Slashdot Mirror

Did you read anything the the Byte editors wrote about the end of the magazine? Tom Halfhill's Tom's Unofficial BYTE FAQ: The Death of BYTE Magazine ? The advertising was drying up well before CMP purchased McGraw-Hill technology publications (including Byte.) By that time, enough magazines with a strong focused interest existed that it was tough for a generalist like Byte to sell advertising. If Microsoft wanted to advertise NT4, they could reach more of their potential customers by advertising in Information Week, rather than Byte. If NuMega wanted to sell a memory leak tester to developers, they could reach more of their audience in Dr. Dobbs Journal. Texas Instruments DSP group could reach more hardware designers by advertising in Microprocessor Report.

Byte was a great magazine for someone like me who was interested in how popular technology was currently used today, what advantages and disadvantages alternate technologies had, and what was coming up in the future. Articles from chip design to heterogeneous user management. I wasn't a good target for many of the advertisers though. (I wasn't interested in the Microsoft NT ads, because I wasn't trying to set up an windows network. I wasn't interested in the NuMega ads, because I wasn't developing for Intel hardware. I wasn't interested in the TI DSP articles, because I wasn't doing hardware design, etc.) and those advertiser didn't want to pay for me to see their ads. The end result is a high subscriber base for a tech magazine with lower per subscriber ad revenue. Not a good business model.

Here is a link http://www.halfhill.com/bytefaq.html to all your why did Byte get killed questsions.

Some interesting facts I gleened from an article written by Tom R. Halfhill, an analyst for Microprocessor Report.

Fact #1: More's Law is not a scientific law, but and only an observation describing semiconductors pace of progress.

Fact #2: Intel cofounder Dr.Gordon E. Moore did not define Moore's law as it is understood today. He didn't even call it a "law" in the original article. Somebody else much later coined the now famous term.

Fact #3: Moore's law was never about processor clock frequency or other performance issues. Rather, it regards the economic manufacturing of component integration on integrated circuits.

Fact #4: Moore's law actually stated component integration doubles every 12 months - not 18 - and he actually ammended this prediction to 24 months. 18 months is a number seemingly drawn from a hat.

Fact #5: Moore's law is extremely inaccurate. Tom Halfhill estimates todays chips would have more than 27 trillion transistors, when in reality Intel's Prescott Pentium sports 169 million transistors.

The thing that irks me is that there is no general computing source any more. Things have pretty much descended into the various "camps" with pee cee people reading about those new processors and the Mac people reading about the Power PC processor.

I used to be able to keep up with processor design in Byte Magazine. It also kept me apprised of each different computer that came out back when no one computer type and operating system had over 90% of the market and I think that Byte helped serve those who didn't want to see Microsoft-Intel become as dominant as they have become.

The death of Byte is still a sore spot with me. I ran an Intel platofrm for many years and was able to keep up with what Motorola and Sun were doing with their designs. There were even columns on embedded applications. I felt like I had a really good handle on the microprocessor universe and the differences. Sadly, not so now (or should I use Jerry Pournelle's frequent "Alas...").

A car that would have been 12,000 - 17,000 6 years ago (the Caviler which is going off the market now) NOW costs 20,000 fully loaded! Thats 3000 more for the EXACT SAME CAR FULLY LOADED 6 YEARS AGO.

MOD PARENT DOWN (-1 doesn't live on planet earth)

Ever hear of a thing called inflation? Even though it has been fairly low in the last 10 years, it has still been there.

Let's take your example: A car selling in 1998 that starts at $12k, and comes fully-loaded at $17k would start at $13,700 today, $19,425 fully-loaded. Sound like the prices you see today?

See this calculator for reference.

It's not the fact that they stopped publishing it, but how they treated the subscribers.

Anyone else get fscked out of a year or two of BYTE?

For more on the story, click here