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Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine

(byte.tsundoku.io)
401 points chromy | 1 comments | 26 Aug 25 15:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.273s | 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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russellbeattie ◴[26 Aug 25 20:10 UTC] No.45031716[source]▶
Fun bit of trivia: Byte was edited and published in Peterborough, New Hampshire. If you've ever been to that area of the world, you'd know how totally absurd it is that such an influential, world-renowned tech magazine was based there.

Nominally, the offices were located sorta near Boston, which at the time had some important tech companies like Digital and Lotus, amongst others. But Peterborough was a small, rural, old-fashioned New England town about as far away from Silicon Valley as you could get. How a publication from that area was able to be so relevant to the tech industry is almost a mystery!

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1. ghaff ◴[27 Aug 25 12:32 UTC] No.45038761[source]▶
Not really that odd. Yes, Lotus was in Boston (Cambridge actually). But the computer industry was mostly west and northwest of the city. Digital had a big campus in Nashua over the border from MA in NH. (I think Oracle is there now.) Lots of people at many of the computer companies actually lived in NH.