[nirai]

the magazine is from 1983, so the C language was not news by then.

Flipping the pages of the magazine is awesome - the ads on every other page are just like time travel.

It has been so long since I have last seen the Charlie Chaplin ad for IBM: https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-08/1983_08_BYT...

I was a kid back then with a Commodore 64

[brudgers]

Magazines like BYTE were the primary communication channel in those days. Among computing professionals, C might not have been big news for many by 1983. For hobbyists and many other computer users it probably was. Most people's knowledge about programming languages in those days would probably be Basic and Assembly.

In summer 1982, a learned of Pascal's existence at the local university...but my classes were in Basic. I first encountered C in the late 1980's in the context of the Amiga and its ROM Kernel Manuals.

Two decades later, HN is where I heard of Python, Ruby and Clojure [and Rust, Go, Haskell, J, Julia, etc.]. The medium had changed, but for anyone not tuned to the right channel it all passes unnoticed. Even today. most people use Windows and installing a C compiler is outside normal operating parameters.

None of which prevents me from noting how I miss the physicality of BYTE and other magazines from that era, too.

[analog31]

Flipping the pages of the magazine is awesome - the ads on every other page are just like time travel.

An ad for an oscilloscope in a computer magazine! Heaven!

My mom subscribed to Byte during that time period, and I remember counting the days until the next issue would arrive. There were so many cool articles about fundamental things, many of which were over my head as a high school kid. My favorite part was Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar.

In my view all of the computer magazines went downhill (for me) when personal computers began to mature, and the articles stopped being about nuts and bolts.

[yitchelle]

Man, those adverts sure brings back the memories. Looking at them now (I am in my mind 40s), I am really surprise how much more "hardware" focus the adverts were. Many of them have pictures of ICs, add-on cards for display extensions etc. There was even one from Tektronics about their 60Mhz CRO.

And the Apple II clones and the PC clones...:-)

Back then, I was just going through high school with an Atari 800.

[ufo]

I really like this gem from the Texas Instruments ad on page 145:

"The function key advantage: We give you 12 function keys that you can easily program to make your work simpler and easier. The best the competition can do is 10 or fewer keys"

[sizzzzlerz]

Its like going back to the black monolith at the Dawn of Mankind. Most of the advertisers have been gone for 25 years, I bet. I did spot an interesting ad on page 258 teasing the release of Excel, to be the reason for buying a computer.

[protomyth]

from an ad:

  With Microbuffer, you don't have to wait for your 
  printer to finish before you resume using your 
  computer.
  
  Data is received and stored at fast speeds, then 
  released from Microbuffer's memory to your 
  printer.
  
  This is called buffering. The more you print, the 
  more productive it makes your workflow.
  
  Depending on the version of Microbuffer, these 
  buffering capacities range from a useful 8K of 
  random access memory - big enough for 8,000 
  characters of storage - up to a very large 256K - 
  enough for 256,000 characters of storage.

[yitchelle]

Love the line "The more you print, the more productive it makes your workflow". I need to get that dot matrix printer connected up to my computer and start printing straight away, I can feel my productivity increasing.

[PhasmaFelis]

Hardware and business-focused. It's interesting how you never really see ads targeting business uses now that personal computers are ubiquitous.

Notably, the primary market for high-end desktop components is now gamers, not businesses. I was quite amused at a recent temp job when I was helping build a computing array for integrated circuit design, and most of the components we were handling had names like Destroyer and Razor Ripjaw.

[trampolinator]

You can read other issues too:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date

[rbanffy]

> the C language was not news by then.

C compilers for microcomputers were still a new thing in 1983. They were common (for obvious reasons) on Unix machines and larger mini-computers. The only 8-bit C compiler I touched was Aztec C for the Apple II computers and it was unbearably slow (even though the II was quite zippy compared to its Z-80 based counterparts). Borland made an excellent Pascal IDE for CP/M computers but I can't remember a decent C for those.

Fun thing is that Aztec C came with a bunch of tools, including a csh-like shell and vi (no, not vim) text editor. Very slow (felt like a 300 bps terminal line), but one could pretend to be accessing a much larger computer somewhere else.

[whyaduck]

Wow - Terminals Terrific was selling a spell checker (Spell Star) for only $144!

[rsuelzer]

$4,600 for a 46mb hard drive. That is $10,000 adjusted for inflation. I think a DVD which holds approx 4600mb is probably a few pennies today. How far we have come, absolutely incredible. I guess this means we should reach the singularity very soon. Perhaps when Windows 10 is released. :)

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-08/1983_08_BYT...

[platform]

> the ads on every page are just like time travel Indeed, quite interesting. I had a thought that having these magazines scans in searcheable form, could help to fight patent trolls. For example, I saw an ad there for 'Gina -- the interactive assistant.." Definetely predates the patent 2001 patent issued by US patent office http://www.google.com/patents/US8086500

[smutticus]

How about that "Rent software before you buy" ad. I remember those places as operating in somewhat questionable legal territory, but here is a full page ad on page 117.

[watmough]

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-08/1983_08_BYT...

An ad for the Apple III. Perhaps a warning of the overheating MacBook Pro logic board woes to come!

[flomo]

The PC XT ad is interesting in context - IBM hadn't totally won yet, and judging by the ads & content, CP/M and Z80 still ruled the day.