To: Jerry Pournelle From: David R Tribble Subject: NEWCHAOS:YOUDOLT Date: Fri 1998-06-05 15:40 +0500 So sorry to hear about the demise of Byte. On the other hand, I can't say I'll miss it, since I've read only about two issues since 1982. I starting reading Byte in 1978 as a budding young hacker, full of youth and enthusiasm and eager to learn the ways of software and hardware. I was one of those readers who used to circle the whole array of advertiser numbers on the Reader Service card, and I got as much fun out of reading the ads and keeping abreast of the latest in PC technology (remember, this was before the term 'PC' was even invented) as reading the articles. And the articles. My eyes get moist remembering the quality and depth of those articles, back in the heyday of Byte. Computer chess, artificial intelligence, BASIC, Pascal, Smalltalk, assembly code, game theory, networking, algorithms, on and on and on. I learned a great deal of Computer Science from reading those articles. And I loved the Robert Tinney covers. I still have all of the issues I ever got, tenderly preserved on my bookshelves. But the Byte I knew and loved lost its momentum around 1982 or so. It had been a great learning resource to me through my formative years as a software engineer in high school and early college. But slowly Byte had become less interesting, containing less and less computer science articles and more and more consumer reviews and industry speculations. My tastes had not changed, but the magazine had. This, by the way, was about the time you joined Byte. It's not a personal slam against you, merely an observation about the change of focus of the magazine. Most of the writers before then had been programmers and CS experts. After that time they were product review specialists and industry editorialists. Even Robert Tinney was gone. All well and good, except that I didn't give two cents about the latest floppy drive or last month's graphics card or the modem of the week. I still wanted to learn. So I moved to the pages of Dr. Dobbs, Computer Language (now defunct), Unix Review, and others. These guys spoke my language. These guys had stuff to teach me. And I didn't look back. Oh, I've glanced through an issue or two since 1982, but since I could only find one interesting article at most, I eventually stopped looking at it at all. So, I'm sorry to hear about the death of Byte magazine. But the Byte magazine I loved died a long time ago. --------------------. +1-972-738-6125 Work ,-. C++ : the PL/1 of David R. Tribble \ ,---------------------' \ the 90s http://www.beasys.com `-' +1-972-738-6111 Fax `------------------- david.tribble@central.beasys.com http://www.flash.net/~dtribble dtribble@technologist.com Support the anti-Spam amendment, join at http://www.cauce.org/