Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
143 chromy 24 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
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 (fractal video) and FIF (fractal image format). Perhaps it was out of scope?
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.
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
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 :-).
I think it's only in German, but perhaps the AI can auto-translate the pdf's.
Connects well to the Halt and Catch Fire syllabus that was posted yesterday :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45007414
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.
Found the following zoom levels:
0. byte (Deep Zoom Image) (868480 x 453747 pixels, 376956 tiles)
...
I think, I'll skip downloading this
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!