Byte magazine ran in print from 1975 to 1998, defining a golden age that began with the first commercially successful personal computer and ending with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or the introduction of the iMac, perhaps.) At byte.tsundoku.io, you can explore the visual history of the "small systems journal." You can zoom into it like a map of the heavens, each issue starting as a row of pixels until you find yourself lost in the fine print of a Silicon Specialties ad or an introduction to computer telecommunications.
Before Hackernews, before Twitter, before blogs, before the web had been spun, when the internet just was four universities in a trenchcoat, there was *BYTE*. A monthly mainline of the entire personal computing universe, delivered on dead trees for a generation of hackers. Running from September 1975 to July 1998, its 277 issues chronicled the Cambrian explosion of the microcomputer, from bare-metal kits to the dawn of the commercial internet. Forget repackaged corporate press-releases; *BYTE* was for the builders. Inside, you'd find Steve Ciarcia teaching you to build a speech synthesizer from scratch, the inner details of a RISC pipeline, deep dives into the guts of Smalltalk, and Jerry Pournelle's legendary columns from Chaos Manor. This wasn't just about what a computer could do, but *how* it did it. The source code of a revolution which continues to this day.
Via Hacker News:
A while ago I was looking for information on a obscure and short lived British computer. I found an article[1] in the archives of BYTE magazine[2] – and was captivated immediately by the tech adverts of bygone eras. This led to a long side project to be able to see all 100k pages of BYTE in a single searchable place.
Check out this painting of a keycap Rubik's cube from one ancient cover! Now that would be a project.
