I've never understood why Byte magazine was shut down. There's been nothing like it. I can't imagine it not being popular in today's tech culture. I'd pay $100 or more for a year's subscription to it right now.
Because of the web. Writers no longer need printing presses to reach interested readers. Readers no longer need managing editors to select good writers and articles. (Writers can still benefit a lot from good editing. Witness the long list of thank-yous on every Paul Graham article.)
It turns out that BYTE was shut down because it didn't focus on WinTel enough - which was the dominant platform at the time (late 90's). I had always suspected this.
It wasn't some overt conspiracy though. Byte had above average circulation for a computer magazine, and far higher resubscription rates. The problem was that because it didn't cater to a specific well defined segment of buyers, it was less appealing to advertisers.
Given that so much of the web is advertising driven, I don't see how it's immune from this. There can be a huge number of people who want a source of well written broad ranging tech material but it's the advertisers who fund the web and they don't want broad ranging. They want people neatly divided up into predictable segments of buyers.
What gets funded on the web isn't determined by what users want - it's what advertisers will pay for.
> There just isn't anything on the web that compares. (or if there is, please please tell me!)
The breadth and depth of well-written technical information available on the web is far, far beyond what was available in Byte in its heyday. Consider:
The big difficulty these days is not getting access to well-written, broad-ranging tech material; it's choosing which well-written, broad-ranging tech material you want to read out of all the immense quantity of material out there, and avoiding spending all of your time reading it. Services like HN, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, and Slashdot basically exist to solve this filtering problem (although not, obviously, limited to the tech press).
> What gets funded on the web isn't determined by what users want - it's what advertisers will pay for.
That's true, but fortunately it's irrelevant, because what gets written about on the web isn't determined by what gets funded—it's what people want to write about.
I respectfully disagree with you. There is obviously a far higher quantity of technical 'information' on the web, but almost none of it reaches the standards of the professional writing that was done by Byte.
The articles I see on the sites you list are typically narrow, sensationalist, or self-serving. Some of them are informative but most of them lack perspective, and many of them are written to gain votes on these sites, which are themselves advertising driven. There are notable exceptions, HN obviously, and LTU for example. But most of what gets posted on HN is junk. Hacker Monthly is a gorgeously executed but frankly it reads like an 80's fanzine, and LTU is great but super-narrow.
What you may not be aware of is that a well written technical magazine article takes weeks of research writing and careful editing, not to mention interviewing experts and preparing of graphics. Professional writers add breadth and perspective gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize it to produce something with added value.
That kind of activity only happens when there are professionals who are skilled and able to do it. Just wanting to write about stuff isn't enough.
We do get some good stuff on business written by independently wealthy ex-entrepreneurs, and some deeply technical stuff written by domain experts, but we've lost perspective and sadly social news sites don't magically bring it back. They can only filter what actually gets produced.
I would link you to some of the articles I am referring to, but whoever owns byte.com now has taken the archive off-line.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing the web - it's added a lot. But it's also taken stuff away that it hasn't replaced so far, and the everything is free but ad-supported model has a lot to do with that.
> The articles I see on the sites you list are typically narrow, sensationalist, or self-serving.
I'm shocked that you would say that about LWN, or Ian Lance Taylor's blog, or Landon Dyer's blog, or James Hamilton's blog, or Google Research Videos. It's so far from reality that I feel compelled to ask if you've actually read them.
> many of them are written to gain votes on these sites, which are themselves advertising driven.
Or that. I mean, maybe Mark? Or Gruber? But can you seriously see James Hamilton or James Hague or Raymond Chen or LWN writing an article "to gain votes on these sites"? I mean, come on.
> But most of what gets posted on HN is junk.
True. But Byte published less than one article per day, and only a minority of its articles were of the high quality that we're talking about here.
> What you may not be aware of is that a well written technical magazine article takes weeks of research writing and careful editing, not to mention interviewing experts and preparing of graphics. Professional writers add breadth and perspective gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize it to produce something with added value.
Well, I haven't written for Byte, but my limited experience writing magazine articles falls pretty far short of what you're describing there. Byte did have some pretty good stuff, it's true. But as often as not, professional writers synthesize those perspectives with errors and FUD.
And I'd like to point out that in http://web.archive.org/web/20050101022330/http://www.byte.co... there were three articles written by Ernest Lilley in, I believe, the same month. So I think "weeks" may be an overestimate of how much time was normally spent on an article. Maybe in 1998 or something they had a much larger staff?
This was close to Byte's peak of the 1980s. Yet what do we find? A 20-paragraph article cluelessly claiming that autoconf "neatly eliminates this work [of porting software between Unix variants]" and that most "public-domain software packages" use autoconf; an in-depth article about classes of ATM service by a guy who writes books about ATM and TCP/IP that somehow neglects to mention how people in the TCP/IP world solve the same problems, and fails to note the degree to which ATM and TCP/IP were increasingly in competition, to the point that ATM is today a minor niche physical-layer protocol; an editorial in favor of standardizing Java; reviews of 26 new MMX laptop models; a one-paragraph article about delays in the shipment of Tillamook; a competitive review article of cryptography software that pits PGP against Netscape and Microsoft Outlook; a competitive review article of web server software that reviews Microsoft IIS and Netscape SuiteSpot, but somehow failed to include Apache (despite noting that it was the market leader); an evaluation of the new Number Nine graphics card; and so on.
> We do get some good stuff on business written by independently wealthy ex-entrepreneurs, and some deeply technical stuff written by domain experts, but we've lost perspective…
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "lost perspective"?
> I'm shocked that you would say that about LWN, or Ian Lance Taylor's blog, or Landon Dyer's blog, or James Hamilton's blog, or Google Research Videos. It's so far from reality that I feel compelled to ask if you've actually read them.
I have read them.
I think that even the byte examples you linked are better than 99% of the articles that appear even on HN and certainly what passes for tech journalism. They don't stir the heart but they are informative and concise - reading them even now doesn't feel like I've wasted my time. I disagree about the lasting value - they are concise and provide a very quick way to get an understanding of what was going on in the industry at the time. Mocking them for using terminology which now seems dated is out of place.
There simply isn't a place now where I can even pay to get this kind of concise but technical view of what's going on.
The LWN stuff is narrow and much less concise, and although the blogs you mention do have very good stuff, they are also narrow and also have some intensely time wasting hobby horses.
BUT
I will concede: most of the individual pieces you list in your penultimate paragraph are indeed excellent. Even though even some of them are surrounded by time wasting random personal fluff, and a couple of them take 10 paragraphs to beautifully make a single emotive point. Which frankly, I can do without most of the time.
It's quite possible that there wasn't even one article per issue on average that compares favorably to the very best blog pieces.
But none of that changes the fact that there is no source for this kind of concise and consistent material anymore.
I want a magazine (electronic is fine) that gives good technical coverage of the industry with concise articles that don't waste my time, where every piece is of reasonable quality and some special pieces are really great. Monthly would be fine.
What I have is tens of sites that give narrow coverage, and are mostly full of dross. In order to find the good material (none of which is the concise cross-industry coverage mind you), I have to visit all of them every day and sift through hundreds of pieces of rubbish looking for the odd gem. Oh - and guess what? I have to read a lot more rubbish to even know whether it was good or not.
As I said originally, the web has brought us stuff we didn't have before - volume, and I'll concede some higher quality stuff than we ever had before.
But we've also obviously lost something. I honestly don't know why you're so trying so hard to claim otherwise.
> Mocking them for using terminology which now seems dated is out of place.
I wasn't mocking the autoconf article for using dated terminology. I was criticizing it for containing serious factual errors in its main points. I didn't even mention the terminology of the encryption-software article and the laptop-review article I was mocking.
> I think that even the Byte examples you linked are better than 99% of the articles that appear even on HN and certainly what passes for tech journalism.
Better than 99% of what appears on HN is no great feat, but earlier in the thread you seemed to be saying that Byte "add[ed] breadth and perspective gathered from multiple domain experts and synthesize[d] it", and by contrast, what is available today was "typically narrow, sensationalist, or self-serving. …[sometimes] informative but most of them lack perspective," but the Byte articles I mentioned were for the most part extremely narrow, often written by a single domain expert and completely lacking in any larger perspective. Many of them were also indirectly self-serving — they read like sales brochures for certain Byte advertisers.
> Even though even some of them are surrounded by time wasting random personal fluff, and a couple of them take 10 paragraphs to beautifully make a single emotive point.
Which ones are you talking about? I went back and followed the links and read the articles in depth (which I hadn't done the first time) and I'm completely mystified by your assertion. It's as if you're writing your comments from a parallel dimension with a completely different set of articles. Those articles, by the way, aren't cherry-picked from among the best; I just went to the home page of several of the sources I'd mentioned earlier and picked the first article that looked like something good.
It is true that the articles in Byte were very short, and the average quality was okay.
> But we've also obviously lost something. I honestly don't know why you're so trying so hard to claim otherwise.
I was going to agree with you, because my memory of Byte was of some extremely high-quality and pioneering articles. But then I dug the old Byte issues out of the Wayback Machine, and it turned out that the problems you were complaining about were worse in late-1990s Byte than in the current web — at least the parts of it that I read. I'd forgotten all about the endless piles of reviews of insignificant graphics cards from now-defunct manufacturers.
> In order to find the good material (none of which is the concise cross-industry coverage mind you),
Can you point me at an example or two of what you're talking about from the Byte archives? I'm not sure what you mean by "cross-industry coverage". Maybe if you give me an example I can tell you where to find similar stuff on the current web.
> I want a magazine (electronic is fine) that gives good technical coverage of the industry with concise articles that don't waste my time, where every piece is of reasonable quality and some special pieces are really great. Monthly would be fine.
I'd like that too. It seems like to the extent that the articles already exist, you could put it together simply as an RSS feed of links. Maybe you could do it as a Delicious tag.
