Modern Day Equivalent of Byte/Compute! Magazine?

MochaMan writes "I grew up in the '80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line by line, and figuring out how sound, graphics, and input devices worked along the way. Since then, the personal computer market has obviously moved away from hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware, but I imagine there must still be a market for similar do-it-yourself articles. Perhaps the collective minds of Slashdot can divine some online sources of fun and educational mini-projects like 'write your own assembler' or 'roll your own bootloader.'"

Comments

It's called "The Internet"

[greggman]

I learned on Byte and Compute! as well but that's because back then that's all there was. That and a few books.

Now there's a gajillion ways now to be a techie. Whether it's coding to the metal or using JavaScript or Flash, using Java or C# or C++ or C or hand coding assembly. The number of ways to get the same buzz I got from those magazines in the early 80s has increased exponentially.

If you're stuck in the 80s though and just want to hand poke hardware then try the Arduino movement or one of these

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/12/fun_games_and_entertainment_open_so.html

And no, I'm not dissing those projects. I'm just trying to say that writing something in JavaScript or Python gives me the same feeling I got back in the 80s from typing in programs out of Compute! It's 2010. I'd much rather be programming in C# on XNA on my PC/360 than in basic or assembly on my Atari800.

Re:Make

[TrisexualPuppy]

Not anymore. They really dumbed it down over the last couple of years. When you recruit mindless radio DJs like Kipkay to the spotlight, you end up with stuff that might look cool to a twelve-year-old, but to any real hobbyist, it's just a bunch of lame junk like adding a Radio Shack toggle switch to a "radar gun" from Toys "R" Us or "hacking" a 9V battery by cutting it open and removing the AAAA cells. Not to rail on Kipkay because he really doesn't know any better, but Make has really moved to cater to the technically illiterate masses. It's becoming more of a light mods site than an in-depth guide to some really unique projects.

There's still always 2600, as limited as its scope is...

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[kenh]

You need to look into websites, there is no magazine that captures the zeitgeist of the personal computer industry today:

http://www.arstechnica.com/
http://www.lifehacker.com/
http://www.tomshardware.com/

then there are specialty sites that focus on very particular topics, but those are some good, general sites to start with...

To get your John C. Dvorak fill, you could go here:

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/

And Jerry Pournelle is here:

http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/

Hope that helps

Re:Make

[cexshun]

Are you serious? Make is crap! Once a month, you'll get an article about actually MAKING something. Other then that, it's 50 articles about knitting bicycle seats or turning a nerf gun "steampunk". Make has become nothing more then hipster fashion.

Re:Make

[gunnk]

Wow... I'm going to disagree with you in a big way. The current issue (Make 22) has an in-depth article on converting your lawnmower to RC control. Circuit boards, wiring, assembly... it's a big project but with LOTS of good info to get you there. NOT an overview or a news article. The same is true for the article on hacking wireless power outlets. Then there is the Arduino-powered tweeting cat toy. The physics and construction of double pendulums. How about a sun tracker for solar projects?

There's a ridiculous amount of great material in that single issue! Not news articles but full, in-depth how-to's. There are some light mods (to borrow your phrase) as well, but many of the projects require a significant investment of time and energy.

I think Make is a great source for projects. No dumbing down that I see, at least not in the latest issue!

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[Weedhopper]

Ars' Science section is great but aside from the longer technical articles, such as Siracusa's OS X reviews, I get the sense that more and more of their writers are wannabe geeks that like to write about technology but aren't real geeks themselves.

Lifehacker? Hahaha. Sorry, but I can't take a site whose 30 something founder just put together her first desktop from parts LAST YEAR as a serious tech head's site. Again, this site is about being a fan of geek/nerddom but isn't really run by real geeks and nerds. Take Lifehacker and then take a look at Hackaday. One is a hipster fansite for hacker wannabes and the other actually shows you how to do interesting hacks.

TomsHardware, don't have any opinion.

Jerry Pournelle is the shit.
John C. Dvorak IS shit.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[commodore64_love]

You missed a lot of pain in my opinion.

I remember spending several days typing-in RUN Magazine's "error checking" program into my C64. It ran perfectly. And then several more days typing boring hexadecimal code into that compiler, expecting to get a free word processor called RUNscript. Well the error-checking program said I had typed flawlessly, but the RUNscript still didn't work. So I waited 3 weeks for the next magazine (a long time in the life of a 13 year old), and looked diligently for typos and there were some listed in the "Ooops" column.

So I had to type in the WHOLE project another time. Several more days of my life. And it was still broke! I then reached into my measly allowance and paid $15 to get the so-called "free" RUNscript word processor on a floppy. As it turned-out it was a worthwhile investment since I used it another 2 years to do homework, until I eventually got the Mac-like GEOS system.

I learned two valuable lessons:
(1) It's easier to BUY programs than to type them in yourself (and then have them not work).
(2) Debugging hexadecimal is a bitch.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[Dan East]

Regarding keying in the programs in binary, I thought that defeated one of the fundamental premises of publishing programs in magazines, which was to gain an appreciation for and learn programming, and have the ability to modify and improve the software. I learned to program when I was 10 years old by typing in COMPUTE! magazine's BASIC programs into my TI-99/4A. I couldn't even save them until we could afford a cassette recorder, so afterward I would leave my computer on for days until I tired of that program (and I think I actually shed tears over power outages more than once). I feel that is why I am a software developer today. I learned an appreciation for the power I could exert over a computer, and the nearly infinite possibilities of what could be achieved through that.

Now if I was typing in nothing but arrays of thousands of numbers, I wouldn't have learned anything. In fact I actively avoided TI programs that consisted of nothing but DATA statements of numbers.