There was also almost nothing to read, so when my monthly issue of Byte appeared (2-3 months later than most people would receive it), I devoured that thing. I would read it literally cover to cover, including all those ads, several times.
I wasn't (then) working in IT, so a lot of the content (like Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar) went way over my head but it didn't matter, I read it anyway, often by the light of my kerosene lantern. I learned a huge amount: object-oriented programming, this new thing called the Internet (capitalized back then, and before the WWW), and how Jerry Pournelle was a self-important jerk (but boy, did I envy the toys he got to play with!).
This was the age of big, fold-out Gateway 2000 ads, 20MB hard drives, and Turbo Pascal kicking other compilers' butts.
I would read the magazine, then write out programs (in BASIC, the only language I had learned at that point). On my monthly trips to the capital city I would go to a local NGO and in exchange for helping with their IT issues they would let me play (i.e type out my programs and try to get them working) on their computers.
Pournelle original claim to fame was as one of the authors of “Strategy of Technology“ which was very influential in the 70s.
The money went to buying my first computer (kit).
I took what I learned from BYTE and wrote a CP/M terminate/stay-resident 'driver' that got some interesting hardware working well enough to get me the contract, as a teenager, to write the DOS driver for thing as well.
That led to a rocket-ride career through decades of systems programming, and I just can't thank the BYTE folks enough for those mind-expanding days ..
I devoured Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar and I think it was one of the main influences on my career, along with Goedel, Escher, Bach.
I discovered Digi-Key in the ads. That's kind of life-changing when all you had access to was Radio Shack. You can tell someone's age from the thickness of their first Digi-Key catalog. It was like only 30 or 40 pages, mostly chips, sockets, and some wiring tools.
At the time, there were two primary alternatives for buying a computer. The first was a computer store. The second was buying an issue of Byte or a competing publication called Computer Shopper that was 100% ads. When I was in grad school, students would share a single copy of Computer Shopper and debate the best choices of parts to assemble for a new machine. Virtually all were MS-DOS based.
Access to BBS was super expensive unless you were lucky to afford a modem, and live on local call distance.
European magazine like Computer Shopper were of similar size and ads ratio.
I remember reading ads about a specific make of vacuum pumps next to an article with experiments which used them.
Today's ads are so obtrusive because you get toilet seat ads next to an article about general relativity.
More seriously though, print advertising was able to target readers based upon the demographics of the publications readership. They didn't track people across their online life and beyond. (That said, there definitely was some tracking.)
I agree, content targeting feels less jarring because it fits with what you are reading.
Doesn't that just create a very obvious conflict of interest and nullify the credibility of the article?
Obviously you, the reader, cannot know if that's what happened, or whether in reality it was the opposite way around, but maybe you trust the reviewer and believe they wouldn't do the other thing, or at least they would feel morally unable to do the other thing without telling you.
And to some extent that same relationship matters to whether you trust the content anyway, irrespective of advertising. I believe Yahtzee Crosshaw did or did not like the video game, I reckon Yahtzee, for whatever it's worth, isn't lying if he said it was fun.
Or take a more obscure but perhaps more relevant example. "Techmoan" on Youtube says maybe this brand new Asda tape player is the best he's seen in years. It's not great, the equivalent product in the 1980s would have Dolby and it'd be smaller and lighter and generally better, but, it's 2026 and Asda can't buy a 1980s tape player, they would need to invest billions to make one and it makes no economic sense in the era of handheld super-computers to invest so much money to make better tape players. So this one is pretty good, considering. Well that's faint praise, but it is praise. If "Techmoan" says he just bought it to see if it's any good, and here's a link to Asda's website, I believe him. If Asda bought him the tape player or even just paid him to say it, why would he lie? He's an old curmudgeon who loves legacy music formats, he's not going to get rich lying to me, so that makes no sense.
In fact they seem to have tightened up on free review samples in general.
I did some reviewing in the 90s and the magazine had a solid reviews policy - tell the truth even if someone pulls their advertising. Which very much happened on a few occasions.
You can do that if you have no issues with selling ad pages, which Byte clearly didn't.
Whether that was ever generally true for the industry, or is true now with YouTube influencers, is a different question.
That's how you know what the industry was doing, and if you want to buy new hardware, these magazines were the main source of information.
Maybe ironically, for better independent content, as in actual articles rather than ads, hobbyist and video game magazines did better. There was a time where video game magazines taught you about programming! If anything, by having you copy lines of BASIC because there was no digital support available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco [1]
prominently. That stuff was barely talked about in the editorial which was much more about ‘home computers’ like Apple and TRS-80 and Atari and TI up to 1983 or so. Up until then there were a few good ‘computer magazines’ like Creative Computing [2] that were platform agnostic but around that time they started to become more specific to platforms like I was subscribing to Rainbow for my color computer and there were a lot of mags for the C-64 [3] and emerging for the IBM PC and clones. Byte got more focused on the PC and low end CP/M machines with a little interest in high-end workstations and also 68k computers like Mac an Amiga… but just a little.
By the late 1980s the cool kids (some of those “kids” were adults) were already online on BBSes and you didn’t need magazines to keep up with free and ‘free’ (pirate) software. I think computer magazines were struggling, the PC kept growing. Computer Shopper became dominant because boy you could find good deals in it. Then the WWW came along and computer magazines were obsolete overnight.
[1] I saw plenty of PDP-11s and other minicomputers but never saw a high end microcomputer of that era outside the pages of Byte…. But somebody bought them.
[2] loved it at the time but it doesn’t have the staying power of Byte, there is a lab in the EE building next door donated by David Ahl who founded Creative Computing, some issues of CC in the 1978-1979 period are wild.
[3] the c-64 was a huge hit in terms of third party software and having friends who had them, but I don’t think it was talked about in Byte like other home computers because Byte was going upmarket then.
The CP/M market was the precursor of the modern PC market - mostly small businesses who didn't see themselves as technical but understood that word processing and spreadsheets could save them time and money.
Minis weren't considered small systems, both for reasons of cost and complexity, so Byte didn't cover them.
By the mid-80s the cost of a PDP-11 had come right down, and was comparable to a high-end CP/M box. DEC made some efforts to sell to small businesses, but never quite understood the people or the market.
Then the IBM PC and its clones appeared and nuked the CP/M market from orbit.
This was DEC's biggest strategic failure. It had about ten years to make the PDP-11 and VAX designs an industry standard. But it was too busy selling expensive peripherals and trying to compete with IBM at the high end to pay attention to what was happening at the low end, and IBM clones stole its lunch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_J-11
which was used to build this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Professional
DEC had a 1-chip PDP-11 but a 1-chip PDP-11 wasn't competitive with the better chips coming out around 1982. That DEC Professional was not such a great machine and the software support for it was worse. You couldn't run software from the minicomputer and even if you could it wasn't suitable for the needs of end users on a single-user system who were asking to open bigger spreadsheets and such.
I knew the PDP-11 pretty well, I never got my hands on a high-end CP/M machine.
The PDP-11 came out around 1970, the OS I always used on it was RSTS/E which was provided an interactive BASIC programming environment. You might have 15 terminals and each user got their own 64k address space. It was a lot like using BASIC on a Apple ][ but a little better, especially because you got to keep files on a hard drive and if you were in a programming class you could share files with the instructor and other student. You could also, like CP/M, run other binaries in that address space and you could edit with the TECO text editor, use a FORTRAN compiler, etc. Ordinarily you would use a VT-100 terminal with 80x25 text which was bigger than most home computers which were more like 40x25. If you were lucky you had a color vk100
https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VK100
with better graphics capabilities than home computers except for animation.
High end CP/M machines used the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP/M
OS for multitasking or actually had one CPU board for user, that, like the PDP-11 gave every user a 64k address space.
When I was getting into this stuff as an 8 year old in 1980 (really!) there was a lot of talk about an 8 to 16 bit transition so of course I imagined future micros would look something like the PDP-11. With micros we had just a handful of 8-bit registers, with mostly 8-bit operations but sometimes 16-bit operations because you sure as hell have to be able do pointer arithmetic. The PDP-11 had 8 16-bit registers and seemed pretty powerful in comparison, but...
it had a 64k problem space. When micros first came out, it was prohibitive to fill out the 64k address space but by 1983 or so even cheap machines had the full 64k. The crisis of the industry was that ordinary user applications needed more RAM. The PDP-11 had a virtual memory system that had 8 8k pages, not too different from virtual memory systems today but simple and small. It worked great for sharing the machine between users but not so great for applications, i guess they could have updated the OS and compilers to do better -- late generation 8-bit machines like my TRS-80 Color Computer 3 had a similar memory management system, but they didn't.
People thought the 68k was the future with a 16x32-bit register file like the IBM 360 mainframe but it wasn't... turns out you can't really pipeline a computer which has indirect addressing [1] so the likes of Motorola and DEC were abandoning the 68k and VAX by the late 1980s. These had no future. Also the 68k did not perform in real life as well as people thought it would.
The 8086 though was pure "worse is better"; the segmentation model seemed lame in comparison to the 32-bit 68k line, but it was actually easy and fun (in my opinion) to use in assembly language and you couldn't afford, say, 8 MB of memory and didn't need a system that could handle it. All of a sudden you could make bigger spreadsheets and CP/M was headed for the dustbin at the high end.
Funny though CP/M did have a sort of revival in that it became common in low-end machines like the C-128 but it was too little too late, the industry going in the PC direction. A last hurrah for me was that circa 1988 I wrote some software in BASIC for a teacher at my school who had a CP/M computer and I had a Z80 emulator that ran on my 286 machine which was 3x faster than any real Z80. That 286 was lame in a lot of ways but it was crazy fast for the price.
[1] ... this was the one RISC/CISC CPU thing that really mattered!
Amstrad were good late 80s CP/M machines. We got both those and C128 in New Zealand.
> the one RISC/CISC CPU thing that really mattered!
Not only indirect addressing, but also multiple memory operands in the same instruction — more than one VM page, really, though a single unaligned operand crossing a page boundary is also bad. Many machines trap on that case to this day and let software emulate it.
Not being able to easily tell how long an instruction is (and thus where the next one starts) is also bad, but can be overcome at some cost in the front end, and the back end is unaffected. Unlike x86 and VAX the 68k does actually tell you everything you need in the first 16 bits, but yes the complex addressing of the 020/030 were what killed it.
I still value a massive collection when I see it, in atomic form, in the real universe of course - but my personal reading of the .PDF archive is usually focused more on its early years - which just seems so much more pioneering/adventurous.
https://archive.org/details/PcWorld2010
The difference in amount ads is really insane...
The classified/small ads section alone was enormous. And then you’d have companies that sold computer components include huge swathes of their catalogues and price lists in multi-page adverts. Would have been a real boon for system builders, but I didn’t have the cash back then. I was still in the world of 8-bit micros and 16-bit machines.
I like their tear downs of electronic equipment. https://www.edn.com/category/design/under-the-hood-teardown/...
Sadly Internet archive does not have a complete collection of old EDN magazines ....
I certainly can't think of any magazines remotely like the big computer mags today. Taken to the extreme of Computer Shopper, no one is buying a magazine in large part for the ads today.
NO Internet back then.
People still had a massive thirst for information. Even the ads where interesting and read by many to learn more ....
Value Added Tax is a tax putatively on, as the name suggests the value you've added. For a consumer you don't care whether you paid £15 for this product because it was £10 plus 50% VAT, or it was £15 with zero VAT, that's the same to you, and so the law says the advertiser can't say that's a £10 product even if there is 50% VAT, 'cos consumers can't buy it for £10, so you're lying to them.
However, if you're selling products for businesses, they're going to claim back the VAT on inputs to their business, only the added value gets taxed and that's implemented by charging the tax on their sales and allowing them to claim back the tax they paid for inputs. As a result it is allowed in that context to display the explicitly without VAT prices, your buyers potentially won't pay that tax anyway. So for a business you can say it's a £10 product.
The question in these magazines was: Are the products for businesses, or, are you actually selling to the hobbyists who often buy the magazine. You obviously want to advertise the lower prices with just an asterisk leading to a disclaimer about VAT to be paid, but if in reality most customers are hobbyists they're all paying VAT so maybe you're breaking the law by advertising the lower price?
Actual adverts definitely varied in how plausible the two categories of buyer were. How many businesses need to buy this slightly nicer Joystick for the Commodore 64? On the other hand, what hobbyist needs to buy hundreds or thousands of 10MB hard disks or SIMMs (yes the DIMM's predecessor was named the SIMM) for a discounted volume price ?