Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!well!ewhac From: ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: R.I.P. BYTE: Open Letter to The Editor Summary: The Sad Demise of BYTE Keywords: BYTE, subscription, letter, fed up Message-ID: <6646@well.UUCP> Date: 28 Jul 88 04:57:24 GMT Reply-To: ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) Organization: Nothing to do with Pixar. Lines: 151 Quote: "'Cheer up, sad world,' he said, and winked. 'It's kind of fun to be extinct.'" -- Ogden Nash [ I hope the line eater gets diarrhea from this. ] Once again, I open myself up to the unknown: Either I'm going to get praised to high heaven, or flamed to a smoking pile of ashes for this. The probability of BYTE actually publishing this in their letters section seems to me to be rather low. In any case, I think it's something that needs to be said out in the open. Feel free to disagree with me on this; I'd love to be dead wrong about it, but I don't think I am. _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Leo L. Schwab -- The Guy in The Cape INET: well!ewhac@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU \_ -_ Recumbent Bikes: UUCP: pacbell > !{well,unicom}!ewhac O----^o The Only Way To Fly. hplabs / (pronounced "AE-wack") "Work FOR? I don't work FOR anybody! I'm just having fun." -- The Doctor _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Letter to editor of BYTE follows: _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ 61 Martens Blvd. San Rafael, CA 94901-5028 8807.26 Frederic S. Langa, Editor BYTE Magazine One Phoenix Mill Lane Peterborough, NH 03458 Cc: Scott Harris, Subscription Manager, BYTE Magazine Letters Editor, BYTE Magazine comp.misc, USENET Sir, I received in the mail today a notice informing me that my BYTE subscription is about to expire, and that I should renew. After having received your magazine for what will shortly be three years, I was prompted to write this letter after having received your notice. Having been involved in computers in one form or another for nearly twelve years (I am now 24), I have found the industry exciting, and its possibilities without end. As imaginative people continue to enter the field, new and wonderful things continue to happen all over the world. Unfortunately, I am of the opinion that, of late, your magazine has not kept up with these changes. What was once a wonderfully diverse and interesting publication has, in my view, degenerated into a Mac and IBM proselytizer. You have, in editorials, vigorously denied that you have lost your diversity. However, one needs only to look at the editorial balance of your articles over the past three years to know that you have heavily curtailed non-Mac and non-IBM material. As an Amiga owner, and staunch supporter of same, my perception of your publication may come as no surprise to you. It is true that many Amiga owners tend to believe that the Amiga is the Center Of The Universe as far as computers go. But even stepping back from this position, BYTE has still lost a great deal of the diversity which made it a once great publication that every computer owner should subscribe to. To your credit, you do make attempts from time to time to present your readers with new programming tricks, and occasionally preview new hardware. But it seems that these articles are written around the PC, or in comparison to the PC. Your publication also appears undecided about whether to accept that Motorola's 68000 series CPU is a powerful force in the industry. After promising for many months to produce a 68000-only issue, you turned around and merely made it your in-depth focus for the September 1986 issue. However, in the August 1988 issue, you have devoted a substantial portion of the magazine to the Macintosh. While this is a step forward, Macintosh is in no way a complete representation of available 68000 systems. There's also Amiga, Atari, Sinclair, Dual, Sun, and Apollo, to name just a few. While the 80x86 series can be adequetely represented by a single machine (the PC), the 680x0 series can not. Further, in my memory, I can not recall you ever covering to any great degree the Commodore 64/128, the AT&T 3B series, the MicroVAX, PostScript programming, or the National Semiconductor 32032 CPU. Your Apple ][ coverage has dropped to almost nothing, and you only bothered to mention Sun Microsystems when they came out with a PC-compatible workstation. Losing your diversity is, in my opinion, an unwise decision and a disservice to your readers. While it may be true that the majority of your readers are PC and Mac users, this is not a reason to fail to cover other systems in a balanced way. Consider a hypothetical reader, Mr. X, who is an MIS administrator for some company. Suppose that this person is looking for a computer solution that will provide him with the ability to do "desktop video", perhaps as a means to do quarterly reports for his company. By reading your magazines, he would be inclined to believe that the only way to do that was to purchase a Mac ][ with an NTSC video card and a piece of $2000 software that won't be available for several months. He would be unaware that such solutions exist NOW on the Amiga, for substantially less money. More generally, a person who may be heavily PC-oriented may need to solve a problem which has already been solved on a non-PC system. By reading about the solution, he may be able to apply it himself on his system, or purchase the system in question to solve it if his problem is important enough. Also, people like to know what's happening outside the realm they've chosen for themselves. Perhaps they will learn about something happening elsewhere that interests them enough to investigate further on their own. By failing to maintain your diversity and report on it, you are depriving your readers of valuable information, which is the greatest disservice any publication can do. If a person has solved a particular problem, it should not matter which system that problem was solved on. A solution is a solution, and someone somewhere is going to want to hear about it. Ray tracing, once exclusively the domain of supermini- and mainframe-computers, can now be done on systems costing less than $1000 complete. Did you report on ray tracing when it was first developed? Have you reviewed any of the current crop of available ray tracing packages? Diversity. It's what this industry is all about. Lots of people in lots of places doing lots of things, some of them rather interesting. When people do interesting things, they like to brag about it. There should be a forum where these people can come and say, "This is what we did. This is why we did it. This is how we did it. We think it's interesting. We hope you do, too." Your magazine used to be such a forum. Sadly, it appears this is no longer the case. In a recent readership survey, you asked which computer the person owned. You enumerated every Mac and PC model ever made, made a casual reference to UNIX, and covered the remainder of the market with the entry "Other". For a magazine that claims to be diverse, this is extremely suspicious. But perhaps the most telling example of the narrowing of your editorial scope is revealed on BYTE's cover. Beginning with the July 1988 issue, underneath your new hard-edged logo, your magazine no longer proudly proclaims, "The Small Systems Journal." I invite you to go through your archives and pull out the March 1981 issue of BYTE: "Structured Programming and Structured Flowcharts", "Three Dimensional Computer Graphics, Part One", "A Beginner's Guide to Spectral Analysis, Part Two", "A Simple Approach to Data Smoothing", "Computer Music: A Design Tutorial", "Desktop Wonders: Hunt the Wumpus with Your HP-41C". This is what BYTE once was. This is what BYTE should be. This is the BYTE I want. I am deeply saddened that this kind of BYTE is no longer published. It is for these reasons that I am electing not to renew my subscription to BYTE. I will continue to occasionally check up on you on the newsstands to see if you have improved, and I earnestly hope that this will not be in vain. I hope you are able to see and understand what has happened to your magazine, and will have the desire to correct it. You can become great again, if you want to. I bid you farewell. Sincerely, Leo L. Schwab