Deeper Than Deep: David Reich's genetics lab unveils our prehistoric past (2017) (laphamsquarterly.org)

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 (28)

bdcravens · 9m 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 · 1h 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?

davis · 1m ago

I love this

dannyobrien · 1h 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 · 53m 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

encom · 4m 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.

mbirth · 1h ago

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

rcarmo · 26m 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.

__fst__ · 38m 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 :-).

oidar · 57m 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).

wkjagt · 1h 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 · 1h 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. https://www.heise.de/select/ix

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

ghaff · 55m 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 · 33m ago

BYTE was best before Jerry Pournelle showed up.

ghaff · 25m 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.

cat-whisperer · 7m ago

This looks hella cool!

grimgrin · 27m 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

browningstreet · 1h ago

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

don_searchcraft · 51m ago

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

thomasjb · 2h ago

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

Gormo · 1h ago

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

wood_spirit · 1h 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 :)

elcapitan · 1h 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

hudecekdev · 51m ago

This is amazing, thank you.

lysace · 1h 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.

Eriks · 1h 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 · 46m 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!

initramfs · 1h ago

aweso

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Comments (28)