Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!gatech!mcnc!ecsvax!urjlew From: urjlew@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Rostyk Lewyckyj) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: More BYTE discussion Summary: But remember that you have grown too Keywords: BYTE, magic, lost Message-ID: <5523@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> Date: 3 Aug 88 17:02:54 GMT References: <987@bucket.UUCP> Organization: UNC Educational Computing Service Lines: 58 While I am also in general agreement with the opinion that the quality and focus of BYTE magazine has been going down for the last several years, I would like to offer some weak defence on their behalf. I began reading BYTE many years ago, and my subscription still has over a year before it expires. I began reading BYTE while already a working programmer for over ten years and a long time member of the ACM and general voracious periodicals reader. At that time pesonal computing was a new growth area and I was looking for information about what was being done with these machines. I found the programming and computer science articles interesting in the popular science or Scientific American kind of way. That is in areas I was familiar with they were "so what, this is old stuff", and otherwise it was "hm .. , this is interesting. I should check it out in a real textbook". At that time there wasn't such a flood of hardware or software , and no systematized attempts at product comparisons. Although any comparisons that appeared were very welcome. Finally, BYTE advertising was, considered a valuable part of the magazine. Over the years the industry has changed. Personal computers have become consumer products. PC users are no longer amateurs of computing. They are buying and using these machines as tools for specific tasks. They *want* an overview of the products available and capsule product comparisons. This has allowed the publishers to get away with changing BYTE from a magazine for discerning computer literate hobbyists and amateurs to simply another trade publication. You may note that they also did this to Electronics ~1984. They simply republish manufacturers publicity/product releases and add some product comparison material from their "labs". As to the other articles, well those that they do decide to publish, they are of about the same level as those of previous years. BUT REMEMBER THAT YOU TOO HAVE GROWN. The articles are not meant for professional procgrammers or budding computer scientists. The articles of former years were interesting to you when you were starting out. You remeber them fondly because of the remebered effect they had on you when you originally read them. To sum things up I too am disappointed with what Mc Graw hill did with Electronics, and is doing to BYTE. I wish they would keep it as a computer hobbyist magazine, sort of a Computing Scientific American. As a second choice I would accept a good Consumer reports type of magazine. A publication of honest high quality comparisons of small computer systems, software, and peripherals. In depth independant product reviews. In their product comparisons, I wish they would get away from the fancy smantzy presentation graphics of three dimensional bar charts and concntrate instead on verifyable results presented in meaningfull tables and readable graphs. ----------------------------------------------- Reply-To: Rostyslaw Jarema Lewyckyj urjlew@ecsvax.UUCP , urjlew@tucc.bitnet or urjlew@tucc.tucc.edu (ARPA,SURA,NSF etc. internet) tel. (919)-962-9107