Byte Magazine - 23 Years of Computer History

I've been working on this one in the background since I've started moving into the office. But I'm finally ready to share the complete collection of Byte magazine I've been able to put together!
A complete scanned library of Byte: vintageapple.org/byte/
0:00 Intro
1:40 What is Byte?
3:25 Breadth and Depth
5:30 The end of Byte
6:54 Making a Collection
9:15 Protecting a Collection
12:02 Getting to the fun part
12:44 Issue #1
19:45 September 1976
21:56 Scan and Search
23:23 Steve Ciarcia Projects
27:56 First Mention of Linux
31:30 Researching Can Still Be Hard
36:33 The Last Issue
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[@TechTangents]

At 30:14 there is a rough jump, that was supposed to be cut but a different tweak I made brought it back and I didn't catch it. There is nothing missing, I just rephrased something better.

[@mattparker9726]

thanks for this, I found a torrent of all the magazines as PDFs online. This is super cool!

[@soteful9949]

That's it..... UNSUB..... just kidding!!!!!

[@Ramdileo_sys]

At 9:50... DAMN!! .. Imagine if this guy manages to get a page from The Gutenberg Bible 😳... he will clean it atom by atom, and sealed in 24 carat gold at the least 🤣😂..

[@nelsoncabrera6464]

As a kid I found a stack of Byte magazines in a box sometime in the early 90s in our garage. My mom would get suspicious that I took so long on the bathroom... but I was happily reading those old 80s Bytes sitting on the toilet. Coincidentally my cousin also found a stack of magazines in his dad's shed and also started spending long times in the bathroom... I wonder which 80s tech magazine he was reading.

[@rocoX1234]

The Joystick monthly.

[@James_Knott]

"but I was happily reading" Yeah, right! 🙂

[@na5y]

I spent a lot of time reading and re-reading Byte magazine copies I had in the late 70s and early 80s. Thank you for the walk down memory lane

[@cryptocsguy9282]

@NA5Y gonna read 📚 then again? 😅

[@chipx86]

This is such a fun video. Also, woo, DESQview! Yes, DESQview/X was an X server for DOS, created by Quarterdeck, same company that made QEMM. My uncle had founded the company, so I grew up on these products. Used to run DESQview/X on a DOS PC as a second head for my Linux machine running next to it, which mostly worked (though DESQview/X only supported X11R5, not R6, so some apps weren't compatible). Got some cool historical artifacts centered around DESQview if you'd ever like to see them. I remember I was talking to someone about this at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View a few years back when I suddenly realized you were standing right next to me, looking at some BBS setup that was on display. Good times.

[@nickwallette6201]

It never occurred to me that DV/X was an X server. Back when I was a kid, my dad worked at a place where they were using UNIX workstations (old Sun and SGI stuff I think), and he thought DV/X was the coolest thing. I, not knowing anything about UNIX or X11 at that point, had no idea what the fuss was about. It just looked like an ugly ripoff of Windows to me. (I did like that it had a file copy dialog with a progress indicator, so I would use it for copying large files.) In all the years since, I’ve never stopped to think about its similarity to CDE or whatever. Now I see why he thought it was noteworthy!

[@dintyshideaway9505]

I have always found Byte to have information on things no one else really covered. At a time when we were less and less documenting things on paper, it stands alone as the definitive story teller of the personal computer story.

[@MontegaB]

The production quality is through the roof on this episode! Holy smokes, and the content is just so good. I love the picture-in-picture tour. You're killing it dude.

[@wmtrader]

Star Trek was very easy to get during the 1970s. 20:01 Star Trek was in reruns during the 1970s and it was available on TV stations across America.

[@villipend]

Yes and it was way more popular in the 70's than it ever was in it's original 1960s run! I remember watching it every day after school.

[@jones1618]

Right! Remember, Trek fandom, Dungeons & Dragons and Personal Computer culture all exploded at the same time. These three enthusiast communities, their fanzines & conventions were the beginning of geek culture and their fans hugely overlapped. That's why Star Trek & fantasy game themes were constant subjects of computer magazine cover art and published game programs (copyright? what copyright?). It also didn't hurt that Star Trek and fantasy-themed text based games (like Colossal Cave) already existed on university mini-computers, so micro-computer hobbyists were quick to adapt or mimic those games on their platforms.

[@DavidLeeKersey]

When I was a kid in the mid to late 70s I watched Star Trek 5 nights a week. At least one independent station in any market would be playing in the later afternoon early evening. At one point I think I could pick from two different episodes as a Station out of Sacramento and one out of San Francisco aired it in the same time slot.

[@Dorelaxen]

There's a local antique store that gets stuff like this from time to time. I know the owner, and he knows I collect this sort of stuff, so he'll pick them up when he sees them. Last year I got a bunch of Byte mags from the late 70's, and man, it's absolutely fascinating. The predictions they made were equal parts hilarious (super high density magnetic tape that can hold up to 5 megs of data) to damn near Nostradamus levels of accurate (predicting the internet and online gaming). Such a cool trip back in time.

[@Neomalthusiano]

But modern tapes can hold much more then that (terabytes)...and still even disks... Zip drives were technically magnetic and could storage hundreds of megas. So they got it right, were actually conservatives in their estimative.

[@telesniper2]

Steve Ciarcia's column "Circuit Cellar" was TOTALLY AWESOME back in the day. I remember reading it as a kid back in the early 90s and credit it for getting me interested in electronics along with a little book called "Circuits for Surveillance and Communication" that had lots of mini transmitters and stuff, and Forest M Mims series of books. He had totally awesome projects. One of them I remember was building a digital camera FROM SCRATCH. Now, at the time the article was written (mid 80s), camcorders were a hot item and digital cameras were not yet released. Now, getting a CCD, that would be expensive. So what he did was took a certain RAM chip, I think it was a 256K, and decapped it. The die was light sensitive, and it would alter the state of the memory cells based on exposure. He had it all figured out how often it needed to be refreshed and stuff, and put the image into another RAM chip as a buffer, and transmit the bits over a UART or something. Yeah, his stuff was at that level bro, back in the mid 80s.

[@FindecanorNotGmail]

So cool. Back in the '90s I used to visit a library that had foreign magazines now and then and read a few issues of Byte and Dr Dobb's Journal.

[@clairekholin6935]

"Oooh! Tron!" exemplifies what the magazines were meant for so well.

[@marctorres7182]

In the mid seventies Star Trek was in widespread syndication. It was on everyday after school and 10:30 PM on Saturdays in my area

[@TechTangents]

I read more about that after this and massively underestimated it. I was thinking that they didn't have VHS yet then so you had to tune in to it live to see it.

[@thecandyman9308]

@19:49 😮😮That gap between the end of Star Trek broadcasts in the summer of '69, to this issue of Byte, on the cusp of Star Wars is a revelation. Thank you so much for this whole video.

[@zrodger2296]

I remember how Byte would have so many ads for, say, some huge IBM PC expansion card with some tiny amount of memory (by today's standards). I would just gaze at those ads and think how coolthose cards were. A lot of those 600+ pages were taken up by ads, which shows you how popular it was.

[@sjn7220]

I used to love reading Byte. Still read archives online to this day. I remember pre-internet all the magazines were massive (Byte, Macworld, PC magazine and so on). But you could see as the Internet got more and more popular these magazines got smaller and smaller as companies or just advertised online and would have their own website. Now none of these magazines exist anymore.

[@GodmanchesterGoblin]

I just found this - it was amazing to look back on Byte. I bought most copies from around 1982 or so well into the mid 90s, and all from the local newsagent store in the UK. I especially remember Steve Ciarcia's column of DIY projects and Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor column, writing about his experiences with computers from a user's perspective as an author and columnist. And the cover art works - they were amazing - I recognised several in the video, despite not have had any of those magazines for over 25 years (sadly, I needed the space). So thank you, this was just great.

[@mr.horseshoe2301]

I absolutely love these retro magazine read throughs. They are truly snapshots of the time and that is something the Internet websites cannot truly duplicate.

[@fernwood]

Now do Creative Computing. Seriously, it’s the software development parallel to Byte, and some of the articles (especially in the 70s) were really out there. The founder & editor David H. Ahl is still alive and selling stuff on eBay, including signed copies of the magazine and books.

[@RavenWolfRetroTech]

Wow, what a blast from the past. Growing up in the 70s with, you know 4 TV channels, it is surprising but Star Trek was on after school every day for many years. I started buying BYTE in the 80s and it was the only magazine I bought specifically for the ads. A tip, the best way to read byte is from the back to front. All the good stuff a poor high school or college student could afford was in the back pages!

[@DimensionDude]

The Dimension 68000 (ad shown at 12:22 ) didn't live up to the hype, but it certainly was/is interesting. I have some working examples along with some prototype and R/D stuff in my collection. I also have some rather long and dull videos of the Dimension 68000 running in its native CP/M 68K mode and the various emulations. What an excellent magazine collection, I would sit and read every one of them. I probably wouldn't be seen for years 🙂

[@helldog3105]

Hey! I just mentioned that he should contact you to find out more information! I hope you are doing well!

[@mortarmopp3919]

I can appreciate your appreciation of old computer magazines. Back in the '80s I had a rather significant collection of Computer magazines: Byte, Kilobaud, Interface Age, Creative Computing, Compute (US), Compute Gazette, ROM, Computer Shopper, et al. Some titles I had the complete run. At the height of my collection, I had ~21 paper ream boxes of magazines. I even had a custom bookcase made that would stand up to the enormous weight of all these issues (seeing yours, I probably didn't need to do that). Due to circumstances, I had to move to smaller spaces (you know how it is) and found I wouldn't be able to take my mags with me. So, I did the only thing I could do...I threw them out... I know, I know, but at the time, I really had no other options. In retrospect, I should've kept at least one box of the most meaningful issues of each title, but I didn't think of that then. Years later, I discovered Internet Archives and found that a lot of my mags were there, including most--if not all of--Byte. Still, to this day, I regret having to toss all that history out. Star Trek and computers have been a thing since the early '70s when mainframes were still king. Back then, you weren't a respectable computer center if you didn't have Star Trek or Super Star Trek in your library. Of course, these were often clandestine programs that would only come out at night; management just wouldn't understand. Consequently, listings started showing up in newsletters and later, computer magazines, including Byte. My favorite Byte cover is from the December, '77 issue. Although the size of the magazine grew, a lot of it was due to increased ad sales. If you removed all the ads, you'd have about half the original number of pages. Watching this was very nostalgic, and a bit sad. Still, I'm glad it's here.

[@paulstubbs7678]

In the early days I knew of Byte, unfortunately it wasn't on the shelves where I bought my magazines. Someone mentioned reading 'foreign' magazines in a library - that idea never came to me, I never knew library's kept such things. Darn good video, you've got me interested in chasing down Byte, some of those early articles would be such a good read.

[@michaelwojcikiewicz1478]

A year later, this is still amazing.. You bagged and boarded a generation or two of important tech journalism

[@AlfredRusselWallace]

I can't believe you scored these. A collection like this is a holy grail for me. In all my years of collecting I've come across a grand total of ONE issue of Byte, and it was torn up and mildewy

[@James_Knott]

I have the complete set of paper issues here. I bought the first 3 issues, in person, from Wayne Green, the original publisher. They're all on the shelf behind me.

[@christopherjackson2157]

I love how this magazine is available on the internet archive. I've spent many a lazy Sunday digging back into the past of computer science.

[@waynemv]

It's 2023, and I just saw another KZbin channel recommend to its viewers that they read the August 1981 issue of Byte, which was linked to in PDF form. I was surprised to realize this issue, one about the Smalltalk programming language, had almost 500 pages, and searched KZbin just curious to see how thick the printed issues actually were! (I'm surprised that 500 pages can be so thin. For comparison, I've seen books twice as thick but with only half as many pages.) Anyway, that led me to finding and thoroughly enjoying your video. I had subscribed to Compute and Compute's Gazette back in the day, but don't recall reading Byte much back then. Now I wish I had. There coverage of computer science topics by Byte was excellent.

[@evensgrey]

I was a kid in the 70's, and Star Trek reruns were EVERYWHERE. Both the original series and the animated series. It was actually more popular ten years after it originally aired than when it first aired, and Star Trek fans made utterly swamped existing science fiction conventions from the first season. (There's a story of one convention in New York City where they eventually gave up trying to collect a membership fee and give a badge of some sort to all the would-be attendees and just let everyone in for free.)

[@richshealer3755]

I'm glad you mentioned Robert Tinney's covers at the end. It was one of the things that drew me to the magazines. Sort of a Norman Rockwell was to the Saturday Evening post. I remeber when they pushed the covers to more topical pictures of computer hardware to attract more news stand purchases of the magazine. I had a large collection of Byte and PC Magazine at one time. I remember being in the computer history area of a Smithsonian museum and they had a display including the Apple I with the wooden case with the burnt writing on it. The shelving was supported by stacks of Byte magazines. I pointed to them excitedly to my wife saying if these are good enough for the Smithsonian to display they are good enough for me to keep. She just rolled her eyes. Sadly all my old documentation and magazines were destroyed in a fire in 2008. Thankfully the magazines have been archived by many.

[@timothyp8947]

I came to Byte sometime in my mid-late teens - possibly after I’d gone off to Uni, maybe just before. Only kept a few pages - the NeXT review - which are still lurking somewhere. Here in the UK there was also Personal Computer World (aka PCW) … I started to learn BASIC by reading program listings in PCW and imagining what they’d do 😂. The College Library also kept copies of the much less known (here, anyway) Dr Dobbs Journal which was a fascinating read, perhaps to a slightly deeper technical level. All these magazines are no more, with the ubiquity of PCs and clones spelling the end for interesting machine reviews.

[@nickbnash]

Incredible collection. Thank you for putting it together and for sharing it with us!

[@nysaea]

Your dedication is out of this world and never ceases to amaze me, thanks for the awesome content!

[@angieandretti]

I watched a historical piece recently on the original Star Trek where they said it really redefined the value of the "re-run" and also claimed that Star Trek's popularity and viewership didn't actually peak until years after production had stopped due to how darn much it was costing to make each new episode. So maybe it's fitting that these guys were as into it in the 70's as you point out!

[@chrisnelson414]

Star Trek reruns were on every weekday late afternoon/early evening in '70s. We hated when the school bus ran late or the parents came home early.

[@redlinechaser7942]

Loved this. What a wonderful collection! Can’t wait to see more!

[@spencerdavies4666]

I discovered Byte in the late 80s but only ever bought odd issues as it was an expensive, import magazine. But I had such great memories that when the opportunity to buy a complete set, from the 1st to the last (including UK editions) I snapped them up. I don't currently have room to put them on display, so they currently sit in storage but one day I'll have the room...

[@1311121712]

I love reading old computer magazines. Your content and passion for the topic you are talking about is wonderful. You are one of my most favorite youtubers.

[@TheCyberDruid]

The view when looking at the magazines is just amazing! Really cool and interesting video.

[@mkonji8522]

I love that these will be added as references in future projects. So much more interesting than images/pdfs when possible and should add another unique element to the content. Keep it up, this is awesome.

[@AgentOrange96]

16:30 Seeing a SCELBI-8H excites me! I also saw the SCELBI referenced at 2:09. This computer came out a year earlier in 1974, but was eclipsed by the Altair 8800 boasting the much more powerful 8080. While SCELBI released the upgraded 8B model to compete (which is the model I've built a reproduction of) they really couldn't. SCELBI ended up focusing on publishing after this and even collaborated with BYTE at some point late on releasing the SCELBI-BYTE Primer.

[@James_Knott]

I bought the books for their Editor, Assembler, Monitor and SCELBAL BASIC for my IMSAI 8080. Since I didn't have a paper tape reader, I had to type in the octal code and save to cassette!

[@1311121712]

Your content is amazingly good. Thank you.

[@OzzFan1000]

So few people appreciate the fascinating history recorded in these magazines. I have a few issues of BYTE but I primarily collected PC Magazine & Computer Shopper. Going back through these and looking at the hyperbolic headlines of the day and the prices of the average systems of the time is a treasure I'll never stop enjoying.

[@dnwheeler]

The lead times on magazines was typically 2-3 months. The amount of work to edit and layout a magazine in those days was significant and the printing and binding were all much more primitive. Then there's shipping to distributors around the country, and final delivery to stores. They usually tried to have magazines on the shelves in the month prior to the cover date. For freelance articles, the lead time was often 9-12 months after acceptance until publication. Another quick comment: you should discuss "reader service cards" sometime - they were one of the best features of these types of magazines.

[@shaunhall960]

I learned so much from this magazine growing up. I'm thrilled that you did a video about Byte!

[@frostphoto2600]

Nice collection! Love your enthusiasm. So jealous.

[@HeadsetGuy]

The first time I heard of _Byte_ was in the satirical book _Dave Barry In Cyberspace._

[@kylemcisaac]

Absolutely love the round-cam for the magazine reading. :D

[@arkadiuszrodacki3094]

Great video, thanks for this piece of history!

[@VeraTR909]

Not into collecting myself, but seeing that whole collection organized and preserved is really cool, I think you did a great job preserving this.

[@nil2k]

I sold all my byte magazines on eBay more than 20 years ago after I discovered scanned copies. I got as part of my own subscription as a kid in the 80s and wonder how many got resold to collectors after that.

[@darylcheshire1618]

I remember Chaos Manor written by Jerry Pournelle. Byte was thick but had a lot of ads.

[@SlabBulkhead]

Star Trek actually gained more audience and popularity once it went into reruns, so it's not that odd to see it in magazines of that time. Rising popularity led to the development of the planned Phase II show, which eventually morphed into StarTrek The Motion Picture, released 13 years (!) after the original series premiered.

[@IanThatMetalBassist]

Some of the Phase II scripts later became episodes of The Next Generation.

[@SlabBulkhead]

@@IanThatMetalBassist They sure did!

[@matthewpalmer9820]

20:00 Sar Trek has been running nonstop reruns forever.

[@TastyBusiness]

There are some great cover art pieces. I've been building up my 1970s issues, and the November '77 has a really oddball 6502 homebrew with a front panel called the Kompuutar [sic]. Excellent episode, Shelby.

[@Many_Sparrows]

Excellent video 👍🏻

[@Michael_A_MN]

Star Trek was heavily replayed in the 1970's. I remember watching in on NBC around 5:00pm after school.

[@DosGamerMan]

Amazing collection.

[@QuaaludeCharlie]

Thank you for your Time and Effort , I have most of them and Some other Computer Mags from that Era in Binders of all things , I hope we can Scan them and Host them in a Server on the Net Long enough for the Curators to snag all the Images . Cheers :) QC

[@marcwolf60]

BYTE was my constant companion from when I became interesting in computers. I have many prized issues including the one where they showed the original wire-wrapped IBM PC

[@TemporarilyOfflineRetroTech]

Byte was one of the better computer mags of the day. Lots of fun and info here.

[@matthewfarr1107]

Ahh the Spaceball 2003. Made by Spacetec IMC in Lowell Mass. It was a six degree of freedom 3d input controller for CAD. Later they made a game controller. I worked for them for a while until they foundered in 1998 or so. I acually have a Spaceball 4000 in my garage; I worked on that product.

[@groovertduidlle3558]

Great job budy!

[@tigerstein]

I sometimes read Byte from the Internet Archive. I especially love the ads as a look back.

[@monomonster]

Byte and Creative Computing were two of my favourite computer mags.

[@soteful9949]

I hope you have more episodes about your old magazines.

[@CarlosPerezChavez]

I started College in 1989 and when I found that the library had Byte Magazine I spent many many hours reading as many issues as I could. I can say that I learned most of what I know about PCs and the computer industry from BYTE.

[@lo1bo2]

Very nice! I appreciate physical copies of things.

[@paulwratt]

I had the entire BYTE collection upto 1997 (when I found them, they were going to be thrown out - they had already stopped selling them in NZ), later on I built the Parallel Port Vortax Speech Synthesiser (with an example for GW-BASIC) which is one of Steve Ciarcia Circuit Cellar projects - I had one lying around for some reason. One of my favourite issues was that one you found, with the (Dell?) Dimension 68000, the other one being the (Compaq?) machine with _double door_ 5 1/4 inch full height drives, with _rounded horizontal divider_ seperating 2x 5.25" drive mechanisms.

[@properjob2311]

So pleased for you. Old computer magazines are alway interesting to browse. This collection should be in the smithstonian! I had a vga only viewsonic monitor it's now inside my nephews MAME machine.

[@James_Knott]

I also have a complete set of every paper issue of Byte magazine. I bought the first three issues, in person, from the original publisher, Wayne Green, at the 1975 Radio Society of Ontario convention, in Ottawa Ontario. He made the mistake of putting the magazine in his wife's name and lost it when they split. My first computer was an IMSAI 8080, which I bought in November 1976. I also subscribed to Popular Electronics for several years, but those are long gone. I also received Circuit Cellar. I am the original recipient of all the issues of Byte and store them in magazine boxes from Bankers Box, which I bought in an office supply store. There was a bit of a legal dispute between Micro Soft, as it was called back then, and MITS, about who owned that BASIC since Bill Gates was contracted to write it for MITS. Also, Bill Gates did the work on a Harvard computer, in violation of use policy. As for software piracy, Bill Gates was known for dumpster diving, to dig up other people's software listings. BTW, I also have every issue of National Geographic, going back to January 1980, properly stored in National Geographic slip cases.

[@DavidMarvin]

You can definitely show off the magazines again in the episode about that trackball.

[@robwebnoid5763]

I have several magazine collections myself. These include Compute!, RUN, Commodore User/Powerplay, Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics, Keyboard, American Artist, Science Digest, Modern Electronics, etc. I do have 1 or 2 BYTE magazines. No, I did not go out & find used magazines just to fill my collection, I just kept what I bought new over the decades. I also kept some catalogs, like some from Radio Shack. Whatever the case, I loved paper magazines, as they were easily totable back in the day when there were no sophisticated lightweight laptops, tablets or smartphones. I love what magazines I have, so hopefully I can hold on to them for a little longer.

[@Lurker1979]

I love Wayne Green. It was such a cool guy. Had a great enthusiasm on many technical subjects.

[@James_Knott]

I also enjoyed reading his magazines. Unfortunately, he started getting into some conspiracy theories in his later years.

[@BollingHolt]

Oh wow. I could look at old advertisements like that all day. I remember riding my bike to the local drug store in the really early 90s to go buy "Computer Shopper". Running a CoCo2 and an Amstrad PC1512, I would drool over the mighty 286s, 386s, and the seemingly unattainable 486 machines!

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

9:05 “Life-sized” might be referring to _Life_ magazine, which had quite a large format as I recall.

[@noferblatz]

I was a Byte subscriber. Best computer mag ever.

[@Mrshoujo]

I think it was in Byte magazine where an article was written for a project you could build which allowed you to dump Atari 2600 cartridges to tape and load them back in and play on the 2600. It used a Z80 on its own PCB.

[@andylaauk]

Over the years I have binned tons of computer magazines (due to space), however I have kept my collection of BYTE magazines, being in the UK these are the international copies.

[@GeoffSeeley]

@29:36 lol, looking forward to the review!

[@deviljelly3]

Amazing....

[@olepigeon]

I _love_ flipping through old tech magazines. One of the added benefits is stumbling upon some niche manufacturer that released some software or hardware that was genuinely innovative, but the company didn't last for one reason or another. However, it's given me new search terms for eBay, Craigslist, etc. to find cool new stuff to collect. Often times because of its obscurity, the item can be be had at a reasonable price because no one else is looking for it. :) Things like now-expensive accelerators or expansion boards that were cloned by companies back then who didn't care about such things like copyrights, trademarks, or patents.

[@nticompass]

I own one copy of Byte Magazine. I found a Compaq SLT/286 on craigslist, and when I looked for accessories for it on eBay, I found the December 1988 issue with an article about the SLT/286. I bought that magazine to keep it with the laptop :)

[@darylcheshire1618]

I remember in the early ‘80s parallel printers had differing standards and you had to set up the printer cable according to the schematic they provided. Thank goodness for standards. I bought a dot matrix parallel printer for the enormous sum of $280 but I used it on every computer I had for 15 years.

[@retrokelpie7606]

The reruns of star trek even into the 80's where constant. Old episodes aired daily during my childhood in the late 70's and early 80's.

[@radiolabworks]

Such a wonderful and insightful review of BYTE. I can understand your excitement in paging through this collection of early microcomputer evolution. I was a senior in high school when BYTE arrived and became a charter subscriber as I had already been involved in ham radio and been a subscriber to Wayne Greens other magazine 73. For a young man Wayne’s editorials were fun to read. It wasn’t until much later in life did I come to realize how much of a narcissist he was actually and the over the top credit he gave himself for so many things in which he had little or no involvement in. For those interested in the details on Mr. Green read the book - See Wayne run. Run, Wayne, run by G. Williamson -. It was once online for viewing free, but not sure if that’s still true. For me I did go onto Wayne’s other magazine Kilobaud Microcomputing. I sold all those issues off in the early 1980’s. I also later subscribed to Steve Ciarcia's magazine when he left BYTE. I think I might still have some of those. However, in recent years I’ll still pick up an old copy of Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia - just for enjoyment reading. Those were more software intensive, but sure provide a historical view of how that side of things progressed as well. In later years, late 80’s into the 90’s, I’d only periodically buy a copy of BYTE at the newsstand. Like most, as the web took off my reading on computers shifted to the display screen from the paper. I did have a few diversions into the OS/2 magazines as I was a prime user of that OS from version 2.1 till the end, eventually moving into the WIN world, and now full circle to Linux. Thanks again for the memories. Jumping down into those rabbit holes of finding the journalistic errors or not well researched reviews and commentaries is par for the course. No different from any other venture into the human condition.

[@James_Knott]

I bought the first 3 issues from Wayne Green in person, at the 1975 Radio Society of Ontario convention in Ottawa. My call back then was VE3ZU and currently VE3ZU.

[@johnboynb]

I love old computer magazines. I would like to see a deep dive once a month or so and look at the actual magazine. I would also like to see a video on old NCD X terminals. We used to use them quite a bit in the 90's but they seem erased from history at this point.

[@JessicaFEREM]

FYI you can get a heat sealer to properly make custom sleeves without tape they're also known as "chip bag sealer" which might lead you to a cheaper design

[@dw1444]

this video format soo much batter than you live streams its kind of reminds me of the good old times of your channel

[@TechTangents]

The live stream recordings are only being uploaded on the second channel while normal videos have been going up here on the main channel at about the same rate as usual. I've had a lot of confusion over this recently and am trying to make it clear that the main channel has not changed.

[@Tuxon86]

Loved Byte magazine. Another good one was Dr. Dobbs Journal.

[@evefavretto]

I'm too young and living in the wrong country to have read Byte, but I loved computer magazines. And I kinda miss it.

[@dialupdave6276]

I have never heard of baking soda being used to save stuff, WEIRD!

[@ChrisCebelenski]

Wow, someone else with a complete set? I thought I was the only one! Actually I think I'm missing some of '77 and '78. And yes, I've read through most of them!

[@James_Knott]

Got one here too! First 3 issues right from the hands of Wayne Green.

[@darylcheshire1618]

I recall that Byte offered Byte branded binders which stored a years supply.

[@hawksights]

I'd be interested in the Year 2000 Survival Guide. I think I remember there was a patch for windows at the time and I don't remember anything went off after the millenuim changed. (Exept the contents of my stomach.)

[@kylemproductions]

I love this episode. Particularly the first mention of Linux bits and the X server for DOS (what?!).

[@evensgrey]

I was just looking for any indication of a public store of Shugart Associates floppy drive mechanism blueprints (and discovered that the company that ended up with them appears to still be in business, as a custom manufacturing company supplying a whole bunch of industries, meaning they probably act as a single contact point for a whole raft of Chinese factories) and I ran across a reference to Shugart having something similar to that 'data plate' storage device, except it was 1 GB per platter, perhaps they modified it to use both sides of the platter.

[@nicksapien3745]

Just imagine a video with tech tangents,LGR,this does not compute,techmoan,Adrain’s digital basement,8 bit guy doing a livestream together

[@mikes989]

about the CD drive. watch the "The Computer Chronicles" 1985 episode "Optical Storage Devices". for some time "The Computer Chronicles" followed the Byte thematic of the month

[@michaelreeves1429]

Man growing up in the 70s before StarWars - Star Trek was on TV every day after school usually around dinner time 5 or 6, even weekends would have several episodes back to back, let alone a animated show on Saturday. Considering Star Trek’s influence of engineering and science students and enthusiast. I can understand all the Star Trek references.

[@RudysRetroIntel]

Excellent video and work!! Could you tell us where is a good place to see the PDFs?

[@infinitecanadian]

My dad has a Popular Electronics issue with an ad to join a computer club. Included is a TRS-80 that you can keep to do your own programming. You just don't see that these days.

[@RetroTinkerer]

I was a subscriptor to a lot of magazines (CGW for example) but not to Byte which I would purchase from time to time based on the article featured on its cover, it's a shame as today I would find it very interesting to read again these old magazines. I'm sure I will enjoy a lot the content you will be able to make thanks to that collection!