Holy cow. Thank you, JP. I enjoyed your high-level writing while monkeying on your new-fangled machines.

The two characterizations of people in the introduction are timeless?

> A person with a primary interest in software will oftentimes be the person who purchases a kit computer because the kit minimizes the amount of hardware knowledge the person is required to have.

That’s how I came into my first computer - built from a kit in 7th grade.

And, yeah, I understand more about hardware than I did back then, but it’s all about the software to me still… okay, maybe some electronics and mechanics, too.

Absolutely love the one on Forth. Issue 5 I think? Has a build it yourself modem for under 50$ in it.

It’s hard to beat this interface:

https://byte.tsundoku.io/

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002)

There's a great display wall of Byte mag at the Computer Museum of America in Atlanta, they've got original cover artworks and possibly every issue. Loved it. Also more Crays than you've ever seen in one place.

Jerry Pournelle's column alone was worth the price of admission.

Here's an index of sorts. I couldn't find anything better.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date

Byte was an amazing magazine in it's heyday.

FWIW, the German magazine ct from Heise is a good modern replacement.

BYTE mag and Creative Computing were the first computing magazines I read, and really kick-started my excitement with computers, even though everything was out of my reach (either too expensive as a kid, or running on computers that were too expensive for me to contemplate). I remember there was a library catalogue system written for the Apple II that I tried to "cargo cult" rewrite for my MicroBee (an Australian Z80-based computer). I had no idea what all the "CHR $4" calls were for, but loved the process of typing in the listings.