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That's your opinion and you're certainly entitled to it, but I disagree. Just because BYTEs are old doesn't mean the raw information is no longer necessary. It depends on who you are, what you're doing, and what you consider "necessary".

 

I read BYTE now to enjoy the history AND for the raw information. Maybe I'm in the minority.

I have to disagree with the "raw information" not being necessary. I recently acquired a IMSAI 8080 system with a floppy drive that I could find no information about on the Internet. It also had a floppy disk controller that again isn't document anywhere I could find on the net and used an IC chip that I could find no information on either. Digging though some old Byte issues I ran across an article about how to interface this exact floppy driver to a system using the same unidentified chip that is on the controller I have. This information will be invaluable in getting this system running again.

 

I will clarify. The information presented in these magazines is not necessary for 99.99999% of the IT industry to operate in 2013. That's was my meaning when I wrote that the "raw information" was no longer necessary.

 

I'm glad to hear that people are still finding the information necessary. I would love to hear about how this information was necessary beyond personal use. Was someone's life saved? Were jobs or businesses saved? What was done that was necessary, meaning compulsory or required? Please expound, but be aware that repairing a computer to simply make it functional again is a desire and not a need... unless that computer is going to be used for something necessary, like open heart surgery or factory automation or..

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I think you guys are really digging into the semantics of the word "necessary". My translation of the way Dan was using the word "necessary" was that the information contained in the old publications was useful to him, as opposed to it just being pretty pictures to look at.

 

Seems to me the bottom line is that the content and visual appeal of these publications should be preserved as closely as possible whenever possible so it can best serves everyone's possible future uses.

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I'm glad to hear that people are still finding the information necessary. I would love to hear about how this information was necessary beyond personal use. Was someone's life saved? Were jobs or businesses saved? What was done that was necessary, meaning compulsory or required? Please expound, but be aware that repairing a computer to simply make it functional again is a desire and not a need... unless that computer is going to be used for something necessary, like open heart surgery or factory automation or..

If that's what you mean by necessary then BYTE in any form is probably not necessary.

 

I still see patents being filed with references to old BYTE articles so apparently some people in the commercial sector still find the info in BYTE to be _useful_. So it's not just us hobbyists.

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That's you trying to fix an old system. If it was printed on toilet paper it would have served its purpose.

 

But for us enjoying classic material, the graphic and font nuances are important. The 70's palettes and curves make or break a scan.

 

I wasn't knocking the need to accurately preserve the content of the magazine, just making the point that's it also still has useful information in it. I actually have a fairly extensive collection of Byte and Creative Computing magazines and would like to see them accurately preserved with high quality scans.

 

I will clarify. The information presented in these magazines is not necessary for 99.99999% of the IT industry to operate in 2013. That's was my meaning when I wrote that the "raw information" was no longer necessary.

 

I'm glad to hear that people are still finding the information necessary. I would love to hear about how this information was necessary beyond personal use. Was someone's life saved? Were jobs or businesses saved? What was done that was necessary, meaning compulsory or required? Please expound, but be aware that repairing a computer to simply make it functional again is a desire and not a need... unless that computer is going to be used for something necessary, like open heart surgery or factory automation or..

 

Same could be said for 95% of the magazine that are currently sold today.

Edited by DanBoris
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Personally, for me, the must-have reason for my Apple II is nostalgia and the now-in-process activity of recovering mass amounts of unseen text files and personal journals.

 

Any computer (like any employee) can be replaced. And there are few no-other-machine-will-do situations.

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<< SNIP >>

 

I work from the command line almost exclusively. Tab completion is a must nowadays. Anyone using bash or zsh has it. Not sure about the older ones like csh and ksh. I just wish the Windows shell (or whatever it's called) had it. It probably needs tab completion more than any other shell!

 

I live on the Command Line too.. It must have something to do with starting with the Apple ][+, then moving to PC-DOS 2.1 and a UNIX Clone called Coherent..

 

I know for a fact the Korn Shell ( ksh ) does TAB Completion, because I worked exclusive on an NCR machine with UNIX System V.. Also, Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 do TAB Completion, and Windows 2000 can be made to do it with a Registry Hack..

 

Better yet it to "ditch" Micro-Soft's Command Interpreter and get 4DOS/NT/OS2 from JP Software... <ftp://ftp.jpsoft.com/oldver>

The 4DOS version 7.50 ( 750 ) is unrestricted and the other Two 4NT and 4OS2 are Shareware..

 

Square brackets in a name I find annoying because I do use them for globbing. I think in a UNIX environment they should be used in file names sparingly to avoid confusion.

 

The only problem I have with using quotes is I always forget to type in the opening quote until after I type/paste the file name. Every single time. :dunce: lol You also can't use globbing within them obviously.

 

I prefer File Names without any Spaces...

 

 

The reason the dates are first is so that a YYYYMM<tab> will almost always be all you have to type to get the complete file name to pop up. This is very handy when trying to sort out what's what and PDFs are getting moved all over the place. However, I suppose for most people just downloading and reading them that's much less of a concern.

 

YYYY-MM probably would not be a bad idea. Just as easy to type and easier to read. Torrents probably should have been done like that.

 

I like the Name Format of YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD if you have Daily Files....

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I live on the Command Line too.. It must have something to do with starting with the Apple ][+, then moving to PC-DOS 2.1 and a UNIX Clone called Coherent..

I started with the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A at home and then Apple IIe's and IIc's in school. Later, at home, I moved on to a TRS-80 Model 4 (TRSDOS & Monte's CP/M) and COCO 2 and 3 (OS/9) and then an IBM XT clone (PC-DOS). When I had my IBM AT clone I bought Coherent 3.2. (EXCELLENT operating system! Have the manual and the 5.25" disks just a couple feet away. I've been playing with it off and on under an emulator and looking forward to using UUCP on it like I did when I signed up with my very first ISP.)

 

Then it was VMS and its PDP predecessors, then VM/CMS, and now Linux. I started out with a (usually) blinking cursor and that's how I like it. I hate these GUIs for the most part.

 

I know for a fact the Korn Shell ( ksh ) does TAB Completion, because I worked exclusive on an NCR machine with UNIX System V.. Also, Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 do TAB Completion, and Windows 2000 can be made to do it with a Registry Hack..

I never used ksh much. For whatever reason I used csh mostly back then.

 

XP does TAB completion?!?! With regular CMD??? Oh yeah... Just googled it. It's not activated by default. Wish I had known about it before but better late than never. Thanks!

 

I'm obviously not a Windows guy. Never have been.

 

Better yet it to "ditch" Micro-Soft's Command Interpreter and get 4DOS/NT/OS2 from JP Software... <ftp://ftp.jpsoft.com/oldver>

The 4DOS version 7.50 ( 750 ) is unrestricted and the other Two 4NT and 4OS2 are Shareware..

I used 4DOS so long ago. Didn't know they had anything for XP.

 

I prefer File Names without any Spaces...

So do I!!!! Unfortunately many Windows users seem to insist on replacing underscores with spaces.

 

I like the Name Format of YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD if you have Daily Files....

 

Ya. Be nice to change the names in the torrent but that screws up upgrades to newer versions. :(

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Underscores for spaces is a horrible ugly kludge. Is hitting "SHIFT-" really any easier than hitting "\ " or just using quotes?

 

The problem with spaces isn't necessarily typing them in (with backslash or even tab-completion), it's when you copy&paste from somewhere. Then you have to edit the line and add quotes at both end. Personally I rename such files with a dash instead of the space. Any letter, even shifted ones, are better than spaces.

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Underscores for spaces is a horrible ugly kludge. Is hitting "SHIFT-" really any easier than hitting "\ " or just using quotes?

 

Obviously I can only speak for myself and surely I'm biased because Windows is the only operating system I've ever used where spaces in file names were the norm. But I don't consider underscores ugly in the least bit. What I consider ugly is when a program gives me a big list of files with the spaces escaped. It can also screw up copy-and-pasting. And like I said above, you can't use globbing inside quotes and I always forget to type the opening quote first. :) With underscores copy-and-paste should always work, no quotes are necessary, and with no escape characters I can type a name just like it appears.

 

When working on the command line I prefer my spaces to be delimiters and ONLY delimiters. Easier to read. Also, a command line with a parameter or two with a half dozen \'s in each I don't find too attractive.

 

This is more of a personal preference. Whether it's right or wrong depends on what you're doing and what you like.

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  • 2 months later...

A forum member has contacted me and gave me an issue of Byte to publish on the FTP server. As he didn't mention if he wants to be anonymous or not, I'll leave it at that.

 

The file is located in the /March 2013/ folder. Had a brain fart and couldn't think of any better name so live with it, I guess.

 

He says he has two other issues of Byte that he's willing to scan and wants feedback regarding the current issue he produced for us.

 

He still has the raw files and Abby Finereader 11 for this issue and he seems motivated to redo the issue taking your feedback in consideration.

 

ps. Download speeds may be slow for a while , as the server is busy with other stuff so don't panic if the download speed is low, it will get better,

 

I finished Byte_1993_07_300_dpi_75q_Orig_Img_Size_.pdf and just started reading Byte_1990_06_300_dpi_75q_OrigImgSize_.pdf. I have lots of trouble reading the first attempt (Byte_1990_11_150_dpi_02.pdf) but these two newer ones look great.

 

Some minor things...

 

Pages 2 and 3 are swapped in both of the newer scans (I don't know about the first attempt. It was too big to keep around!). 3 and 4 in the '93 issue are swapped too.

 

Always clean your optics. I noticed some stuff on the first pages of the '93 scan. Probably a little debris from the cover. Nothing major.

 

The '93 scan seems a little dark to me. There's not enough contrast and to my eyes it makes the text look hazy and a bit harder to read. I think you may have already fixed this in the new '90 scan. So far it seems much easier for me to read.

 

Job well done. People should really download these two and check them out. (Download the 1990/11 scan at your own risk. ;) )

 

Jim

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm just d/l some Byte mags here:

[..]

and only now I found out that sometimes there's an issue 13.

 

That appears to be just mis-labeling on the archive page. The 13 link points to issue 12, and if you look through them all you'll see that suddenly there's a jump in the issue numbering on that page, but the numbers of the magazines themselves don't jump.

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That's what I'm missing:

 

 

Vol 10 No 12 1985

 

Vol 11 No 12 1986

 

Vol 13 No 12 1988

 

Vol 13 Nos 1, 2, 6, 11 1988

 

Vol 14 Nos 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13 1989

 

Vol 15 Nos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 1990

 

Vol 16 Nos 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 1991

 

Vol 17 Nos 6, 10, 11, 12 1992

 

Vol 18 Nos 8, 9, 10, 12 1993

 

Vol 19 Nos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 1994

 

Vol 20 Nos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12 1995

 

Vol 21 all issues 1996

 

Vol 22 all issues 1997

 

Vol 23 all issues 1998

 

 

Anyone can provide any of the above?

Edited by high voltage
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That appears to be just mis-labeling on the archive page. The 13 link points to issue 12, and if you look through them all you'll see that suddenly there's a jump in the issue numbering on that page, but the numbers of the magazines themselves don't jump.

 

Yes, I figured that out too. Sometimes you have to open up the mag online to see if it's issue 12 or issue 13, as it's not always mentioned on the cover. That's very confusing....

Edited by high voltage
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  • 2 weeks later...

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