Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine

234 chromy 41 8/26/2025, 3:34:55 PM byte.tsundoku.io ↗

A while ago I was looking for information on a obscure and short lived British computer. I found an article[1] in the archives of BYTE magazine[2] - and was captivated immediately by the tech adverts of bygone eras. This led to a long side project to be able to see all 100k pages of BYTE in a single searchable place.

[1]: https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198502-381 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683184

Comments (41)

bdcravens · 1h ago

Kinda meta, but I found it fascinating seeing the ads that were presumably bought up well in advance, with the same company on the same page in the first few pages of the issue, at least early on. Seeing how it changed over time, I can't help but wonder if that in itself is a bit of a historical record about the growth and death of parts of the industry.

fsiefken · 2h ago

Thank you for doing this, it also has a nice microform feel when browsing. I remember that in the pre internet days I went to the library to find the microfiche in the drawer en folder of the newspaper I wanted to read. I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6P9FhSkd0I

I wonder what's the reason for the decline in length over the years and why the peak size years seem to be '82-'83.

As an image format alternative, there's avif and webp, but png has the advantage it was in existence during in the lasts BYTE years (1996-1998). "The full specification of PNG was released under the approval of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on 1 October 1996, and later as RFC 2083 on 15 January 1997"

The funny thing is, when I search I can't find mention of the GIF/PNG discussions or PNG introduction, while I do find mention of things like WebNFS, OLiVR/VDOLive (wavelet video) and FIF (fractal image format). Perhaps it was out of scope?

os2warpman · 1m ago

>I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer.

My library had two forms of microfiche.

One was a cartridge containing a single spool, which upon being inserted into the reader would unspool onto an internal mechanism. You used two jog wheels, one fine and one coarse, to control the speed at which you traversed the tape, and there were numeric inputs so you could go to an arbitrary page. (it got close enough)

The second were flat rectangular sheets with pages laid out in a grid, and you placed the flat sheet onto a glass bed, pulled down a cover and slid the plate into the reader, using etch-a-sketch-like controls to move along the x and y axis.

In either case you could insert a dime and a single page of whatever was on the screen would spit out an attached printer.

mwexler · 11m ago

82-83 was the peak of hobbyist computing where articles and ads were in-between components and software.

As the tech improved, it moved into "appliance" mode of being a box you plug in, not a heathkit you assemble. By 86, Gateway and Dell and other packagers sold the "box". As demand shifted, all the mags shrunk from phone-book proportions (PC Mag, Compute, SoftDisk, etc etc). Some survived longer as business software fought for the office and marketing moved to peripherals (mice, monitors, printers) but things got anemic by the 90s.

theturtle32 · 58m ago

This is beautiful! I love this so much, as it makes it so simple and intuitive to drop into a sense of curiosity, exploration, serendipity, scanning around, seeing what catches the eye, zooming in and out.

It kind of recaptures part of the intangible sense of flipping through the old physical pages to see what catches the mind's interest. This feels substantively different from the current way that we discover and stumble upon things in the modern web and especially mobile app ecosystems with infinite scroll and algorithmically curated feeds.

dannyobrien · 2h ago

This is amazing -- thank you for building this! Amusingly, I too ended up searching for British computers -- there's a good article here on the Cantabrian explosion here. https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198301-042

chromy · 2h ago

Oh interesting, thank you! I live in Cambridge an often walk past the Sinclair building but I had not heard of Lynx or Ace which are also based in familiar places! https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198301-050

rayiner · 1h ago

I loved BYTE! The articles were so much more technical and interesting than anything you find in a computer magazine (or equivalent) today.

embedded_hiker · 58m ago

That is most of how I learned how computers worked when I was a teenager. I had no other resources of this quality, not even access to a computer most of the time.

Strangely, I don't get much nostalgia from this. The situation kind of sucked.

mbirth · 3h ago

Wow, that’s the first digital Microfiche implementation I’ve seen. Well done!

catapart · 1h ago

Same! This is really awesome! I'm hoping it's generalizeable enough to do with something like Game Informer, or other magazines. Seems like the underlying tech is just "load unreasonably sized images without performance issues" which feels plenty generalizeable, as a framework. So the question is in how complex or tedious it is to get every page into a single image (or whatever format these are loaded as), in a catalogued way.

Regardless, this is just a really fantastic example of this whole kind of project, and the fact that it was done with BYTE is the cherry on top.

HellDunkel · 32m ago

This must be the single most wonderful magazine archive i have ever seen and it's even searchable. This would be so nice to have with music, fashion and lifestlye magazines. The zooming in and out of decades is a breeze.

trafnar · 42m ago

I wanted to suggest a tweak to this cool project: The panning and zooming feel very sluggish. I'm not sure if there's a technical reason it needs to be that way, but if the animation duration or spring used to control that can be made faster, it will feel much nicer to navigate around.

lo_zamoyski · 5m ago

The navigation is very nice and snappy. It gets out of the way. Most UIs for browsing and navigating material feel constricted, like you're handling some kind of radioactive material through those thick gloves mounted directly into the fume hood.

Other than that, I had forgotten what a shameless exercise in marketing these magazines were. You were basically buying a book of ads. Even the articles feel like copy under the thin veneer of "Oh, look at this cool thing!".

oidar · 2h ago

Beautiful. What a wonderful way to navigate a periodical. Any chance you could open source this implementation? There are plenty of magazines that I'd love to search in this format (eg Sound on Sound).

placebo · 1h ago

Thank you. Was subscribed to it around 1981-1983. Eagerly waited every month for it to make its way across the Atlantic so I could dig into all the fascinating new technologies. I'm sure it had a great influence on my interests and eventual career.

browningstreet · 3h ago

So much of my childhood in one zoomable image. This is incredible.

wkjagt · 3h ago

BYTE is awesome. And this project is awesome and really well done. I miss the BYTE days. Is there a modern day equivalent?

fsiefken · 2h ago

The German 'iX magazine fuer professionelle IT' is pretty good, but it also has devops, the whole stack from networking, data storage, compute, cloud, development en ops. I bought one on holiday. It's nice to browse through pages for a change. A fixed A4 keeping your attention on 1 page. https://www.heise.de/select/ix

I think it's only in German, but perhaps the AI can auto-translate the pdf's.

ghaff · 2h ago

Computing sort of got too big. Early on, Byte could be eclectic with lots of different architectural discussions and hardware like circuit cellar. But from my perspective they got to a point where they were, for lack of a better word, pretty random. I was at an event where they were trying to reboot sometime in the 2000s but not sure what the market was for a popular computing magazine trying to cover all the bases at that point.

pklausler · 2h ago

BYTE was best before Jerry Pournelle showed up.

ghaff · 2h ago

Chaos manor was sort of a proto-blog. I enjoyed it well enough. As I say, Byte worked well enough as sort of extended hobbyist/nerd zine until that didn't really work as well any longer.

thomasjb · 3h ago

Love this! Part of why I went into electronics is reading archives of Byte and Popular Electronics

wood_spirit · 3h ago

I remember having just a couple of issues of Byte but reading them cover to cover and basing my whole understanding of possibilities on a deep dive into a Silicon Graphics workstation they had an article on… happy fuzzy distant memories :)

__fst__ · 2h ago

Amazing overview!

It's interesting how the level of public computer/computing knowledge changed. The Byte magazine goes into deep details of hardware, software and programming.

I feel that nowadays a lot of it is taking for granted or very few people care how things work under the hood. But probably at the time of the Byte magazine only very few people cared too :-).

rcarmo · 2h ago

I love that this exists. I bought BYTE for many years and this is bringing back fond memories.

The best printed ads I’ve ever seen, though, were on WIRED. Doing the same for that might be impossible until copyright expires, but I would love it.

don_searchcraft · 2h ago

Its certainly beautiful to look at but the search capability itself is not very good.

grimgrin · 2h ago

a nice feature would be similar to what searching google books does. the results highlight in yellow (though I'd prefer a way to clear highlighting after seeing where I'm supposed to stare)

I searched for "MUDs" and found a few results, clicked one, but it didn't appear the centered page was the one I was looking for

this is a wonderful idea though, and I'm happy you made it!

edit: perhaps also a nice feature is putting the search query in the URL, so I can link folks

Gormo · 2h ago

This is the sort of thing that would be perfect to view from within Eagle Mode (https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/).

elcapitan · 3h ago

Oh wow, this is absolutely amazing. It's one thing to read about computers like the Altair in history overviews, but to see ads for it and how they were discussed at the time, that's really interesting.

Connects well to the Halt and Catch Fire syllabus that was posted yesterday :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007414

encom · 1h ago

I'll echo all the praise from other posters, and offer one tiny bit of criticism: I don't like the motion damping (or whatever it's called) when panning/zooming around. It feels like wading through mud. I'd prefer it much reduced, or removed entirely.

EDIT: From 12/1989: "Will Clock Speeds Top Out at 50 MHz? An issue that computer designers can't seem to agree on is the ultimate potential speed limit of microprocessor clock rates. The more conservative argument, put forth at the Microprocessor Forum by Microprocessor Report editor Michael Slater and several other conference speakers, maintained that clock speeds will top out at about 50 MHz[...]"

cat-whisperer · 1h ago

This looks hella cool!

hudecekdev · 2h ago

This is amazing, thank you.

lysace · 2h ago

(!)

I only have a few issues that I bought as a kid. I've been re-reading them lately and I noticed that that while e.g. a 1987 issue is (still!) deeply intellectually stimulating, a 1989 issue is kind of boring in comparison.

It seems like it went from being focused on computer science/engineering to commercial uses of computing quite quickly.

Tor3 · 1h ago

I read all the Byte magazines until I stopped near the end of the eighties.. and the reason was as you indicated. The articles went from being about programming techniques, new languages, interesting hardware, CPUs, to instead be reviews of commercial software, and boring software at that. Actually Byte wasn't alone here.. nearly every magazine ended up the same (e.g. another one I read from the very first issue - the British magazine Personal Computer World), and died.

lysace · 1h ago

(I'm also a PCW fan. Grew up reading it in the local public library. Tiny mill town in Sweden.)

I'm curious: if you remember - which years would you describe as the best ones for Byte and PCW?

davis · 1h ago

I love this

Eriks · 2h ago

dezoomify-rs https://byte.tsundoku.io/byte_files/10/0_0.jpg

Found the following zoom levels:

0. byte (Deep Zoom Image) (868480 x 453747 pixels, 376956 tiles)

...

I think, I'll skip downloading this

chromy · 2h ago

Yes it's a fair amount of data:

pdfs/ 12.5 GiB

pages/ 91.96 GiB (Each page as a .png)

text/ 365.03 MiB (Each page as text)

byte_files/ 55.98 GiB (The 1024x1024 tiles as .jpeg)

I had not heard of https://github.com/lovasoa/dezoomify-rs before, that's really cool!

Sunspark · 1h ago

I wonder how it would do with the djvu codec which tends to have been used specifically for archiving documents. I suppose it is best applied at source if the physical material is at hand.

Might still be worth taking a look at as an experiment since this codec separates text, background and images into different layers, even when converted from another format.

initramfs · 3h ago

aweso