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Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine

(byte.tsundoku.io)
401 points chromy | 2 comments | 26 Aug 25 15:34 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

A while ago I was looking for information on a obscure and short lived British computer.

I found an article[1] in the archives of BYTE magazine[2] - and was captivated immediately by the tech adverts of bygone eras.

This led to a long side project to be able to see all 100k pages of BYTE in a single searchable place.

[1]: https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198502-381

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683184

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Eriks ◴[26 Aug 25 17:16 UTC] No.45029511[source]▶
dezoomify-rs https://byte.tsundoku.io/byte_files/10/0_0.jpg

Found the following zoom levels:

0. byte (Deep Zoom Image) (868480 x 453747 pixels, 376956 tiles)

...

I think, I'll skip downloading this

replies(1): >>45029789 #
1. chromy ◴[26 Aug 25 17:39 UTC] No.45029789[source]▶
Yes it's a fair amount of data:

pdfs/ 12.5 GiB

pages/ 91.96 GiB (Each page as a .png)

text/ 365.03 MiB (Each page as text)

byte_files/ 55.98 GiB (The 1024x1024 tiles as .jpeg)

I had not heard of https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify-rs before, that's really cool!

replies(1): >>45030371 #
2. Sunspark ◴[26 Aug 25 18:27 UTC] No.45030371[source]▶
I wonder how it would do with the djvu codec which tends to have been used specifically for archiving documents. I suppose it is best applied at source if the physical material is at hand.

Might still be worth taking a look at as an experiment since this codec separates text, background and images into different layers, even when converted from another format.