I remember Wayne well, W2NSD = never say die... He did well in ham radio magazines, and entered computer magazines running full speed with byte and others. His accountant advised him to put Byte in his wife's name for tax reasons. This later came back to 'byte' him when they divorced and she was adjudicated as the owner, but he never said die and went on to other things but never overtook Byte. I recall him at the Atlantic city hamfest, where the Apple launched. Woz and Jobs were there, at set-up and they had a problem, no solder or iron and a 74366 had failed when the card involved was pulled under power = failed. This was before there were low cost, low power 74LS366 were available cheaply. This part had to be desoldered and replaced. They had no chip, solder, iron or wick. John Ramsey had a booth there, so he lent them the solder iron etc and he was also selling a wide range of TTL parts = the rest is history. I also had a table selling diverse ham radio bits/pieces. Wayne was operating his magazine booth, more Wayne details here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green

I got into computers in 1978 when I started high school and they had two Wang 2200 computers, each with a whopping 8KB of RAM.

Although I was 14 I asked my parents for a subscription to Byte. Every so often I'd get an offer in the mail to join a "wine of the month" service, or life insurance, etc. Clearly they had sold their mailing list and they just assumed anyone with a subscription must be an adult.

Anyway, I loved Steve Ciarcia's column and hated Jerry Pournelle's column that got too much space. His schtick was that he was a power user using the hardware/software for doing real work. But he was far from normal -- he'd write florid articles about having a software or hardware malfunction and then calling up the owner of the company and they next morning the guy who wrote the malfunctioning app would be at Jerry's house debugging it. "XYZ Corp produces quality software that they really stand behind and you should buy it too." Yeah, Jerry, you didn't buy it, and the average Joe doesn't get personal attention like that. I found him to be an insufferable, self-important twat. 45 years later I still feel the same about him.

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.

vintageapple.org also has a really great collection of scans fwiw

I saved every issue. Boxed them up when I moved out of my childhood home. Moved them 13 times and they ended up in a shed in field on my farm (some success in Silicon Valley) where they mouldered into rot over 20 years.

Hard to express what that monthly compendium of electronic and computer hobbyist articles meant, to a farm boy thousands of miles from anywhere.

Has anyone archived the foreign language editions?

man... I was programming 8080 at school... time passing so fast

I started reading Byte when I had no way to understand what it was talking about. There were technical terms that I simply had no reference for. What the heck is an assembler?

I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.

You might be interested in UnixBench, the original BYTE UNIX benchmark suite

https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench

As a young hacker in the 70's and 80's, magazines were my primary source of docs. I lived in a remote community where such technology was really, really foreign at first. My relatives lived in other parts of the state, some very remote, some in the city. I had a HAM-/CB-enthusiastic hacker uncle I'd regularly visit in one end of the state (outback) and plenty of relatives in the major city and countryside where I lived, so my docs-collecting mission during a routine adventuring between these family areas went something like this:

1. If in the city/small town: go to the library, read latest BYTE magazine, Radio Electronics, a few other electronics (then computer-) magazines, and so on[1]. Then, browse back issues - my library had them all in the first few years - find code that I might adapt to my machine, copy notes or - remember it - for when I got home later. I usually didn't check anything out because I never, ever gave back BYTE magazines I loaned from the library, just because I never knew when I'd be back (or that was my excuse). So, the library was just for reference/note-taking. This actually made going on those boring family visits quite palatable.

2. If in the city: Go to every newsagent/magazine dealer in my route, read every single tech magazine - BYTE, Dr. Dobbs Journal, ZAP, etc. as quickly as possible, before being asked to leave. Buy something if possible, but only if a review finds something interesting. Usually, leave with a BYTE, at least. If I could afford it, always with a DDJ too. Repeat at every newsagent in the city.

3. If I am in the country, at Uncle Hacker-Shacks: In between hacking on his radios and amplifiers, burning my fingers on some new Fun Way Into Electronics Dick Smith kits, and with those toasty digits browsing his extensive magazine collection, including every BYTE issue since the beginning (it's the 70's/80's, I'm a teen) .. do chores (lawns/wood-chopping/fishing/cleaning/reading-to-little-kids) and save coins for photocopying .. take uncles magazines to get photocopies of interesting things, create my own ring-binder full of such things to take back home with me. Somehow, my uncle always had really great magazines and books and things, way, way out there beyond the dusty horizon... and I'd go home after the holidays, with copies of the best of it.

Usually BYTE magazine articles for systems (Apple/C64/etc.) similar enough to mine (Oric-1) to have some use for me, later, when I got back home to my computer. During those long bus, car, train, plane rides, I'd often spend more time reading and re-reading the listings, than I did typing it in when I finally got home.

BYTE was huge to me, it was my first real foray into cross-platform/multi-discipline software development, I literally had no choice but to port things to the Oric-1, if I wanted to do anything with it. I really wish I still had those old ring-binders, it'd be a blast to see my old notes and printouts (had the Oric printer for such things, it was my long-term archive, which I've long-since lost..)

The skills I gained, basically from 8 years old to 18 years old, by reading these magazines - truly informed an important part of my professional toolbox, which have stuck with me for years of course, since this was an era where a significant part of computing technology was being worked out.

I really wonder how kids these days get access to the evolutionary, real-time nature of the fields they're interested in. I guess MAKE filled that hole for a while.

EDIT: Just wanted to say, Issue #1 of BYTE is really worth a read .. "Assembling your own Assembler", and "Recycling used IC's" is so resonant with my Sunday-afternoon musings about the perils of AI and ML on my teenagers' mindset .. seems like someone else is gonna get some burned fingers, soon enough ..

[1] - (I think I read my first 2600 this way also...)