Oh The Audacity

A big old magazine tells a much bigger story

I’ve been reducing my physical footprint anticipating an inevitable downsizing and consolidation of my living space. My earlier Monster in the basement post was my initial rumination on this process of deciding what to keep and what to trash. But now I’m into serious trash-out mode, and those cartons that have stood in the corner of my home office for years are the final target in prioritizing the serious artifacts and objets du portfolio from the uncategorizable detritus of long abandoned projects and pursuits.

One item I’ve decided to keep is the April 1985 issue of Byte Magazine, which I realize that I’ve moved no less than seven times as I changed residences. I try to reflect on the sentimentality that caused me to keep it, reflecting that at one point I kept boxes and boxes full of old tech magazines. I wanted to scan them and use a neural net to find my preferences and somehow make all the indexed and tagged content available via subscription. It was a big idea for the late 80's. It’s easy to reflect the number of ways in which that vision is now realized as well — how easily I can access the fully-indexed versions of almost everything. Likewise I reflect on the number of different agents and services that I’m privy to that use machine intelligence to discern my tastes and interests and feed relevant material to me, using my choices as input to further hone their “intelligence.”

Pondering what makes this particular issue special leads down several paths. First is the content — at the time I recall determining to myself that I would read and absorb all the articles about Artificial Intelligence in the issue. I felt it was an important window on the future we were emerging into at the time. Certainly, with the benefit of three decades of hindsight, that importance can’t be understated. It’s interesting that the excitement of the “AI Program” has run through peaks and valleys. On its own, AI was never as spectacularly important as its most ardent supporters would have you believe. But the principles and patterns that the broader notion of machine intelligence have pushed into our current world in more ways we can ponder, from the fuzzy logic that runs the climate control in your car to the ability of Facebook to get to “know” your tastes and predilections.

Thirty years on, Byte Vol. 10, No 4 also has a lot to say about publishing, information access, and tech marketing. It’s a snapshot of the Cambrian explosion of microcomputing in the mid 198o’s. The issue clocks in at 496 pages and weighs close to a pound. It’s covered front-to-back with advertising, some of which features the most egregious excesses of the era (CEOs with pornstaches and boxy 3-piece suits) and the frenetic sellers of componentry of allsorts with ads in agate type. Going from front to back in the thing, it expresses the sheer audacity and enthusiasm of the time in a visceral way that today’s digitality fails to do, I think. When I see an ad for a 42 megabyte, 5.25-inch form-factor hard drive that cost $1695 ($3729 in today’s dollars), I think that you had to be committed to something extraordinary to make that investment.

There is nothing like what Byte represented in the digital sphere. Nobody has the resources to assemble 500 pages of editorial and advertising on a monthly basis, focused on technology — and specifically on PC technology. On one hand, it’s not really necessary. If you need help with a technical issue, or want a review, you search on Google and go to YouTube, or read one of a million blogs, or go to Reddit. We all choose our own path, and we all arrive at what we need on a self-determined course. There are no more estimable editors to set directions, to leaven the mundane and practical with the aspirational, as is evident in reading through this issue.

Byte ceased printed publication in 1998. It staggered through various online manifestations, and disappeared forever in 2013. It’s the story of almost every publishing entity from that era. Sure, there are stalwarts like CMP and CNet that set standards for tech publishing and have established niches online. O’Reilly still publishes Make magazine, and Wired still provides an outline on tech and culture that seems to have a stable audience.

More personally, this issue reflects a time when I envisioned myself as a philosopher of technology, a role I still strive to inhabit. For example: on Pg. 270, in the middle of an advertisement for Microsoft’s CP/M emulator card for Apple IIs (!!) I find scrawled “The assessment of any qualitative description always first draws into the discussion the nature of truth.” I think I was reading too much Heidegger at the time. It’s profound at my stage in my life to see the junior independent scholar who wrote that working to generate some truth against a background of confounding new realities carved out in symbolic languages and relations that proved uncommonly abstruse.

Now we’re left to be solo navigators in a sea of content. The editors and curators and bloggers who provide new information and insights do so within a time-frame in which everything is transient, and everything is linkbait, calling out for your attention to land your eyeballs on their inline advertising. Twas ere so, I guess, given that the old Byte issue is laced front-to-back with advertising. But again, the motive force in today’s online “publishing” world seems different. When you bought or subscribed to a magazine, there was the social contract that implied that the advertising subsidized the editorial and production costs. The transaction was self-contained. Today the race for metrics and readership is so profound that I don’t think anybody really understands the contract between “publisher” and “reader”. I’m happy these days to come out the relationships not feeling taken advantage of, and I have to take an active role in deflecting the potential for abuse. Byte never abused me, it served me. I’d like to have some of that sense of being served back.