BYTE Magazine

» see byte.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

byte was a us print magazine i never bought. by the time i was old enough to want to read it for the engineering, the print run had already ended. i caught the website's tail end in the early 2000s when it was a shell of the print product, mostly a redirect surface for tradeshow news. byte's reputation reached me anyway, through the robert tinney covers that lived on as desktop wallpapers long after the magazine itself was gone.

wayne green and carl helmers founded the magazine in september 1975 out of peterborough new hampshire. green had been editing the amateur radio publication 73 and helmers had been publishing a tiny home-computer newsletter called ecs. they merged the operations and printed the first issue around the altair and the imsai. by the end of the decade it was the dominant voice of the microcomputer hobby and mcgraw-hill bought it in april 1979. circulation crossed 400,000 in the early 80s. the magazine was profitable in a way that print engineering publications mostly are not anymore.

cmp media bought byte from mcgraw-hill in may 1998. the new owner closed the print operation two months later with the july 1998 issue. the entire staff was laid off the same week. the website kept publishing for several years under various owners, including a revival under techweb in 1999 and another in 2011 under ubm. the last serious update was in 2013. the domain still resolves to an archive that nobody seriously maintains.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

byte was the magazine where you found out what the next cpu architecture meant for the software you were writing. the columns were the product. jerry pournelle wrote a monthly diary called view from chaos manor about trying to make every new piece of hardware work together in his home office, with the predictable failures laid out in detail. ciarcia's circuit cellar, which taught a generation of engineers to build their own peripherals from raw chips, eventually spun off into its own magazine in 1988. tinney's surreal cover paintings still turn up pinned to office walls four decades after the issues they ran on went out of print.

~ how it ended ~

the cmp acquisition was the end. mcgraw-hill had been losing interest in the title for a few years and the sale was a wind-down move dressed as a transfer. cmp's reasoning was that the trade-show business and the related publications could absorb byte's audience without the magazine itself. they were wrong about that but they were not the only ones being wrong about print computing magazines in 1998. byte's circulation had peaked years earlier and the web was already pulling the readership away.

~ what came after ~

the magazine's main inheritance was the column format. ars technica inherited byte's habit of writing about computers in long form, with named columnists and methodology paragraphs attached to every claim. anandtech did the same thing in the hardware-review space a decade later. byte's death in 1998 was the first big public signal that the english-language computing press was going to migrate to the web. the publications that survived for another decade had all been started by readers of byte.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »