Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine

Thank you for doing this, it also has a nice microform feel when browsing. I remember that in the pre internet days I went to the library to find the microfiche in the drawer en folder of the newspaper I wanted to read. I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6P9FhSkd0I

I wonder what's the reason for the decline in length over the years and why the peak size years seem to be '82-'83.

As an image format alternative, there's avif and webp, but png has the advantage it was in existence during in the lasts BYTE years (1996-1998). "The full specification of PNG was released under the approval of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on 1 October 1996, and later as RFC 2083 on 15 January 1997"

The funny thing is, when I search I can't find mention of the GIF/PNG discussions or PNG introduction, while I do find mention of things like WebNFS, OLiVR/VDOLive (wavelet video) and FIF (fractal image format). Perhaps it was out of scope?

82-83 was the peak of hobbyist computing where articles and ads were in-between components and software.

As the tech improved, it moved into "appliance" mode of being a box you plug in, not a heathkit you assemble. By 86, Gateway and Dell and other packagers sold the "box". As demand shifted, all the mags shrunk from phone-book proportions (PC Mag, Compute, SoftDisk, etc etc). Some survived longer as business software fought for the office and marketing moved to peripherals (mice, monitors, printers) but things got anemic by the 90s.

>I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer.

My library had two forms of microfiche.

One was a cartridge containing a single spool, which upon being inserted into the reader would unspool onto an internal mechanism. You used two jog wheels, one fine and one coarse, to control the speed at which you traversed the tape, and there were numeric inputs so you could go to an arbitrary page. (it got close enough)

The second were flat rectangular sheets with pages laid out in a grid, and you placed the flat sheet onto a glass bed, pulled down a cover and slid the plate into the reader, using etch-a-sketch-like controls to move along the x and y axis.

In either case you could insert a dime and a single page of whatever was on the screen would spit out from an attached printer.

The decline in monthly print medium is universal, mostly due to a loss of advertisers. Once advertisers leave, magazines and newspapers have to start cutting costs which reduces the amount and quality of the content included. The feedback cycle continues until there's nothing left. In the 1980s magazines were the primary medium through which information about new technology products spread. Then in the early 1990s people began moving online to the internet and the world changed.

In Byte's case specifically the large space devoted to ads for mail order services started to decline significantly in the 1990s. In part it was a change in the kind of reader that was interested in computers. There was no longer a need to publish the price of CPUs, SRAM and other ICs in the back of Byte as that wasn't what people were buying. Plus the mail order houses had built up their own lists of customers by then, and would directly mail flyers and catalogues. Computers were no longer easily built from scratch as 32 bit CPUs became more complex and out of reach of most hobbiests.

I loved Byte magazine in the 1980s, and learned so much from it... The monthly hardware project from Steve Circia was fascinating, and there were articles about data structures, languages and even filesystems. I am sad for the loss of that enjoyable monthly experience.