Byte (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Byte magazine arrived in September 1975 with an initial yearly subscription price of $10, just months after the Altair 8800 sparked a wave of intense interest in personal computing. The listener encountering Byte for the first time might picture a thin hobbyist newsletter, something akin to the electronics magazines that published kit advertisements in their back pages. The reality was different. Byte would grow to a thickness of roughly two inches by 1990, with a single October 1984 issue carrying around 300 pages of advertisements sold at an average of $6,000 per page. How did a magazine born from an amateur radio publisher's side project become an elite publication compared favorably to Rolling Stone and Playboy? What happened when the industry it chronicled began to shift beneath it? And what does the story of Byte reveal about the fragile economics of covering a technology revolution in real time?

• 2. Founding Friction

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  Wayne Green was the editor and publisher of amateur radio magazine 73 when readers began responding enthusiastically to a series of articles about computers. Green knew about the Altair 8800 because MITS had previously advertised in 73. That connection pushed him toward planning a dedicated microcomputer magazine.

  Around the same time, Carl Helmers had published six articles in 1974 detailing the design and construction of his own personal computer based on the Intel 8008 microprocessor. By January 1975, those articles had become a monthly publication called ECS magazine with 400 subscribers. Green approached Helmers, and the two announced their joint venture in both magazines in May.

  The circumstances behind the magazine's legal structure were unusual. Green had recently had a run-in with the Internal Revenue Service, and his lawyer advised him to put any new business in someone else's name. Green had recently reconciled with his ex-wife Virginia Londner Green, who had been listed as business manager of 73 Inc. since December 1974. She incorporated Green Publishing in March 1975 to take over publication.

  The first issue, dated September 1975, carried articles on assembler writing, serial interfaces, and an in-depth review of the RGS-008, a basic 8008-based kit computer. It also introduced the Kansas City standard for storing data on cassette tape, a format adopted by most machines of the era. Advertisers in that debut issue included MITS, Godbout, Processor Technology, SCELBI, and Sphere.

  The editorial partnership did not last. One day in November 1975, Green returned to the office to find that the Byte staff had packed up and left, taking the January issue with them. For the February 1976 issue, the company renamed itself Byte Publications. Helmers was a co-owner. The February issue described the transition with a note comparing the launch period to "a romantic light opera with an episode or two reminiscent of the Keystone Cops."

• 3. The Kilobaud Rivalry

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  Green's reaction to losing Byte was to announce a competing magazine he planned to call Kilobyte, with the first issue set for December 1976. Byte Publications moved quickly. The team trademarked "KILOBYTE" as the name of a cartoon series running inside the magazine and threatened legal action for trademark violations. Green was forced to rename his venture Kilobaud.

  Both publications ended up operating out of the same small town, Peterborough, New Hampshire, competing for readers and advertisers while sharing a geographic address. The animosity between Byte Publications and 73 Inc. was real, yet neither organization relocated.

  Byte's reach during this founding period extended beyond its cover stories. Starting with the December 1975 issue, covers regularly featured the artwork of Robert Tinney through September 1990, a run of nearly fifteen years that gave the magazine a visual identity unlike anything else on the newsstand. The main exceptions were issues introducing significant hardware, where product photographs replaced Tinney's illustrations. Those issues covered the Apple Lisa, the Apple Macintosh, the IBM PC, and the Commodore Amiga.

• 4. Peak Influence

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  Virginia Williamson, born Virginia Londner Green, sold Byte to McGraw-Hill in April 1979. At the time of the sale, paid circulation stood at 156,000 readers, placing Byte second only to Business Week in McGraw-Hill's technology magazine portfolio. Williamson remained publisher until 1983 and was named a vice president of McGraw-Hill Publications Company.

  The McGraw-Hill acquisition was described as a watershed event that prompted larger publishers to rapidly purchase many of the early computer magazines. From August 1979, the magazine switched to computerized typesetting using a Compugraphic system.

  By 1981, Byte had been selected by Xerox PARC as the vehicle to publicize Smalltalk to the wider computing world. That same year, it was the only computer publication listed on the Folio 400, a ranking of the largest magazines in the United States.

  The numbers from 1982 and 1983 tell the scale of what Byte had become. The magazine's average issue in 1982 ran 543 pages. The number of paid advertising pages grew by more than 1,000 that year, at a time when most magazines saw their advertising hold flat. By 1983, Byte earned $9 million from revenue of $36.6 million, twice the average profit margin for the magazine industry as a whole. Circulation by that point reached 420,000, the third-highest of any computer magazine. David Bunnell of PC Magazine was among those who openly aspired to match what Byte had built.

  Around 1985, Byte launched BIX, the Byte Information eXchange, a text-only bulletin board system running on CoSy conferencing software. Access arrived via local dial-in or, for additional fees, the Tymnet X.25 network. Monthly rates were $13 for the account and $1 per hour for X.25 access. Tom Sloan's full-page multipanel cartoons, which appeared roughly from 1980 to 1985 and covered computer and technology themes, became notable enough that several originals are now held by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

• 5. Editorial Shifts and Decline

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  Shortly after the IBM PC appeared in 1981, Byte's editors began moving the magazine away from do-it-yourself electronics and software construction articles toward product reviews. The coverage gradually shifted from "how to do it" to "what it does" and "how it works." The focus on home and personal computers remained, but the audience Byte was writing for had changed.

  A long-running feature called Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar, in which electronic engineer Steve Ciarcia described small projects for modifying or connecting hardware to computers, ran continuously until the December 1988 issue. The column was later spun off into its own magazine, Circuit Cellar, dedicated to embedded computer applications.

  By 1990, the magazine was roughly two inches thick and carried a subscription price of $56 per year. Around 1993, Byte acquired the domain name byte.com and began hosting discussion boards and posting selected editorial content online, an early move into digital publishing. International editions were published in Japan, Brazil, Germany, and Jordan.

  Like many generalist magazines, Byte suffered through the 1990s as advertising sales declined. McGraw-Hill sold its publishing arm to CMP Media in May 1998. The magazine's writers and editors expected the new owner to strengthen the brand. Instead, CMP ceased print publication with the July 1998 issue, laid off almost everyone, and shut down Byte's product-testing lab. The German and Japanese editions continued without interruption. The Turkish edition, which had lapsed, eventually resumed. The Arabic edition ended abruptly.

• 6. Afterlives Online

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  After print publication ended, the byte.com website was drawing 600,000 page views per month. That audience prompted CMP to relaunch Byte as an online-only publication in 1999. From 2002, access required a subscription. The site closed in 2009.

  Many of Byte's regular columnists migrated their work to personal websites. Science fiction author Jerry Pournelle moved his long-standing column, written from a power user's perspective, to a weblog called The View From Chaos Manor. After the closure, Pournelle's column continued to appear in the Turkish editions of PC World, which was soon renamed PC Life in Turkey. Nikkei Business Publications licensed the Byte name from McGraw-Hill for Nikkei Byte, which was the leading computer magazine in Japan. It ran Pournelle's column in Japanese translation as a major feature for years after the American edition closed.

  UBM TechWeb officially relaunched Byte as Byte.com on the 11th of July 2011. The relaunch editor-in-chief was tech journalist Gina Smith. On the 26th of September 2011, Smith was replaced by Larry Seltzer. In January 2012, American author F. Paul Wilson, known for his character Repairman Jack, began writing for the site. Byte.com shut down for the last time in 2013.