erd

What a bummer - FWIW, here's what a reverse IP location reports for that address... CHINA, SICHUAN long/lat 35.122098 105.480318

could be. Although I couldn't find any problems with mine currently - does it work for you ? . the others did seem a little slow currently (I think the first one isnt responding at least). I'm getting 150K-250K/sec from exotica right now - seems fine to me.

I personally use 'wget -c' for fetching (and re-fetching) such things, but perhaps those commenting that the mirrors don't work are just using a browser and eventually timing out?

An excellent choice - one of my all-time favorites. I built the Simon knockoff ("The Toy Store Begins at Home", p. 10) and hooked it up to the User Port on the PET as my first foray into building peripherals. My second was building a two-digit 7-segment display (also for the PET User Port) and displaying two-letter codes from the "Digital Alphanumeric Display" article on p. 218. Because Mark Zimmerman's (of FLOPTRAN-IV fame) article on "Simulating Physical Systems" was written for the PET, I tried to follow it, but he only provided assembler code (not a hex dump) and the idea of hand-assembling his program (I only had a cassette drive and no assembler program) was beyond me at the time. This was one issue I read over and over until the pages fell out. Thanks for posting it!

Very nice! (I'm a hardware guy

I've got a 7" "Haipad" Android tablet. Its screen is 480x800. I tried reading Byte issues on it, but scaled down, the text is too fuzzy to read a page at a time. It's fine when expanded, but there's a lot of scrolling to do (which is a real pain on half-page technical diagrams/schematics/etc in many of the articles). I was hoping to be able to carry around a few issues with me (my tablet shipped with an 8GB MicroSD, and it supports up to 32GB), but the resolution just isn't good enough for that to be practical. Perhaps if the issues were externally downsampled and rebundled to better match the screen resolution (vs letting Acroread and/or the android font engine handle things) the situation might be better, but as is, trying to read 8.5"x11" pages scanned at 300 dpi is no good.

Thumpnugget, a request: since you have been posting older, thinner issues (for bandwidth reasons), do you have January, 1977? Thanks!

We started subscribing to Byte in 1979, right before we bought a 32K PET with full-sized keyboard (used it was $1100 with external C2N tape drive!) We never waited for stuff to trickle down, but I did read all the ads for the S-100 stuff and was amazed at what a serious system would cost (48K-64K plus floppies plus dumb terminal was "standard" by then, and cost a couple grand). I don't remember first-gen S-100 stuff being widely available at used prices (perhaps because folks held on to what they had and upgraded, or perhaps because it just wasn't easy to advertise used gear).

Indeed. The original PET was how I got my start at age 11 (I recently picked up a chicklet-keyboard PET at the Vintage Computerfest-Midwest, which I'm now restoring). And how about "C: A LANGUAGE FOR MICROPROCESSORS?" (especially since in other contemporary coverage, C was subordinated to PL/1 and FORTRAN for "serious" work, and to BASIC and PASCAL for simpler exercises - boy how that changed just a few years later). I'm getting a 404 right now (and the covers didn't render in this post). Having site problems?

Unfortunately I do not have that issue yet.. If someone out there has it and would like to cough it up.. I can check my boxes later this week. That's new enough I might have it on paper and I would be happy to donate it to the cause.

I wouldn't be surprised. Were you North or South?

I'd love to help, but I don't have any (surviving) paper copies older than late 1982. I recently rescued four boxes of newer magazines from someone who was cleaning his house out, and would much rather share the proceeds than have them take up space at my place. If you need any specific issues from 1983 on, post a list and I'll check the cartons. The recently-posted UNIX issue is a great one (and one I happen to have on paper). I brought it to work to show the young guys what life was like in the old days. They read the ads and are stunned into disbelief.

Yep. I confirm. The PET makes an appearance in a number of places, even the second season of "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", when Buck is in the sickbay with a fever - he uses a PET (with a cheezy 1980s video overlay) to watch events unfold in the docking bay. There's also a 12" PET in "Terminator 3" in a pile of old computers at the end of the movie.

Your link didn't survive. I'd want to open it up to be sure, but the User Port definitions of the VIC-20 and the C-64 are almost certainly close enough that the ViController should work on both. It's probably just using the ACIA-emulation pins and skipping the RS-232-voltage-conversion step. I have the "official" X-10 serial controller ( Make your ST a Powerhouse ) with a C-64 cable. I used it for years to turn my lights on and off at night. Lots of fun.

Thank you! This issue has been great to re-visit. It's one of the ones I read from cover to cover over and over when it was new. I'm amazed at how many of the ads are so familiar to me, and I'm more amazed at how many companies I recognize not from 1980, but from later (especially the ones pushing DEC products - like the PDP-11/23 for a mere $6750!) when I worked at different companies that could afford "real" computers. I appreciate the S-100 articles and ads, but I barely touched those when they were new - I went from the 6502 right to the PDP-11 and VAX, and some of that history is quite well represented in Byte.

I remember when it used to take two weeks to get an e-mail to Australia over UUCP...

Great to hear! I've been enjoying the fruits of your labors all month (I used to be a subscriber when I was a kid, but my old magazines were lost in a basement flood). If I may, I have a request for the queue - October, 1980. There's a particular article in that one I'd like to have again - "FLOPTRAN-IV: a Tiny Compiler", a program I typed in many years ago. It's essentially a reduced-feature-BASIC compiler (single-letter variable names, nearly no string handling, simplified loop and control syntax, etc) written in BASIC that mostly compiles your code down to a sequence of calls to the machine's ROM floating point routines with as little glue code as possible. Abacus apparently repackaged it as their "Tiny BASIC Compiler", but the article has the complete source code for the original (for the 8K PET). I ported it to the "new" ROMs (BASIC 3.0) and added a couple of essential features to allow me to compile some of the simpler programs from David Ahl's "101 Microcomputer Games". Thanks!