Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine

[chromy]

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.

[1]: https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198502-381

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683184

[sizzzzlerz]

Well this made my day. Randomly clicking on the covers, I hit on November 1979. It turns out that this issue had an article on software to solve SOMA cubes and Pentominoes written in 6502 machine code and Basic for the Pet PC. When I originally read this, 46 years ago, I had an Apple II+. So I made some adjustments to the code for the Apple in both the machine code and basic and got it working. That article (along with Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth) started my obsession for Pentominoes that exists today. I've taken that code and rewritten and improved it in Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, and Python. I'd copied that article and carried it with me for years until it got lost in an office move. What a treat to stumble across it today!

[galfarragem]

TIL: pentominoes - tetrodominoes - trominoes - DOMINOES!

[fsiefken]

Thank you for doing this, it also has a nice microform feel when browsing. I remember that in the pre internet days I went to the library to find the microfiche in the drawer en folder of the newspaper I wanted to read. I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6P9FhSkd0I

I wonder what's the reason for the decline in length over the years and why the peak size years seem to be '82-'83.

As an image format alternative, there's avif and webp, but png has the advantage it was in existence during in the lasts BYTE years (1996-1998). "The full specification of PNG was released under the approval of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on 1 October 1996, and later as RFC 2083 on 15 January 1997"

The funny thing is, when I search I can't find mention of the GIF/PNG discussions or PNG introduction, while I do find mention of things like WebNFS, OLiVR/VDOLive (wavelet video) and FIF (fractal image format). Perhaps it was out of scope?

[bcrl]

The decline in monthly print medium is universal, mostly due to a loss of advertisers. Once advertisers leave, magazines and newspapers have to start cutting costs which reduces the amount and quality of the content included. The feedback cycle continues until there's nothing left. In the 1980s magazines were the primary medium through which information about new technology products spread. Then in the early 1990s people began moving online to the internet and the world changed.

In Byte's case specifically the large space devoted to ads for mail order services started to decline significantly in the 1990s. In part it was a change in the kind of reader that was interested in computers. There was no longer a need to publish the price of CPUs, SRAM and other ICs in the back of Byte as that wasn't what people were buying. Plus the mail order houses had built up their own lists of customers by then, and would directly mail flyers and catalogues. Computers were no longer easily built from scratch as 32 bit CPUs became more complex and out of reach of most hobbiests.

I loved Byte magazine in the 1980s, and learned so much from it... The monthly hardware project from Steve Circia was fascinating, and there were articles about data structures, languages and even filesystems. I am sad for the loss of that enjoyable monthly experience.

[os2warpman]

>I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer.

My library had two forms of microfiche.

One was a cartridge containing a single spool, which upon being inserted into the reader would unspool onto an internal mechanism. You used two jog wheels, one fine and one coarse, to control the speed at which you traversed the tape, and there were numeric inputs so you could go to an arbitrary page. (it got close enough)

The second were flat rectangular sheets with pages laid out in a grid, and you placed the flat sheet onto a glass bed, pulled down a cover and slid the plate into the reader, using etch-a-sketch-like controls to move along the x and y axis.

In either case you could insert a dime and a single page of whatever was on the screen would spit out from an attached printer.

[mwexler]

82-83 was the peak of hobbyist computing where articles and ads were in-between components and software.

As the tech improved, it moved into "appliance" mode of being a box you plug in, not a heathkit you assemble. By 86, Gateway and Dell and other packagers sold the "box". As demand shifted, all the mags shrunk from phone-book proportions (PC Mag, Compute, SoftDisk, etc etc). Some survived longer as business software fought for the office and marketing moved to peripherals (mice, monitors, printers) but things got anemic by the 90s.

[theturtle32]

This is beautiful! I love this so much, as it makes it so simple and intuitive to drop into a sense of curiosity, exploration, serendipity, scanning around, seeing what catches the eye, zooming in and out.

It kind of recaptures part of the intangible sense of flipping through the old physical pages to see what catches the mind's interest. This feels substantively different from the current way that we discover and stumble upon things in the modern web and especially mobile app ecosystems with infinite scroll and algorithmically curated feeds.

[HellDunkel]

This must be the single most wonderful magazine archive i have ever seen and it's even searchable. This would be so nice to have with music, fashion and lifestlye magazines. The zooming in and out of decades is a breeze.

[spankibalt]

> This would be so nice to have with music, fashion and lifestlye magazines.

Or catalogs. But scanning them in archival quality is a massive pain in the ass. And don't get me started on all the scalpers, who sell catalogs at prices beyond good and evil.

[bdcravens]

Kinda meta, but I found it fascinating seeing the ads that were presumably bought up well in advance, with the same company on the same page in the first few pages of the issue, at least early on. Seeing how it changed over time, I can't help but wonder if that in itself is a bit of a historical record about the growth and death of parts of the industry.

[throwup238]

That’s why I find old publications so interesting. I have several copies of Scientific American from the 19th century and watching the advertisements evolve at the pace of the industrial revolution is really fun, as are all the letters to the editor debating stuff like the nature of comets from a 19th century layperson’s perspective.

(You can get the same experience from the Scientific American archives but holding the 170 year old bound copies with all the prints is something else)

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I downloaded all of Scientific American. There is a k12 school website that posts the password to their group account, you can log into SA's own archives, and they provide them as PDFs. Only 2-3 issues from 1868 (I think) are missing.

Cell (journal) also makes all their stuff accessible, but they don't provide the front matter or cover... was going to grab that too. Quite alot of everything's up on archive.org if there's anything in particular anyone wants.

[encom]

I'll echo all the praise from other posters, and offer one tiny bit of criticism: I don't like the motion damping (or whatever it's called) when panning/zooming around. It feels like wading through mud. I'd prefer it much reduced, or removed entirely.

EDIT: From 12/1989: "Will Clock Speeds Top Out at 50 MHz? An issue that computer designers can't seem to agree on is the ultimate potential speed limit of microprocessor clock rates. The more conservative argument, put forth at the Microprocessor Forum by Microprocessor Report editor Michael Slater and several other conference speakers, maintained that clock speeds will top out at about 50 MHz[...]"

[mbirth]

Wow, that’s the first digital Microfiche implementation I’ve seen. Well done!

[catapart]

Same! This is really awesome! I'm hoping it's generalizeable enough to do with something like Game Informer, or other magazines. Seems like the underlying tech is just "load unreasonably sized images without performance issues" which feels plenty generalizeable, as a framework. So the question is in how complex or tedious it is to get every page into a single image (or whatever format these are loaded as), in a catalogued way.

Regardless, this is just a really fantastic example of this whole kind of project, and the fact that it was done with BYTE is the cherry on top.

[dannyobrien]

This is amazing -- thank you for building this! Amusingly, I too ended up searching for British computers -- there's a good article here on the Cantabrian explosion here. https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198301-042

[chromy]

Oh interesting, thank you! I live in Cambridge an often walk past the Sinclair building but I had not heard of Lynx or Ace which are also based in familiar places! https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198301-050

[leonim]

Thank you for doing this, this is fun. Also, I love all the nostalgic comments.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Robert Tinney the artist who illustrated many of the covers. His work is pretty amazing, and seemed to capture all sorts of interesting ideas.

I met him once at a computer show. I was in too much in awe that I didn't really talk with him, but was able to give him some praise for his artwork. Also, I bought one of the t-shirts with his artwork.

[rayiner]

I loved BYTE! The articles were so much more technical and interesting than anything you find in a computer magazine (or equivalent) today.

[embedded_hiker]

That is most of how I learned how computers worked when I was a teenager. I had no other resources of this quality, not even access to a computer most of the time.

Strangely, I don't get much nostalgia from this. The situation kind of sucked.

[browningstreet]

So much of my childhood in one zoomable image. This is incredible.

[wood_spirit]

I remember having just a couple of issues of Byte but reading them cover to cover and basing my whole understanding of possibilities on a deep dive into a Silicon Graphics workstation they had an article on… happy fuzzy distant memories :)

[oidar]

Beautiful. What a wonderful way to navigate a periodical. Any chance you could open source this implementation? There are plenty of magazines that I'd love to search in this format (eg Sound on Sound).

[thomasjb]

Love this! Part of why I went into electronics is reading archives of Byte and Popular Electronics

[grimgrin]

a nice feature would be similar to what searching google books does. the results highlight in yellow (though I'd prefer a way to clear highlighting after seeing where I'm supposed to stare)

I searched for "MUDs" and found a few results, clicked one, but it didn't appear the centered page was the one I was looking for

this is a wonderful idea though, and I'm happy you made it!

edit: perhaps also a nice feature is putting the search query in the URL, so I can link folks

[wkjagt]

BYTE is awesome. And this project is awesome and really well done. I miss the BYTE days. Is there a modern day equivalent?

[fsiefken]

The German 'iX magazine fuer professionelle IT' is pretty good, but it also has devops, the whole stack from networking, data storage, compute, cloud, development en ops. I bought one on holiday. It's nice to browse through pages for a change. A fixed A4 keeping your attention on 1 page. https://www.heise.de/select/ix

I think it's only in German, but perhaps the AI can auto-translate the pdf's.

[ghaff]

Computing sort of got too big. Early on, Byte could be eclectic with lots of different architectural discussions and hardware like circuit cellar. But from my perspective they got to a point where they were, for lack of a better word, pretty random. I was at an event where they were trying to reboot sometime in the 2000s but not sure what the market was for a popular computing magazine trying to cover all the bases at that point.

[pklausler]

BYTE was best before Jerry Pournelle showed up.

[ghaff]

Chaos manor was sort of a proto-blog. I enjoyed it well enough. As I say, Byte worked well enough as sort of extended hobbyist/nerd zine until that didn't really work as well any longer.

[sitkack]

Chaos manor was <uncharitable>. Readers were being both talked at and down to. BYTE would have been better without it.

[lysace]

(!)

I only have a few issues that I bought as a kid. I've been re-reading them lately and I noticed that that while e.g. a 1987 issue is (still!) deeply intellectually stimulating, a 1989 issue is kind of boring in comparison.

It seems like it went from being focused on computer science/engineering to commercial uses of computing quite quickly.

[Tor3]

I read all the Byte magazines until I stopped near the end of the eighties.. and the reason was as you indicated. The articles went from being about programming techniques, new languages, interesting hardware, CPUs, to instead be reviews of commercial software, and boring software at that. Actually Byte wasn't alone here.. nearly every magazine ended up the same (e.g. another one I read from the very first issue - the British magazine Personal Computer World), and died.

[lysace]

(I'm also a PCW fan. Grew up reading it in the local public library. Tiny mill town in Sweden.)

I'm curious: if you remember - which years would you describe as the best ones for Byte and PCW?

[Tor3]

That's hard - I do have scans of most of Byte, but I don't have many of PCW, so it's hard to remember. I still have a lot of printed PCW magazines stored somewhere, but I can't exactly go and look through them where they are. But I think Byte was all good until at least 1986-1987, and PCW almost as long but I'm uncertain about the latter.

I subscribed to PCW from issue no. 2 (after finding issue no. 1 in a local shop, and the shop had a system where you could get them to set up the subscription for you - so I did that on the spot. Those were the days..)

And I stopped subscribing at some point, after the aforementioned "review commercial business software" change of focus. But I can't remember when that happened. I may also have dumped the later issues already (because of that), so even if I go look up the stored mags I may not be able to tell. Unlike Byte it's hard to find scanned complete PCW issues.

[spankibalt]

Interesting. German publisher Heise avoided this largely by fielding two sister publications: the "c't" (1983 onwards, aimed largely at the general, computer-literate audience) as well as the mentioned above "iX" (1988 onwards, aimed at professionals and pro-level amateurs).

[trafnar]

I wanted to suggest a tweak to this cool project: The panning and zooming feel very sluggish. I'm not sure if there's a technical reason it needs to be that way, but if the animation duration or spring used to control that can be made faster, it will feel much nicer to navigate around.

[mhdhn]

On fastish home network (~300 Mbps) with middle-age MacBook Pro (2020), it's wonderfully snappy, not sluggish at all.

[placebo]

Thank you. Was subscribed to it around 1981-1983. Eagerly waited every month for it to make its way across the Atlantic so I could dig into all the fascinating new technologies. I'm sure it had a great influence on my interests and eventual career.

[russellbeattie]

Fun bit of trivia: Byte was edited and published in Peterborough, New Hampshire. If you've ever been to that area of the world, you'd know how totally absurd it is that such an influential, world-renowned tech magazine was based there.

Nominally, the offices were located sorta near Boston, which at the time had some important tech companies like Digital and Lotus, amongst others. But Peterborough was a small, rural, old-fashioned New England town about as far away from Silicon Valley as you could get. How a publication from that area was able to be so relevant to the tech industry is almost a mystery!

[thomasjb]

Wayne Green [0] is responsible for that. Responsible for some publishing innovation in the electronics world, he started with writing about radioteletypes for hams in the 50s, and moved up to Peterborough after starting 73 magazine

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green

[jvan]

Less than an hour away from Marlow, NH, original home of PC Connection. Must be something in the water.

[ghaff]

Not really that odd. Yes, Lotus was in Boston (Cambridge actually). But the computer industry was mostly west and northwest of the city. Digital had a big campus in Nashua over the border from MA in NH. (I think Oracle is there now.) Lots of people at many of the computer companies actually lived in NH.

[lo_zamoyski]

The navigation is very nice and snappy. It gets out of the way. Most UIs for browsing and navigating material feel constricted, like you're handling some kind of radioactive material through those thick gloves mounted directly into the fume hood.

Other than that, I had forgotten what a shameless exercise in marketing these magazines were. You were basically buying a book of ads. Even the articles feel like copy under the thin veneer of "Oh, look at this cool thing!".

[__fst__]

Amazing overview!

It's interesting how the level of public computer/computing knowledge changed. The Byte magazine goes into deep details of hardware, software and programming.

I feel that nowadays a lot of it is taking for granted or very few people care how things work under the hood. But probably at the time of the Byte magazine only very few people cared too :-).

[elcapitan]

Oh wow, this is absolutely amazing. It's one thing to read about computers like the Altair in history overviews, but to see ads for it and how they were discussed at the time, that's really interesting.

Connects well to the Halt and Catch Fire syllabus that was posted yesterday :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007414

[don_searchcraft]

Its certainly beautiful to look at but the search capability itself is not very good.

[kmoser]

I was unable to find information mentioned in some ads, and couldn't figure out why. The scanned text was reasonably legible that I would assume it would have OCRed correctly.

[rcarmo]

I love that this exists. I bought BYTE for many years and this is bringing back fond memories.

The best printed ads I’ve ever seen, though, were on WIRED. Doing the same for that might be impossible until copyright expires, but I would love it.

[Gormo]

This is the sort of thing that would be perfect to view from within Eagle Mode (https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/).

[aryehof]

Just fabulous. Reading Byte in the Science Library at Uni while studying accounting was one of the things that got me interested in computing so many years ago. Thank you!

[amelius]

This is from a time when I actually liked ads. Can you imagine?

[ralphc]

So. Much. Modula-2. It must have been the future, there were as many compilers, ad, reviews as there were for C.

What killed Modula-2?

[timbit42]

C++ killed Modula-2. Modula-2 was never as popular as Pascal had been and I suspect the fact it was descended from Pascal tainted it as a non-serious low-level systems language, although it was all that. Pascal was beaten by C so any descendant of Pascal was going to get killed by C++. Small binaries and speed was more important than safety in those days.

[utopcell]

You've done an amazing job. This is buttery-smooth even when zooming in. Awesome!

[kwanbix]

I am trying to search for OS/2 but nothing comes out. Any ideas?

[pkroll]

It's a regular expression, and OS/2 was referred to in many ways, so try something like: "os-2|os\/2|os2" (without the quotes)

I get 136 results, from that query.

[jasonm23]

Love the idea... loathe the interactive design implementation.

[JKCalhoun]

I suggest everyone pull down the archive on … archive.org [1].

For me anyway (and it sounds like a few of you as well), whiling away looking through a random BYTE issue from the past can be enjoyable.

(I have in fact now close to a TB of magazines as PDFs downloaded/offline just for this sort of reminiscing. Magazine packs make it easy [2].)

[1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine

[2] https://archive.org/details/magazine_packs

[fancythat]

Great work sending me down nostalgia memory lane!

[TheOtherHobbes]

Awesome. A really nice way to do this.

[apricot]

This is awesome. You are awesome.

[Cockbrand]

This is beautiful, thank you!

[knottedoak]

Superb.

[hudecekdev]

This is amazing, thank you.

[cat-whisperer]

This looks hella cool!

[davis]

I love this

[Eriks]

dezoomify-rs https://byte.tsundoku.io/byte_files/10/0_0.jpg

Found the following zoom levels:

0. byte (Deep Zoom Image) (868480 x 453747 pixels, 376956 tiles)

...

I think, I'll skip downloading this

[chromy]

Yes it's a fair amount of data:

pdfs/ 12.5 GiB

pages/ 91.96 GiB (Each page as a .png)

text/ 365.03 MiB (Each page as text)

byte_files/ 55.98 GiB (The 1024x1024 tiles as .jpeg)

I had not heard of https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify-rs before, that's really cool!

[Sunspark]

I wonder how it would do with the djvu codec which tends to have been used specifically for archiving documents. I suppose it is best applied at source if the physical material is at hand.

Might still be worth taking a look at as an experiment since this codec separates text, background and images into different layers, even when converted from another format.

[initramfs]

aweso