Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine

(!)

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.

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.

(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?

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.

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).