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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It kind of recaptures part of the intangible sense of flipping through the old physical pages to see what catches the mind's interest. This feels substantively different from the current way that we discover and stumble upon things in the modern web and especially mobile app ecosystems with infinite scroll and algorithmically curated feeds.
Or catalogs. But scanning them in archival quality is a massive pain in the ass. And don't get me started on all the scalpers, who sell catalogs at prices beyond good and evil.
(You can get the same experience from the Scientific American archives but holding the 170 year old bound copies with all the prints is something else)
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EDIT: From 12/1989: "Will Clock Speeds Top Out at 50 MHz? An issue that computer designers can't seem to agree on is the ultimate potential speed limit of microprocessor clock rates. The more conservative argument, put forth at the Microprocessor Forum by Microprocessor Report editor Michael Slater and several other conference speakers, maintained that clock speeds will top out at about 50 MHz[...]"
Regardless, this is just a really fantastic example of this whole kind of project, and the fact that it was done with BYTE is the cherry on top.