Bite?Bite?

Before Hackernews, before Twitter, before blogs, before the web had been spun, when the internet was just four universities in a trenchcoat, there was BYTE. A monthly mainline of the entire personal computing universe, delivered on dead trees for a generation of hackers. Running from September 1975 to July 1998, its 277 issues chronicled the Cambrian explosion of the microcomputer, from bare-metal kits to the dawn of the commercial internet. Forget repackaged corporate press releases—BYTE was for the builders. Inside, you'd find Steve Ciarcia teaching you to build a speech synthesizer from scratch, the inner details of a RISC pipeline, deep dives into the guts of Smalltalk, and Jerry Pournelle’s legendary columns from Chaos Manor. This wasn't just about what a computer could do, but how it did it. The source code of a revolution that continues to this day.

What?What?

This zoomable map shows every page of every issue of BYTE starting from the front cover of the first issue (top left) to the last page of the final edition (bottom right). The search bar runs RE2 regex over the full text of all 100k pages. The archive itself is not new, scans of BYTE have long existed on the Internet Archive and elsewhere on the net – but I hope seeing everything in single, searchable place offers a unique perspective.

Why?Why?

"[...] pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]—and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.
—Alan Kay, on Computing, Dr. Dobb’s Interview with Alan Kay

The relationship between Computing and its history is that of a willful amnesiac. We discard the past as fast as possible, convinced it cannot possibly contain anything of value. This is a mistake. The classic homilies are accurate: Failing to remember the past we are condemned to repeat it – as often as tragedy as farce.