to a farm boy thousands of miles from anywhere.
I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.
1. If in the city/small town: go to the library, read latest BYTE magazine, Radio Electronics, a few other electronics (then computer-) magazines, and so on[1]. Then, browse back issues - my library had them all in the first few years - find code that I might adapt to my machine, copy notes or - remember it - for when I got home later. I usually didn't check anything out because I never, ever gave back BYTE magazines I loaned from the library, just because I never knew when I'd be back (or that was my excuse). So, the library was just for reference/note-taking. This actually made going on those boring family visits quite palatable.
2. If in the city: Go to every newsagent/magazine dealer in my route, read every single tech magazine - BYTE, Dr. Dobbs Journal, ZAP, etc. as quickly as possible, before being asked to leave. Buy something if possible, but only if a review finds something interesting. Usually, leave with a BYTE, at least. If I could afford it, always with a DDJ too. Repeat at every newsagent in the city.
3. If I am in the country, at Uncle Hacker-Shacks: In between hacking on his radios and amplifiers, burning my fingers on some new Fun Way Into Electronics Dick Smith kits, and with those toasty digits browsing his extensive magazine collection, including every BYTE issue since the beginning (it's the 70's/80's, I'm a teen) .. do chores (lawns/wood-chopping/fishing/cleaning/reading-to-little-kids) and save coins for photocopying .. take uncles magazines to get photocopies of interesting things, create my own ring-binder full of such things to take back home with me. Somehow, my uncle always had really great magazines and books and things, way, way out there beyond the dusty horizon... and I'd go home after the holidays, with copies of the best of it.
Usually BYTE magazine articles for systems (Apple/C64/etc.) similar enough to mine (Oric-1) to have some use for me, later, when I got back home to my computer. During those long bus, car, train, plane rides, I'd often spend more time reading and re-reading the listings, than I did typing it in when I finally got home.
BYTE was huge to me, it was my first real foray into cross-platform/multi-discipline software development, I literally had no choice but to port things to the Oric-1, if I wanted to do anything with it. I really wish I still had those old ring-binders, it'd be a blast to see my old notes and printouts (had the Oric printer for such things, it was my long-term archive, which I've long-since lost..)
The skills I gained, basically from 8 years old to 18 years old, by reading these magazines - truly informed an important part of my professional toolbox, which have stuck with me for years of course, since this was an era where a significant part of computing technology was being worked out.
I really wonder how kids these days get access to the evolutionary, real-time nature of the fields they're interested in. I guess MAKE filled that hole for a while.
EDIT: Just wanted to say, Issue #1 of BYTE is really worth a read .. "Assembling your own Assembler", and "Recycling used IC's" is so resonant with my Sunday-afternoon musings about the perils of AI and ML on my teenagers' mindset .. seems like someone else is gonna get some burned fingers, soon enough ..
[1] - (I think I read my first 2600 this way also...)
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 :-(
It was also where I first started learning about synthesizers, which is another subject my uncle and I would get burned fingers about - him building the oscillator and me doing the filter and so on .. but there were other magazines of that ilk, I thing Radio Electronics transitioned to "Electronics Magazine" in my market in those days (Australia), or so it seems through the fog of time ..
I can come clean and say that I have all of these magazines safely .PDF'ed for the sailboat somewhere, I do know that for sure anyway, lol ..
I didn't have much money so I stuck with Micro Cornucopia as it had the biggest signal to noise ratio (and before that Rainbow Magazine). I did pickup Computer Shopper later when I started building/rebuilding my mini-tower every few months.
While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.
I think you're right. A lot of people have written about this, but one of my favourites who has stuck with me in recent years is Byung-Chul Han with "The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present"
It covers other topics as well, but describes the value of physical experiences and serendipitous encounters that occurred before the digital era as we know it today. Having everything at hand is an incredible trade-off, and it isn't entirely clear what the downsides are because you can literally never know beyond "I'm missing out on countless experiences". What could they have been?
We gain a sort of efficiency, which at one point almost seemed imperative... But here we are, wishing we could ride our bikes to the bookstore again, just to look at printed copies of weeks or months-old data in inconvenient paper bindings.
It seems to be more than nostalgia to me; it's the desire to be out in the world, engaged, excited, and exploring. Maybe even with friends! We had to do that once, but now, not so much. And the journey to what we're seeking follows the same track, roughly the same distance, and a similar result, every single time. Efficiency isn't always very fun.
Of course, inefficiency is sometimes not fun at all too. I suppose we need to find the right blend, for the right reasons, and be cognizant of these trade offs as we go about our days and our lives.
Also, I loved Linux Journal (later years) and Linux Magazine. I got a subscription sent to a cousin who lived in the US (In Alaska!!). She came to Mexico every six months and would bring the stacks of those magazines, which i would read back to back.
One thing I miss from thise type of magazines was the high SNR ratio and most importantly the information "push" character of it. You would learn stuff that was related but adjacent to your interests. But it will make you expand your knowledge horizon.
Nowadays sure, everything is a search away... but, you dont know what you dont know. So what would you search for?
Additionally, most content on the internet is VERY low effort. High quality content got heavily devalued.
This was so important - you'd get your monthly copy, and you'd read all the parts you were interested in, but after a few days, it'd still be a month until the next issue and all that was left to read were the ads and the parts you weren't really into. But there wasn't anything else, so you'd read them, too.
One of the things I like about Hacker News is that it provides some exposure of this kind. The SNR in any given post might not always be high, but the tangential discussions often lead to topics just as interesting, expanding my awareness of what I don't know. There are lots of rabbit holes to explore here.
I've got a few great memories from the mid-80s...
Being on school-vacation trip with my teacher and classmates at about 11 years old and sending a letter to my mom with a BASIC program I asked her to type on my computer at home and then calling her to ask her the result of the program.
Then pedaling on my BMX clone bicycle to go meet strangers I'd meet through classified ads in a local newspaper where ads read like this (in french but I'll translate):
"Have 120 games for the C64, listing on demand. Send your listing."
At 13 years old or so, we'd buy an ad in the local newspaper and run ads like that, with our phone number and (snail) mail address.
Many games we didn't care about but we load them again and again to see and re-see the "cracktro" before the game (except they weren't yet called cracktro: the term hadn't been coined yet).
Salivating in front of shops displaying computers: but those looking too "serious", as kids we didn't dare to enter those so we'd watch through the window.
Fast-forward 10 years to the mid-nineties and I find myself working with a person whose books (in french) about computing I used to buy and read to learn about computers and programming.
These were the days.
I’m discovering a renewed appreciation for libraries — never lost in theory but in practice. I’m lucky my community has a good municipal public library nearby, a good university library not too much farther. Book collection at MPL is mixed but plenty of good to great material in the mix. Periodical collection has journalism superior to most freely available web. Periodical archives at university library are incredible (including stuff like Byte).
The environment encourages a better balance between exploration and focus. There are people to greet or not as you wish. There is no algorithm trying to anger for engagement or crumb out just enough other rewards just often enough that you pull the lever for another hit for as long as possible. Search is a whole different game, both higher effort but also passing through a more scholarly tradition and less of the commercial incentive war.
Online advantages still remain (and evolve). I’m not about to give up the web. But I might want more of myself focused through environments and institutions like libraries.
Haven’t seen the bookstore newsstand for a while though, maybe I should see what that’s like these days too.
Here's a tweet I made packing them up when I was moving overseas in April 2015:
https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/586675607087419394/photo/1
I also have a 1984 Encyclopædia Britannica, all 30 volumes.
Will anyone want them when I can't house them?
It was transformative to go, each week, and see new stuff or review things this way.
1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore.
2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after every page. It's interesting to look back at those ads from today but it's also a jarring experience to some extent.
Also make sure to read the letters to editor part! Always fun
Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February:
All lost during a move from one city to another - except for one Byte book: Threaded Interpreted Languages.
https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...
I binned my large collection of Byte, Dr. Dobbs, etc. during a move. I recall taking them down from an attic cubby and then having to take them back up. Something like "Oh, forget it" came to pass. Stuff it heavy!
Interestingly, I think one of the most formative Byte articles for me was from 1978 (I think). It was an introduction to 3D graphics. Specifically the matrices for rotation and scaling etc.
I can assure that that while it is possible to visualize simple 3D models using the 40x25 character graphics of a PET, it's not advisable. The one thing I was unknowingly missing was Bresenham's line algorithm. That would have helped. I might have even moved up to "high res (80x50)" using the little block PETSCII characters.
I was able to work with it more in college where I had access to a Tektronix 4052 (which readily solve the whole line drawing problem).
It's interesting to wonder if the next 50 years of computing will be the same. Will a device from 2075 make what we have today seem like primitive toys? No doubt we'll have full blown AGI by then, which may be the major difference, and we'll (or rather our kids) will look back with nostaligia on these LLMs which seemed so revolutionary at the time, but severely limited and flawed, just a hint of what is going to come.
I also have lots of the actual machines and parts, especially Apple, Commodore. Ship them too?
https://github.com/SixOThree/Collectibles
One thing I'm considering adding is a "inquire about this item" link.
I am using a few of your photo's but as a database I just filled a spreadsheet (poor man's database) that I can turn into a website hosted at home with two clicks: Squeak with Seaside, Magritte and Pier CMS (swiki). I then render a catalogue PDF with another few clicks for the LLMs. Total time for setup from zero 82 minutes, mostly the time to search the files on my spotlight indexed 400 TB harddisk.
The Byte magazines are extra searchable documentation for the Retro Computing stuff (from capacitors to fix old CRT monitors, cables to wire up coax, ADB, SCSI, IEEE-488 and Appletalk, whole computers, Transputer supercomputers, IBM Risc 1000, early FPGA's) and ways to do SEO: if people search for Lisa than Byte text OCR-ed will find Macintosh XL and my web page catalogue and they see I have several for sale.
There is a faster way still, just get you stuff in a csv tab delimited list and render it into a html file and host it on my first webserver september 2 1991 [2] or today on one of the few free webhosting options left: https://100yeararchive.neocities.org
When I started the first public ISP in 1987, several years before the first web page (on August 6, 1991 [2]), I just hosted my collectables and magazines (The same as I offer here today, I still have them 49 years later), photo's and hardware on hyper cards, mailing lists, uucp, usenet, FTP or Gopher. Webpages we also hosted on the unix home directory of my customers next to their pop email box. I think of your proposal as: the early internet is a great improvement on its successors.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19970509105527/http://www.knowar...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
Now, I’ll need to check what is on archive for each issue and make sure I have the highest quality for each one…
"A McGraw-Hlll PIIIJIICGIIOI1/0360-5280" " and dBonk erformance nc ie and t load ng ter 1 even " doesnt appear so
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/m...
On the other hand the 6800 code is buggy too. It's incrementing only one byte of the FROM and TO pointers — and the MSB at that on a bigendian machine — with no provision for crossing a page boundary, when the normal thing is to
LDX FROM
LDA 0,X
INX
STX FROM
LDX TO
STA 0,X
INX
STX TO
LDA FROM,X
STA TO,X
INX
Also no mention is made of `(ZP),Y` addressing mode which takes 6502 to another level entirely.
The Lisp issue is what got me into said language. Later I was using music software (Cakewalk) and noticed the language was nearly the same, so I started making non-music stuff in Cakewalk as well. CAL was all about programming music logic, but it was a fully fledged language that did whatever text-oriented duties you could think of. It was also super easy to write viruses, although they would only run within Cakewalk of course. Fun times!
I learned a tremendous deal from it and I will forever be grateful.
But it does call into question my decision to haul 100's of kg of these things around every time I moved residence over the last 40+ years.
> A person with a primary interest in software will oftentimes be the person who purchases a kit computer because the kit minimizes the amount of hardware knowledge the person is required to have.
That’s how I came into my first computer - built from a kit in 7th grade.
And, yeah, I understand more about hardware than I did back then, but it’s all about the software to me still… okay, maybe some electronics and mechanics, too.
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11/page/n129/...
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.
Pournelle original claim to fame was as one of the authors of “Strategy of Technology“ which was very influential in the 70s.
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.
I remember reading ads about a specific make of vacuum pumps next to an article with experiments which used them.
Today's ads are so obtrusive because you get toilet seat ads next to an article about general relativity.
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11/page/n173/...
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.
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, mostly chips, sockets, and some wiring tools.
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.
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.
The CP/M market was the precursor of the modern PC market - mostly small businesses who didn't see themselves as technical but understood that word processing and spreadsheets could save them time and money.
Minis weren't considered small systems, both for reasons of cost and complexity, so Byte didn't cover them.
By the mid-80s the cost of a PDP-11 had come right down, and was comparable to a high-end CP/M box. DEC made some efforts to sell to small businesses, but never quite understood the people or the market.
Then the IBM PC and its clones appeared and nuked the CP/M market from orbit.
This was DEC's biggest strategic failure. It had about ten years to make the PDP-11 and VAX designs an industry standard. But it was too busy selling expensive peripherals and trying to compete with IBM at the high end to pay attention to what was happening at the low end, and IBM clones stole its lunch.
https://archive.org/details/PcWorld2010
The difference in amount ads is really insane...
I still value a massive collection when I see it, in atomic form, in the real universe of course - but my personal reading of the .PDF archive is usually focused more on its early years - which just seems so much more pioneering/adventurous.
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.
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.
NO Internet back then.
People still had a massive thirst for information. Even the ads where interesting and read by many to learn more ....
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 ?
Unfortunately many novel library buildings are transitioning to electronic stacks which fetch specific resources quickly and are well suited to large collections but deny the experience of browsing.
My Dad regularly gave me Omni magazine subscriptions, it was kind of how I realized there were really great things to read out there, as a young 'un ..
If anything, the closest thing we have to Byte in 1975 is /r/localllama in 2026. Believe me, there was no shortage of old men in 1975 who didn't get it, either.
What do I mean? If you posted them for free you might get a taker, but probably not.
But it's possible you might identify the right child at the right time who could appreciate them.
1991 Byte might be too old, but a 1984 Britannica has something even an offline copy of Wikipedia doesn't.
I like their tear downs of electronic equipment. https://www.edn.com/category/design/under-the-hood-teardown/...
Sadly Internet archive does not have a complete collection of old EDN magazines ....
Probably, if one thinks about it, one of the more eloquent data structures in human existence, BYTE.
The money went to buying my first computer (kit).
I took what I learned from BYTE and wrote a CP/M terminate/stay-resident 'driver' that got some interesting hardware working well enough to get me the contract, as a teenager, to write the DOS driver for thing as well.
That led to a rocket-ride career through decades of systems programming, and I just can't thank the BYTE folks enough for those mind-expanding days ..
Pournelle was always pleasant.
I had the opportunity to share a dinner with JP. I was on BIX, Byte Information Exchange, their "BBS" or "CompuServe"-ish service. And Jerry would occasionally sponsor small get togethers.
So there was about 8 of us just sharing dinner at a Chinese place in the Valley. It was a great time. The man can talk, to be sure. Sat right next to him.
Living in New Zealand, it wasn't easy to meet people — or for that matter to access BIX! I was fortunate that from mid 1986 my employer paid for access via X.25 [1] for several years until telnet was possible from Actrix BBS.
jdow took me to LASFS once in 1989 and I think I saw JP from a distance. But in 2004 I spontaneously caught a flight to LA for the historic SpaceShip One 100km high flight. jpistritto picked me up at the airport and we drove to Mojave. Parking at the XCor hangar david42 and his wife Rita pulled up next to us in an RX7. There was a party in the hangar that evening, I got to talk with JP and LN and many others, at one point helped Doug Jones (can't remember if he was on bix) make LN2 icecream. A lot of us slept in the hangar. In the morning I helped shadow cook bacon&eggs for everyone, before we all went out to watch the flight.
Also at other times got to meetups in Phoenix, New York (a lot of C++ crowd there), New Haven (people came down from Boston), Seattle.
Good times.
[1] NZ$13.20 per kilosegment (ISTR even more at first!) .. up to 64k bytes if you filled the packets, but possibly as little as 1000 bytes if there was only 1 byte per packet e.g. sitting there and hitting return: so I always filed all new messages to scratchpad and then did either SHOW or else download via X/Y/Z modem.
I bought "Bowl of Heaven" because his name was on it, but it was a disappointing read and DNF for me...
More seriously though, print advertising was able to target readers based upon the demographics of the publications readership. They didn't track people across their online life and beyond. (That said, there definitely was some tracking.)
I agree, content targeting feels less jarring because it fits with what you are reading.
Doesn't that just create a very obvious conflict of interest and nullify the credibility of the article?
Obviously you, the reader, cannot know if that's what happened, or whether in reality it was the opposite way around, but maybe you trust the reviewer and believe they wouldn't do the other thing, or at least they would feel morally unable to do the other thing without telling you.
And to some extent that same relationship matters to whether you trust the content anyway, irrespective of advertising. I believe Yahtzee Crosshaw did or did not like the video game, I reckon Yahtzee, for whatever it's worth, isn't lying if he said it was fun.
Or take a more obscure but perhaps more relevant example. "Techmoan" on Youtube says maybe this brand new Asda tape player is the best he's seen in years. It's not great, the equivalent product in the 1980s would have Dolby and it'd be smaller and lighter and generally better, but, it's 2026 and Asda can't buy a 1980s tape player, they would need to invest billions to make one and it makes no economic sense in the era of handheld super-computers to invest so much money to make better tape players. So this one is pretty good, considering. Well that's faint praise, but it is praise. If "Techmoan" says he just bought it to see if it's any good, and here's a link to Asda's website, I believe him. If Asda bought him the tape player or even just paid him to say it, why would he lie? He's an old curmudgeon who loves legacy music formats, he's not going to get rich lying to me, so that makes no sense.
In fact they seem to have tightened up on free review samples in general.
I did some reviewing in the 90s and the magazine had a solid reviews policy - tell the truth even if someone pulls their advertising. Which very much happened on a few occasions.
You can do that if you have no issues with selling ad pages, which Byte clearly didn't.
Whether that was ever generally true for the industry, or is true now with YouTube influencers, is a different question.
But let's clarify something. You say you are using my photos. Are you referring to the hosted version of my personal photos, without attribution? Or are you referring to the images in the github repo, which themselves have CC attribution in the readme?
Also why did you bloviate so much about yourself here? Was it to make yourself seem more important? Because honestly you come off as a real asshole Merick.
ROFL. Didn't you notice he's Dutch? And old (add insult to injury).
Expect extreme absence of delicacy from the Dutch, they simply lack that gene.
Then again, your comment was a complete, shameless plug of promoting your own crap, in total disregard of what the man said. Someone had to say it to you.
>> Also why did you bloviate so much about yourself here? Was it to make yourself seem more important? Because honestly you come off as a real asshole Merick.
I would bet on "I'm old and I don't care".
What I'm curious though is why would he sell the physical collection.
It was, it's fine. But it's also something I spent 6 months on, purpose built for his scenario, and most importantly released under MIT license without charge.
And yeah, I totally didn't notice he was Dutch. I'm used to rude, but the whole pivot to his life accomplishments was quite gross and repulsive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_J-11
which was used to build this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Professional
DEC had a 1-chip PDP-11 but a 1-chip PDP-11 wasn't competitive with the better chips coming out around 1982. That DEC Professional was not such a great machine and the software support for it was worse. You couldn't run software from the minicomputer and even if you could it wasn't suitable for the needs of end users on a single-user system who were asking to open bigger spreadsheets and such.
I knew the PDP-11 pretty well, I never got my hands on a high-end CP/M machine.
The PDP-11 came out around 1970, the OS I always used on it was RSTS/E which was provided an interactive BASIC programming environment. You might have 15 terminals and each user got their own 64k address space. It was a lot like using BASIC on a Apple ][ but a little better, especially because you got to keep files on a hard drive and if you were in a programming class you could share files with the instructor and other student. You could also, like CP/M, run other binaries in that address space and you could edit with the TECO text editor, use a FORTRAN compiler, etc. Ordinarily you would use a VT-100 terminal with 80x25 text which was bigger than most home computers which were more like 40x25. If you were lucky you had a color vk100
https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VK100
with better graphics capabilities than home computers except for animation.
High end CP/M machines used the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP/M
OS for multitasking or actually had one CPU board for user, that, like the PDP-11 gave every user a 64k address space.
When I was getting into this stuff as an 8 year old in 1980 (really!) there was a lot of talk about an 8 to 16 bit transition so of course I imagined future micros would look something like the PDP-11. With micros we had just a handful of 8-bit registers, with mostly 8-bit operations but sometimes 16-bit operations because you sure as hell have to be able do pointer arithmetic. The PDP-11 had 8 16-bit registers and seemed pretty powerful in comparison, but...
it had a 64k problem space. When micros first came out, it was prohibitive to fill out the 64k address space but by 1983 or so even cheap machines had the full 64k. The crisis of the industry was that ordinary user applications needed more RAM. The PDP-11 had a virtual memory system that had 8 8k pages, not too different from virtual memory systems today but simple and small. It worked great for sharing the machine between users but not so great for applications, i guess they could have updated the OS and compilers to do better -- late generation 8-bit machines like my TRS-80 Color Computer 3 had a similar memory management system, but they didn't.
People thought the 68k was the future with a 16x32-bit register file like the IBM 360 mainframe but it wasn't... turns out you can't really pipeline a computer which has indirect addressing [1] so the likes of Motorola and DEC were abandoning the 68k and VAX by the late 1980s. These had no future. Also the 68k did not perform in real life as well as people thought it would.
The 8086 though was pure "worse is better"; the segmentation model seemed lame in comparison to the 32-bit 68k line, but it was actually easy and fun (in my opinion) to use in assembly language and you couldn't afford, say, 8 MB of memory and didn't need a system that could handle it. All of a sudden you could make bigger spreadsheets and CP/M was headed for the dustbin at the high end.
Funny though CP/M did have a sort of revival in that it became common in low-end machines like the C-128 but it was too little too late, the industry going in the PC direction. A last hurrah for me was that circa 1988 I wrote some software in BASIC for a teacher at my school who had a CP/M computer and I had a Z80 emulator that ran on my 286 machine which was 3x faster than any real Z80. That 286 was lame in a lot of ways but it was crazy fast for the price.
[1] ... this was the one RISC/CISC CPU thing that really mattered!
Amstrad were good late 80s CP/M machines. We got both those and C128 in New Zealand.
> the one RISC/CISC CPU thing that really mattered!
Not only indirect addressing, but also multiple memory operands in the same instruction — more than one VM page, really, though a single unaligned operand crossing a page boundary is also bad. Many machines trap on that case to this day and let software emulate it.
Not being able to easily tell how long an instruction is (and thus where the next one starts) is also bad, but can be overcome at some cost in the front end, and the back end is unaffected. Unlike x86 and VAX the 68k does actually tell you everything you need in the first 16 bits, but yes the complex addressing of the 020/030 were what killed it.