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posted by
martyb
on Sunday December 24 2017, @09:23PM
from the when-computer-magazines-had-over-500-pages-and-we-read-them-FOR-the-ads dept.
from the when-computer-magazines-had-over-500-pages-and-we-read-them-FOR-the-ads dept.
A digital archive of BYTE Magazine covering 1975 through 1995 is online now at the Internet Archive. BYTE was a very influential magazine its first decades and included articles and columns on both hardware and software, basically everything in the topic of small computers and software. A broad range of operating systems were addressed as well. Any of the programming languages available at the time were regularly covered, Smalltalk, Lisp, Logo, basically anything. And of course source samples and occasionally whole programs were included. It basically lead in the era of hands-on computing.
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BYTE Magazine Archive 1975 - 1995
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To stay youthful, stay useful.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 24 2017, @09:25PM (16 children)
BYTE was as close to a computer programming textbook as I had in 1983. I didn't take a formal computer language course until a couple of years later, and that was Fortran 77, which was a total breeze after the BASIC I learned from BYTE.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 24 2017, @09:34PM (3 children)
Looking through the (horrendous to navigate) archives reminded me: BYTE was more hardware review and purchasing focused, though they did have the occasional good article. Compute! and similar had more HOWTO program focused articles. I had an Atari 800, so the Atari hardware focused pieces were especially interesting, making the custom chips do interesting things like play music using the vertical blank interrupt as a timeclock... A lot of times a $3 ($3 in 1983 is more like $10 today, or $60 when you consider my increase in hourly pay rate) magazine would only have one interesting programming article, but implementing those 2 or 3 pages of how-to and background would take a couple of hours, and extending the concepts to do other things could go on for months afterwards...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 24 2017, @11:36PM (2 children)
You are full of shit. You had an atari game machine, Byte didn't cater to your game machine needs, and you rag on it? Byte was around to write about S100 bus, fool.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 25 2017, @01:15AM (1 child)
Jump to conclusions often?
http://oldcomputers.net/atari800.html [oldcomputers.net]
Games of course, but also expandable and programmable.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 25 2017, @02:21AM
Played an awesome game of Star Raiders, though I probably logged about 80% programming time and 20% gaming time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Sunday December 24 2017, @09:43PM (8 children)
That's funny.
Common knowledge was that once someone was exposed to Basic, it was impossible to make a programmer out of them. [brainyquote.com] Lucky you survived.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 24 2017, @10:05PM
Maybe not, I'm addicted to C++ and Qt now, and both of those seem to scare the hell out of most people that call themselves programmers.
Back in the days of BYTE, et. al. you couldn't do anything interesting in pure BASIC, the cool stuff ended up being a hybrid of BASIC and assembly.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 24 2017, @10:07PM (1 child)
BASIC is the language that rendered "goto" statement into pure evil. Didn't stop it going into C, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 24 2017, @11:59PM
10 cls
20 goto 10
30 rem I can't remember the rest
(Score: 2, Informative) by optotronic on Monday December 25 2017, @02:54AM
I learned Atari BASIC on my Atari 400, and I too thought Fortran 77 was easy after that. I guess I also learned 6502 assembler before Fortran. You could do a lot on those old machines, but so much was specific to the hardware, like the display lists and aforementioned vertical blank interrupt. Also, PEEKs and POKEs.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by acid andy on Monday December 25 2017, @06:22AM (3 children)
My usual response when people say that is that when you deal with machine code or to a lesser extent assembler, it's full of branches everywhere that stylistically aren't much different to BASIC's Gotos. Of course later BASICs supported more elegant structures, named procedures and functions for example, so if you cared enough you could produce code that was almost as elegant as C. You don't have to write with spaghetti programming, multiple statements crammed onto one line, single letter, undeclared variable names (on most more recent dialects anyway).
I think a lot of Dijkstra's quotes get taken out of context, although it does make them funny, he also comes across as something of a code bigot.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday December 25 2017, @07:17AM (2 children)
BASIC was fine for a beginner's introduction - and I mean it in the way one uses a hand calculator. I felt ( and still do ) that it makes a great programmable calculator.
But its usefulness drops off sharply as program complexity increases.
I found anything over maybe 10 pages of code or so to be nearly unmaintainable in BASIC.
To get around this bottleneck, I made lots of SHELL calls. Passing arguments through filesets. Quite cumbersome, but at least it isolated the scope of my variables.
Then I learned C / C++.
Now, that's the language I quickly learned to love. It let me do it all. From the little-bitty assembler stuff to the overall system. It was such a removal of burden to not have to deal with peeks, pokes, then shell stuff out here and there trying to keep everyone in their proper cages, as C was so much better at managing the scope of my variables.
Not only that, the library architecture of the C family made it so easy to compartmentalize that which I knew was already running fine, letting me store most of my code in convenient places to avoid cluttering up all my code with support code. This made it so easy to make reusable code, like drivers for various interfaces.
I won't say that BASIC will ruin a programmer, but I will say its a really nice language to try out a small math algorithm, but its a really poor choice for trying to code anything bigger than a sheet or two of code.
I still use GWBasic a lot! ( Yes, I use DOS too. Its quick and dirty when I just want to play around with an algorithm or checkout some simple interface ).
Now, Basic is great for letting me check out something like my fuel consumption/mileage/estimated cost to top-off-tank calculator I am coding for my van. It's an adaptive program where it learns how much fuel I am using under various circumstance of what gear I am in, engine RPM, vehicle speed, and throttle-position sensor. If I top off the tank, when I get back in the van, I key into the system how much fuel I put in. It uses my history of top-offs to generate more and more accurate estimates of how much it will take to top off again. If I should key in the price of fuel I am seeing... it will display how much I should expect to pay for the next top-off, so I can tender the appropriate amount at the register so I don't have to go back for more, or go back for change. I am dry-labbing it in Basic before I hard-program it in the van's Arduino.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Monday December 25 2017, @08:29AM
To a large extent, I agree with you. I think though that if and when a programmer feels ready to take on a project of that size and complexity, they should also feel ready to quickly pick up and embrace other languages. If they stubbornly stick with only ever BASIC (and I should probably include VB6 in that) even after years of experience, I'd say the problems lie outside of the computer and not with BASIC itself.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 25 2017, @09:22PM
I revamped a BBS program in BASIC, it was in pretty bad shape when I started on it - far more than 10 pages of code. It was still big when I was done, but organizing it logically and identifying bottlenecks and cleaning those up I did manage to make it run much faster and crash much less often - I got it reliable enough to serve an active message community (via 1200 baud modem) for months without crashing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday December 25 2017, @02:40AM (2 children)
What is true is it was not trivial to get another copy of the documentation if it became lost along the way. This was often a problem with hand-me-down equipment. But there was generally quite thorough documentation for the hardware produced with and shipped with the hardware, which is not always true today.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 25 2017, @07:28AM
There were also copies of the source code of the Commodore-64. I believe it was Abacus Books which actually published it.
This was in the day where people like me could actually learn exactly how something works.... before the "rights management" folks "worked with"... uhhh "bribed" our Congress to enact federal law prohibiting knowledge of how our stuff works.
Of course, our Congress is not going to appreciate the error of their ways of legislating ignorance until the military badge-hats one day discover they have about as much control over the nation's defense arsenal as a kid with a toy driver's wheel has over his dad's car, and the bad guys are coming over the hill with stuff that works, and they tell the Congressmen and badge-hats that they no longer own the things they have deeds for.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 25 2017, @09:28PM
The documentation wasn't that hard to come by for the Atari computers either. My favorite was the GTIA chip - which shipped with some bugs. I wrote code to the documentation and it had a glitchy display on my machine. When the GTIA2 came out in later models, my code - untouched - ran flawlessly on the new chips.
However, there also just wasn't that much to document. It is literally feasible to provide a transistor level schematic of computers from that era (though the memory systems would be pretty boring...) Get up a couple of layers from the transistors, and that's as sophisticated as the documentation got, as sophisticated as the machines were - after all, the 6502 was conceived as an electric toaster controller.
Today - it's 16 levels of voodoo between the C++ code and the actual registers that execute the instructions. Luckily, those 16 layers are somewhat less buggy than the hardware and software that was being sold commercially in the 1990s and before.
Anybody else try to use Turbo C++ for a serious project in the early 1990s? Too many compiler bugs for us, we stuck with straight C.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 24 2017, @09:55PM (5 children)
CHAOS MANOR - The User’s Column was always the high point for me. I'd flip through the ads to see if any of the hardware I wanted was affordable (prices were constantly falling) and then straight to see what Jerry was up to.
Last column is archived here,
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/computing/last.html [jerrypournelle.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 24 2017, @10:11PM (4 children)
Good stuff, and as true today as it was then, and long before:
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday December 24 2017, @10:35PM (3 children)
Working Software's bug fix releases were always free. We even covered the shipping charge.
I worked without pay for my last six weeks. Eventually I had to get another job.
Eventually there was only one paid employee - the owner promoted our operations manager to President.
Not long after that the owner dissolved the company.
But all our users loved us!
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 24 2017, @11:05PM
I worked for a good company for 12 years, good in all respects except sales. For the last 6 months the writing was clear on the wall, but the outside job market was terrible.
Finally, one Friday, the last 6 of us were called into a meeting and told that today was our last paid day. We were free to use company resources (like the color copier) as needed for job searching and home selling, but salaries stopped in 3 hours. About 3 people stayed around on a volunteer basis, and in the end they were well taken care of in a later investment round, but that took several uncertain years.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday December 25 2017, @07:44AM (1 child)
I guess that was the problem with my first electronic drafting program... Futurenet... Dash 2.
It simply worked. I never had it crash on me. Even to this day, I can easily open up drawings.
We had already fixed our Futurenet so it no longer needed its dongle.
Now, it was an early system, and it had its limits. The display was limited to one EGA mode ( which I had to actually open up and edit the source code in binary so it would properly set up the VGA registers for flat-panel VGA displays ), and its library was cumbersome to make new parts for.
I used that program for decades, until my latest work associates weaned me off it for EAGLE.
I resist like hell stuff like CAD programs with DRM in it, as I never know when someone is going to turn off something that locks me out of my own work. The game people do this a lot. But I often find executives seem to have no concept of what it means to have a permission-server go away and seem to think that what works today will work tomorrow. Its almost impossible to work under people with that kind of mindset - just gotta let them spend their money and watch themselves dig themselves in way over their head.
I loved Futurenet, but it was like a hammer. You sell someone a well made hammer... he won't ever buy another one!
Its abandonware by now... and I don't even know anyone else who has even heard of this old gem.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday December 25 2017, @02:36PM
"You sell someone a well made hammer... he won't ever buy another one!"
That is a problem - and the unfortunate solution is to find ways to force people to update to later versions, even if they don't need them. Look at MS Office: Office-97 was complete, and included everything needed by 99.9% of the users. Everything since then has been bloat, feature creep, or needless UI design changes. But MS has ways of forcing companies to keep updating their software, so they do...and when the big companies move, the rest of us have to update as well, in order to stay compatible. Our little company stayed with Office-97 as long as we possible could - there really was absolutely no reason to change - but eventually OOXML-compatibility forced us to update.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday December 24 2017, @10:30PM
Why do you hate Freedom?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday December 25 2017, @02:27PM
In its prime, BYTE was - by far - the best computer magazine of its day. Lots of substantive, neutral product reviews, plus in-depth articles on various hardware and software topics. Lots of content, written by people who knew what they are talking about, and only moderate advertising. In its last several years, it got thinner, and advertising took an ever-greater share, until it was finally indistinguishable from any other marketing-driven computer rag. In the end, the only thing worth reading was Jerry Pournelle's column.
Today, none of the English-language magazines come anywhere close: they are stuffed full of advertising and sponsored reviews, with little original content and no depth. In German, however, I can recommend c't magazine [heise.de] - it's pretty close to what BYTE used to be. Online, I suppose Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] is about as close as it comes, although it's a bit marketing heavy, and sometimes one isn't so sure about the neutrality.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by trimtab on Friday December 29 2017, @02:50AM
Also from the same era of the late 70s and a competitor to Byte... at least for a while:
https://archive.org/details/kilobaudmagazine [archive.org]
I remember the original covers that were just a table of contents like this one:
https://archive.org/details/kilobaudmagazine-1977-12 [archive.org]