While most of us now source our technology news online, millions globally still flick their way through a newspaper or magazine to keep up to date.
Sadly, print media is a declining industry, according to figures from Statista, and with a digital world at your fingertips, it’s easy to see why you’d visit the myriad (but also declining) news sites out there to keep your finger on the pulse of the global tech scene.
Rewind to the mid-1970s, however, and it was a completely different world - and Byte magazine was all the rage. Launched in 1975, the magazine gained a reputation for its extensive coverage of ‘microcomputers’ and rose to prominence in parallel with the early days of personal computing.
The magazine was published monthly, and readers could subscribe through an annual subscription of just $10 initially. Even by today’s standards that’s cheap, coming in at the equivalent of $59.88 - great value, if you ask me.
By 1979, at the time of its acquisition by the McGraw-Hill publishing group, Byte boasted a paid circulation of over 150,000 readers, making it one of the most popular technology magazines on the scene.
Byte brought back to life
Times change, though, and in 1998 the print version of Byte was issued for the last time. Having been acquired by CMP Media some years prior, the decision was made to cut staff and cease production.
The Byte website finally shut down in 2013 after several ill-fated attempts to revive the site.
Luckily, we’re able to go back and get a glimpse at Byte in its heyday, thanks to a new online archive.
Byte: A Visual Archive brings the magazine back to life in all its glory, giving users access to every single front page splash, article, and advertisement. A quick glimpse at the homepage of the archive gives you an idea of exactly how much coverage the magazine provided over the years.
Decade’s worth of content, countless hours of typing, and who knows how many moments of writer’s block for the plethora of journalists that boasted bylines in the magazine.
Plunging into the archive with a single click, I landed on the September 1983 edition - a period in time when I was just a glimmer in my dad's eye.
On the left we have ads for Mitsubishi floppy disk drives offering a mighty 6.2k bytes of RAM. Powerful stuff. Elsewhere, we have an advert for color printers aimed at helping businesses visualize data and a review for the Pied Piper personal computer.
Going down another rabbit hole, the Pied Piper was released in the early 1980s by Semi-Tech Microelectronics (STM). At the time, it was a low-cost and ‘portable’ business computer.
Judging by the size, it’s definitely not getting a five-star rating on TechRadar based on that. Regardless, author Seth P. Bates noted it was a surprisingly cost-efficient option for businesses at the time.
“The Pied Piper offers real business features at toy prices,” he wrote. "Although a few of its features might have been designed differently, as with any machine, STM offers a good system for the money”.
“Models II and III are already in the works, and one of them is a 16-bit machine,” Bates added. “These additions to the line, along with the promise of the 20line LCD option, make the Piped Piper’s future look bright.”
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