Byte (magazine)
Encyclopedia
BYTE magazine was a microcomputer
Microcomputer
A microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. They are physically small compared to mainframe and minicomputers...

 magazine, influential in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage. Whereas many magazines from the mid-1980s had been dedicated to the MS-DOS
MS-DOS
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...

 (PC) platform or the Mac, mostly from a business or home user's perspective, Byte covered developments in the entire field of "small computers and software", and sometimes other computing fields such as supercomputer
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems including quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling A supercomputer is a...

s and high-reliability computing. Coverage was in-depth with much technical detail, rather than user-oriented. The Byte name and logo continued to exist , but as an online publication only, with different emphasis.

BYTE started in 1975, shortly after the first personal computers appeared as kits advertised in the back of electronics magazines. BYTE was published monthly, with an initial yearly subscription price of $10.

How BYTE started

In 1975 Wayne Green
Wayne Green
Wayne Green is an American publisher and writer, and consultant. He was formerly editor of CQ magazine before he went on to found 73, 80 Micro, Byte, CD Review, Cold Fusion, Kilobaud Microcomputing, RUN , InCider, and Pico, as well as publishing books and running a software company...

 was the editor and publisher of 73
73 (magazine)
73 Magazine was a United States-based amateur radio magazine that was published from 1960 to 2003. It was known for its strong emphasis on technical articles and for the lengthy editorials in each issue by its founder and publisher, Wayne Green...

(an amateur radio
Amateur radio
Amateur radio is the use of designated radio frequency spectrum for purposes of private recreation, non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, and emergency communication...

 magazine) and his ex-wife, Virginia Londner Green, was the Business Manager of 73 Inc. In the August 1975 issue of 73 magazine Wayne's editorial column started with this item:
"The response to computer-type articles in 73 has been so enthusiastic that we here in Peterborough got carried away. On May 25th we made a deal with the publisher of a small (400 circulation) computer hobby magazine to take over as editor of a new publication which would start in August ... BYTE."


Byte's first editor was Carl Helmers and in the first anniversary issue he wrote:
"BYTE began with its first issue dated September 1975. That first issue was assembled from scratch in seven weeks of hectic activity starting May 25, 1975."

Byte was published by a new company, Green Publishing, which was wholly owned by Virginia Green, who had kept the surname after her divorce ten years earlier. Because she started Green Publishing and Byte Magazine with limited capital, which she borrowed from her family, much of the work of the early issues was sub-contracted to various individuals and companies, mostly in the Monadnock Region
Monadnock Region
The Monadnock Region is a tourism region in southwestern New Hampshire. It is named after Mount Monadnock, the major geographic landmark in the region. The Monadnock Region is composed of all of Cheshire County and western Hillsborough County. The largest city in the region is Keene...

 of New Hampshire
New Hampshire
New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian...

. 73 Magazine, which had excess staff capacity, did much of the "paste-up" of the magazine pages for the first 4 issues under sub-contract from Virginia Green. In 3 of those first 4 issues, without permission or authority, Wayne Green inserted his name and the title of Publisher just before the final page "boards" were sent to the printer. After the third occurrence, Virginia Green removed all work in progress from the 73 premises and used other sub-contractors and her own growing Byte staff.

A 1985 Folio magazine article suggested that "One day in November 1975 Wayne came to work and found that the Byte magazine staff had moved out and taken the January issue with them." This Folio article quoting Wayne Green was the genesis of libel actions by Virginia Green against both Folio and Wayne Green in the New Hampshire Superior Court in Manchester
Manchester, New Hampshire
Manchester is the largest city in the U.S. state of New Hampshire, the tenth largest city in New England, and the largest city in northern New England, an area comprising the states of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. It is in Hillsborough County along the banks of the Merrimack River, which...

. Folio had never attempted to corroborate Wayne Green's statements with Virginia Green, Carl Helmers, or the law firm that organized Virginia Green's publishing company to publish, inter alia, Byte Magazine. Both Folio and Wayne Green settled before trial with large payments to Virginia Green.

The January 1976 issue has Virginia Green listed as Publisher.

Virginia Green Williamson's second husband, attorney Gordon Williamson, wrote a book contending that Wayne Green's role in founding Byte was minimal and that litigation between the parties was settled against Wayne Green's interests. See "See Wayne Run. Run, Wayne, Run." (Barkley, 1988).

The February 1976 issue of Byte has a short story about the move. "After a start which reads like a romantic light opera with an episode or two reminiscent of the Keystone Cops, BYTE magazine finally has moved into separate offices of its own."

In the autumn of 1976 Wayne Green announced the planned launch of a computer magazine called Kilobyte. Byte quickly trademarked KILOBYTE as a cartoon series in Byte magazine as the first of a planned family of trademarks based upon the original "Byte" trademark. A trademark infringement lawsuit in US Federal Court in Concord, New Hampshire
Concord, New Hampshire
The city of Concord is the capital of the state of New Hampshire in the United States. It is also the county seat of Merrimack County. As of the 2010 census, its population was 42,695....

 by Byte against Wayne Green and Kilobyte was settled with Green changing the name of his proposed magazine to Kilobaud before the first issue was produced. Byte magazine's policy was not to mention competitors in its pages, including Wayne Green's publications. There continued to be competition and animosity between Byte Publications and 73 Inc., both located in the small town of Peterborough, New Hampshire
Peterborough, New Hampshire
Peterborough is a town in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 6,284 at the 2010 census. Home to the MacDowell Art Colony, the town is a popular tourist destination....

.

The early years

Byte was able to attract advertising and articles from many well-knowns, soon-to-be-well-knowns, and ultimately-to-be-forgottens in the growing microcomputer hobby. Articles in the first issue (September, 1975) included Which Microprocessor For You? by Hal Chamberlin, Write Your Own Assembler by Dan Fylstra
Dan Fylstra
Dan Fylstra is a pioneer of the software products industry. In 1975 he was a founding associate editor of BYTE Magazine. In 1978 he co-founded Personal Software. Personal Software became the distributor of a new program called VisiCalc, the first widely used computer spreadsheet...

 and Serial Interface by Don Lancaster
Don Lancaster
Donald E. Lancaster is a prolific author, inventor, and microcomputer pioneer best known for his magazine columns. He is also known for his "TV Typewriter" dumb terminal project, his book on technical entrepreneurship The Incredible Secret Money Machine, and his work on and advocacy of early...

. Advertisements from Godbout
Bill Godbout
Bill Godbout was an early computer pioneer and entrepreneur known for manufacturing and selling computer equipment, parts and Electronic kits in Silicon Valley, before the time of the Apple II....

, MITS
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems
Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems was an American electronics company founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico that began manufacturing electronic calculators in 1971 and personal computers in 1975. Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims founded MITS in December 1969 to produce miniaturized telemetry...

, Processor Technology
Processor Technology
Processor Technology Corporation was a microcomputer company founded by Bob Marsh and Gary Ingram in April 1975. Its best known product is the Sol-20 computer.-History:...

, SCELBI
SCELBI
SCELBI Computer Consulting was a personal-computer hardware and software manufacturer located in Milford, Connecticut. It was founded in 1973 by Nat Wadsworth and Bob Findley. Initially, they sold hardware based on the first 8-bit microprocessor from Intel, the 8008...

, and Sphere appear, among others.

Early articles in Byte were do-it-yourself electronic or software projects to improve small computers. A continuing feature was Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, a column in which electronic engineer Steve Ciarcia
Steve Ciarcia
Steve Ciarcia is an embedded control systems engineer. He became popular through his Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar column in BYTE magazine, and later through the Circuit Cellar magazine that he published...

 described small projects to modify or attach to a computer (later spun off to become the magazine Circuit Cellar, focusing on embedded
Embedded system
An embedded system is a computer system designed for specific control functions within a larger system. often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including hardware and mechanical parts. By contrast, a general-purpose computer, such as a personal...

 computer applications). Significant articles in this period included the Kansas City standard
Kansas City standard
The Kansas City Standard , or Byte standard, is a digital data format for audio cassette drives. Byte magazine sponsored a symposium in November 1975 in Kansas City, Missouri to develop a standard for storage of digital computer data on inexpensive consumer quality cassettes, at a time when...

 for data storage on audio tape, insertion of disk drives into S-100
S-100 bus
The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE696-1983 , was an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800, generally considered today to be the first personal computer...

 computers, publication of source code for various computer languages (Tiny C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, BASIC, assemblers
Assembly language
An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...

), and breathless coverage of the first microcomputer operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

, CP/M. Byte ran Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's first advertisement, as "Micro-Soft", to sell a BASIC interpreter
Altair BASIC
Altair BASIC was an interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product , distributed by MITS under a contract...

 for 8080
Intel 8080
The Intel 8080 was the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and was released in April 1974. It was an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibility...

-based computers.

Growth and change

In spring of 1979, owner/publisher Virginia Williamson sold the magazine to McGraw-Hill
McGraw-Hill
The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Its primary areas of business are financial, education, publishing, broadcasting, and business services...

. She remained publisher until 1983, about 8 years after founding the magazine, and subsequently became a vice president of McGraw-Hill Publications Company. Shortly after the IBM PC was introduced, in 1981, the magazine changed editorial policies. It gradually de-emphasized the do-it-yourself electronics and software articles, and began running product reviews, the first computer magazine to do so. It continued its wide-ranging coverage of hardware and software, but now it reported "what it does" and "how it works", not "how-to-do-it." The editorial focus remained on any computer system or software that might be within a typical individual's finances and interest (centered on home
Home computer
Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming increasingly common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user...

 and personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

s).

From 1975 through 1986 Byte covers usually featured the artwork of Robert Tinney
Robert Tinney
Robert Frank Tinney is an American contemporary illustrator most well known for his monthly cover illustrations for the influential microcomputer publication Byte magazine spanning over a decade...

. These covers made Byte visually unique. In 1987 Tinney's paintings were replaced by product photographs, and Steve Ciarcia's "Circuit Cellar" column was discontinued.

Around 1985 Byte started an online service called BIX
Byte Information Exchange
Byte Information eXchange was an online service created around 1985 by Byte magazine. It was a text-only Bulletin Board System-style site running the CoSy conferencing software running originally on an Arete multiprocessor system based on Motorola 68000s. When that didn't scale well, it was...

 (Byte Information eXchange) which was a text-only BBS style
Bulletin board system
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...

 site running on the CoSy conferencing software, also used by McGraw-Hill internally. Access was via local dial-in or, for additional hourly charges, the Tymnet
Tymnet
Tymnet was an international data communications network headquartered in San Jose, California that used virtual call packet switched technology and X.25, SNA/SDLC, ASCII and BSC interfaces to connect host computers at thousands of large companies, educational institutions, and government agencies....

 X.25
X.25
X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet switched wide area network communication. An X.25 WAN consists of packet-switching exchange nodes as the networking hardware, and leased lines, Plain old telephone service connections or ISDN connections as physical links...

 network. Monthly rates were $13/month for the account and $1/hour for X.25 access. Unlike Compuserve
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...

, access at higher speeds was not surcharged. Many of the Byte staff were active on the service. Later, gateway
Gateway (telecommunications)
In telecommunications, the term gateway has the following meaning:*In a communications network, a network node equipped for interfacing with another network that uses different protocols....

s permitted email
Email
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 communication outside the system.

Byte continued to grow. By 1990 it was a monthly about an inch in thickness, a readership of technical professionals, and a subscription price of $56/year, a high figure for the time. It was the "must-read" magazine of the popular computer magazines. Around 1993 Byte began to develop a web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

 presence. It acquired domain name byte.com and began to have discussions and post selected editorial content.

It developed a number of national sister editions in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, and an Arabic edition published in Jordan.

End of the printed magazine, and online publication

Byte's readership and advertising revenue were declining when McGraw-Hill sold the magazine to CMP Media, a successful publisher of specialized computer magazines in May 1998. The magazine's editors and writers expected its new owner to revitalize Byte but CMP ceased publication with the July 1998 issue, laid off all the staff and shut down Bytes rather large product-testing lab. Subscribers were offered a choice of two of CMP's other magazines, notably CMP's flagship publication about Windows PCs.

Publication of
Byte in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 and Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 continued uninterrupted. The Turkish edition resumed publication after a few years of interruption. The Arabic edition also ended abruptly.

Many of
BYTE
s columnists migrated their writing to personal web sites. The most popular of these was probably science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 author Jerry Pournelle
Jerry Pournelle
Jerry Eugene Pournelle is an American science fiction writer, essayist and journalist who contributed for many years to the computer magazine Byte and has since 1998 been maintaining his own website/blog....

's weblog "The View From Chaos Manor" derived from a long-standing column in Byte, describing computers from a power user
Power user
A power user is a user of a personal computer who has the ability to use advanced features of programs which are beyond the abilities of "normal" users, but is not necessarily capable of programming and system administration...

's point of view. After the closure of Byte magazine, Jerry Pournelle's column continued to be published in the Turkish editions of PC World, which was soon renamed as PC LIFE in Turkey.
In 1999 CMP revived BYTE as a web-only publication, from 2002 accessible by subscription
Subscription business model
The subscription business model is a business model where a customer must pay a subscription price to have access to the product/service. The model was pioneered by magazines and newspapers, but is now used by many businesses and websites....

. It closed in 2009.

UBM
United Business Media
UBM plc is a magazine publisher, news distributor and events organiser providing business information services principally to the technology, healthcare, media, automotive and financial services industries...

 brought the BYTE name back on 11 July 2011 as an online publication, more oriented toward consumer electronics rather than the deep technology coverage of the original BYTE Magazine.
Jerry Pournelle continued writing from "Chaos Manor". The initial editor-in-chief was Gina Smith, who left Byte two months after a controversy erupted over a column by blogger Demetrius Mandzych about Apple products which was criticized for numerous factual errors and ultimately retracted by Byte, which publicly apologized for running it. Larry Seltzer took over as editorial director.

See also

  • MC die microcomputer-zeitschrift (magazine)
    MC die microcomputer-zeitschrift (magazine)
    MC die microcomputer-zeitschrift was a monthly German microcomputer publication for technically interested persons, a bit similar to Byte magazine, but unlike Byte it often published the circuit diagrams of various computer devices...

    , a former German magazine similar to Byte.

Further reading

  • Ranade, Jay
    Jay Ranade
    Jay Ranade, is a bestselling computer book author and information technology management consultant, and also a World Power Breaking Champion....

    ; Nash, Alan (1993). The Best of Byte. McGraw-Hill Companies. 641 pp. ISBN 0-07-051344-9.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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