About Byte

Byte

Byte, stylised as BYTE, was an American microcomputer magazine based in Peterborough, New Hampshire, published monthly from September 1975 until July 1998. It was one of the most influential computer publications of the late 1970s and 1980s because of its wide-ranging, technically deep editorial coverage of the entire field of small computers and software. While many rival magazines served a single system or a home or business audience, Byte covered developments across personal computing and sometimes beyond it, into supercomputers and high-reliability computing, with coverage that was in-depth and technical rather than merely user-oriented. Founded by Wayne Green with Carl Helmers as its first editor, it was sold to McGraw-Hill in 1979, grew to circulations above 400,000 and average issues of more than 500 pages, and was closed abruptly by new owner CMP Media in 1998 despite still having more than 440,000 paid readers. Online revivals followed in 1999 and 2011 before the name finally closed in 2013.

The batch listing for this directory correctly placed Byte in Peterborough, New Hampshire. That small town remained its symbolic home even as it became, in the early 1980s, the largest and most profitable computer magazine in the United States.

Origins in 73 Magazine and the Altair Moment

Wayne Green was the editor and publisher of 73, an amateur radio magazine published from Peterborough. In late 1974 and throughout 1975, 73 published a number of articles on the use of computers, which drew a significant response from readers. The Altair 8800 was announced in January 1975, sparking intense interest among people in technical fields, including the amateur radio market, and Green knew of the Altair because its maker, MITS, had previously advertised in 73. That response led Green to plan a magazine for the newly emerging microcomputer market. At the same time, Carl Helmers had published a series of six articles in 1974 detailing the design and construction of his Experimenter's Computer System, a personal computer based on the Intel 8008; in January 1975 that became the monthly ECS magazine, with about 400 subscribers. Green contacted Helmers and proposed the new magazine to be known as Byte, and the deal was announced in both magazines in May 1975.

The First Issue, September 1975

The first issue of Byte was the September 1975 edition. It carried articles including Which Microprocessor For You? by Hal Chamberlin, Write Your Own Assembler by Dan Fylstra and Serial Interface by Don Lancaster, and it featured an in-depth review of the RGS-008, an 8008-based kit computer from RGS Electronics. Among its most important contents was the introduction of the Kansas City standard for storing data on cassette tape, used by most machines of the era. Advertisements came from Godbout, MITS, Processor Technology, SCELBI and Sphere, among others. The magazine was published monthly with an initial yearly subscription price of ten dollars. To promote it, Green contacted companies that had advertised in 73, asked for their contact lists and mailed those contacts directly; about twenty percent subscribed, a massive conversion rate that demonstrated how underserved the new microcomputer audience was.

Break with Green and the Move to Byte Publications

The first four issues were produced in the offices of 73, with Wayne Green listed as publisher. The arrangement collapsed dramatically. One day in November 1975 Green returned to the office and found that the Byte staff had moved out and taken the January issue with them. For the February 1976 issue the company changed its name to Byte Publications, with Carl Helmers as a co-owner. The February issue joked about a start that read like a romantic light opera with episodes reminiscent of the Keystone Cops. Green, unhappy at losing Byte, planned a rival called Kilobyte; Byte quickly trademarked KILOBYTE as the name of a cartoon series within its pages and threatened suit, forcing Green to rename his new magazine Kilobaud. Competition and animosity persisted between Byte Publications and 73 Inc., though both remained in the small town of Peterborough. Ownership complications traced back to Green's difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service and to his ex-wife Virginia Londner Green, who had incorporated Green Publishing in March 1975 to take over publication.

Signature Features of the Early Years

Byte's early identity was built on constructional and programming depth. Until the December 1988 issue, a continuing feature was Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, in which electronic engineer Steve Ciarcia described small projects to modify or attach to a computer; it was later spun off as the magazine Circuit Cellar, focused on embedded applications. Significant coverage in this period included fitting floppy disk drives into S-100 computers, publishing source code for computer languages including Tiny C, BASIC and assemblers, and covering CP/M, the first major microcomputer operating system. Long-running humour and commentary features, including the Kilobyte cartoons and, later, Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor column describing computers from a power user's point of view, gave the technical material a distinctive voice. From the December 1975 issue through September 1990, covers often featured the artwork of Robert Tinney, which made Byte visually distinctive on the newsstand, although issues introducing major hardware such as the Apple Lisa, Macintosh, IBM PC and Commodore Amiga used product photographs instead.

Sale to McGraw-Hill and the Small Systems Journal

In April 1979 owner and publisher Virginia Williamson, formerly Londner Green, sold Byte to McGraw-Hill. At the time its paid circulation was about 156,000 readers, making it second only to BusinessWeek in McGraw-Hill's technology magazine portfolio, and the purchase was a watershed that led to the rapid acquisition of many early computer magazines by larger publishers. Williamson remained publisher until 1983 and became a vice president of McGraw-Hill Publications Company. From August 1979 the magazine switched to computerised typesetting using a Compugraphic system, took on a more serious, journal-like atmosphere and began referring to itself as the small systems journal. Its influence peaked symbolically in 1981, when Byte was selected as the medium Xerox PARC used to publicise the Smalltalk programming environment, introducing graphical, object-oriented computing to a wide technical audience.

Peak Years in the Early 1980s

By the early 1980s Byte had become an elite magazine, spoken of as a peer of Rolling Stone and Playboy in reputation, and it was the only computer publication on the 1981 Folio 400 list of largest magazines. Its 1982 average issue ran to 543 pages, paid advertising pages grew by more than a thousand while most magazines' advertising was flat, and its circulation of 420,000 was the third-highest of all computer magazines. It earned nine million dollars in profit on revenue of 36.6 million dollars in 1983, twice the average profit margin for the magazine industry, and it remained successful while many rivals failed in the computer industry's weak year of 1984: the October 1984 issue carried about 300 pages of advertising sold at an average of six thousand dollars a page. Shortly after the IBM PC appeared in 1981, editorial policy gradually shifted, de-emphasising do-it-yourself electronics and software projects in favour of product reviews that reported what a product did and how it worked rather than how to build it, while keeping the focus on home and personal computers.

BIX, International Editions and the Web

Around 1985 Byte launched an online service called BIX, the Byte Information Exchange, a text-only, BBS-style conferencing system running on CoSy software, also used internally by McGraw-Hill. Access was by local dial-in or, for additional hourly charges, over the Tymnet X.25 network, at monthly rates of thirteen dollars for the account plus one dollar an hour for X.25 access, with no surcharge for higher speeds, and later gateways allowed email outside the system. The print magazine also spread internationally, with editions published in Japan, Brazil and Germany and an Arabic edition published in Jordan; Nikkei Byte in Japan, published by Nikkei Business Publications under licence, became that country's leading computer magazine and continued Pournelle's column in translation for years after the American edition closed. By 1990 the magazine was about half an inch thick with a subscription price of fifty-six dollars a year, and around 1993 it acquired the domain byte.com and began hosting discussion boards and selected editorial content online.

Decline and the 1998 Closure

Like many generalist magazines, Byte suffered in the 1990s from declining advertising sales, even though its readership remained large: paid circulation peaked near 580,000 in 1994, and more than 440,000 people still paid for it when it was sold. On 27 May 1998 McGraw-Hill's magazine arm sold Byte and three other titles to CMP Media for 28.6 million dollars. The new owners immediately laid off almost the entire magazine staff, shut down Byte's large product-testing laboratory and ended publication with the already-complete July 1998 issue. Senior editor Tom Halfhill's unofficial FAQ, written after he was laid off with the rest of the staff, recorded that readers outlasted advertisers and that CMP appeared to value the name and subscriber list over the magazine itself. Publication in Germany and Japan continued uninterrupted, and the Turkish edition later resumed, but the American print Byte, after twenty-three years, was finished.

Online Revivals, 1999 to 2013

The Byte website continued to draw about 600,000 page views a month even without updates, which prompted CMP to revive Byte as a web-only publication in 1999, persuading longtime columnist Jerry Pournelle to resume Chaos Manor online. Pournelle left in 2006, the underfunded site lacked the print magazine's breadth and depth, and it vanished in 2009. In December 2010 UBM TechWeb announced plans to revive Byte.com, and the site relaunched on 11 July 2011 with a mission focused on technology in the context of the consumerisation of IT, under launch editor-in-chief Gina Smith, who was replaced by Larry Seltzer that September. That revival never recaptured the original's authority, appeared more oriented toward consumer electronics than deep technology, and Byte.com closed permanently in 2013; the address later redirected to InformationWeek. Many former columnists had meanwhile migrated their writing to personal websites, including Pournelle's own Chaos Manor site.

Legacy

Byte's legacy is that of the defining technical magazine of the personal computer's first two decades. It began within months of the Altair, published the Kansas City cassette standard, documented S-100 systems, CP/M, Smalltalk and the IBM PC era, and served beginners and professionals across every platform at a time when the industry had few other common forums. Its scans, preserved from the first issue to the last on the Internet Archive, remain a primary source for computer historians. Its business history is equally instructive: a magazine founded in a Peterborough house, fought over by its founders, sold to McGraw-Hill in 1979 and killed in 1998 with hundreds of thousands of readers still paying, because its advertising model, not its audience, had failed. In the history of American technology publishing, no title better illustrates both the rise of personal computing and the economics that ended the great thick monthly computer magazine.