Byte Magazine – for 70s/80s/90s Hackers

[Ed P]

The Byte Archive is now complete and on-line.

In the early days it was my must-have, must-read  magazine subscription, and over time it just grew and grew in numbers of pages and weight. I’d guess that in the late 80s it topped out at a couple of kilos.

Take a look at the 1975 editions and you will see that this was not an inexpensive toy for the masses. Even a DIY single board computer would set you back the price of a second-hand car. I had to save for about two years before I could afford my first pc (an Apple IIe).

Btw the Hacker in the title refers to the original usage of the term, which was all about building, making, coding and investigating. It had nothing in common with the criminal hacking of this age.

[Dave Rice]

It was from Byte I learned about vertical and horizontal interrupts on the Atari 400 / 800.

With a bit of assembler you could change the value of a colour during the horiztonal interrupt i.e. the time between line 1 being drawn and line 2 being drawn etc So what was red on line 1 would be blue on line 2. You could do some interesting animation effects, like waterfalls or scrolling landscapes, and appear to have many more colours than you actually had.

[Richard]

I saw it erratically living overseas but it was still a let down when it went the way of all flesh. It had something for everyone, but lots that were not for any one person and yes, costs were a bit higher then. ‘Massive’ 250 MB disk drives were quite physically quite large even when they became PC usable – if you stomach the prices. I found an old 4 MB static protection package a little while back, that bit cost more than an entire PC today. Ouch

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

I quite often read Byte starting in 1978 but my subscription was to Micro Computer Print Out ( later Printout !) Magazine. A review in 1980 convinced me to go for an Atari 400 with a massive 48k of ram soldered in. Seeing as I had a 1K ZX80 at the time, 48K seemed inexhaustible !

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