A Few Good Magazines From the 70s and 80s

Summary

A Few Good Magazines from the 70s and 80s Youngsters may find it hard to imagine, and us oldsters may find it hard to remember, but in the late 1970s through most of the 1980s, there were several very good magazines being published. This is a personal remembrance of periodicals I knew and loved. Not all of them are explicitly "tech" magazines, but each of them expressed an optimism for technology and the future. It's not all tech in this list, but we're definitely starting with tech. BYTE was by far my favorite. It was already going strong by the time my family got our first TRS-80 for the home. Figure 1: August '81 Smalltalk Issue of BYTE. When my mom brought home a Sun workstation running Smalltalk, the famous August '81 Smalltalk Balloon issue had just been published. BYTE was focused on the (then) growing Micro-Computer Revolution. Early issues bounced between hardware projects (like how to build a cassette interface or graphics card to your S-100 system) and software projects (like "Roll Your Own Assembler.") The early years of BYTE predated the IBM PC by years. I first encountered Steve Ciarcia in the pages of BYTE, where his monthly Circuit Cellar articles tackled an interesting DIY hardware project. Circuit Cellar eventually spun off as it's own thing and if the internet is to be believed, Steve sold his interest in the business in 2016, hopefully to enjoy a happy retirement. Figure 2: August '80 FORTH Issue. In addition to countless articles about new personal computing systems and industry news, BYTE also ran annual articles focused on specific programming languages. The August '77 issue focused on APL and the August '79 issue was a deep-dive on LISP. BYTE is still worth reading, 50 years later. Maybe not every article, but there are some great overviews of topics that are still of interest (programming languages, games, music, etc.) And if you're a computer historian, it's a first class collection of primary sources. Many of the articles were written by t...