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

Circuit Cellar

[Anonymous Coward]

A fantastic hobbyist type magazine. Our community college has a student subscription for it, definitely worth it. Edited by Steve Circia, name should ring a bell!!

Re:Circuit Cellar

[LWATCDR]

Yep that was number one on my list. You might want to add Nuts and Volts as well.
Oh and the entire internet for software.
I really miss Byte :(
Oh and this as well http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/

Re:Circuit Cellar

[negRo_slim]

Am I the only still buying copies of 2600?

Re:Circuit Cellar

[dsoltesz]

I'll add my vote to Nuts and Volts - fun and fantastic mag.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only still buying copies of 2600?

Am I the only leaving words out of my sentences?

Oh, I not.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely correct. I rarely post or reply here, but I lunged at this one. Very gratifying to see you beat me to it.

To give you an idea, the latest issue of this magazine includes a quaternion-based combined accelerometer/magnetometer/gyroscope navigation system for unmanned aerial vehicles-- and it's pretty good. There's also a good summary of cool new and emerging parts, and fairly often some high-profile design contests that are absolutely accessible to hobbyists.

And yes, you'll occasionally see source code listings. Though the website is used thoroughly as well.

I write embedded software for a living, and let me tell you, if you want to get back to that 1980s feel of knocking out your own computer just because you can, then hacking around to see what you can pull off with it, modern microcontrollers are awesome, and they are cheap, cheap, cheap. Add to that the cheap fab 'n' slab shops that not just print PCBs but will populate them with your parts, and you're off and running even if your soldering dexterity sucks.

Also, I would say that "Make" has its place, and that is getting people to be creative comfortably within their skill space. The long term strategic goal for that magazine is probably as an easy entry point to get people back into a mindset where they realize that they can, in fact, build things themselves. I consider that goal strategically important for the global economy, as well as the Bright Shiny Future.

But "Circuit Cellar" ("Circuit Cellar Ink" if you want to go back a bit) is an excellent thing to read and hack around with. Sometimes just seeing what other people have managed to pull off is half the fun. Much of that stuff finds its way into real-world applications, just like "Byte" and "Dr. Dobb's Journal" once trained an armada of people who changed the world (thank you, Michael Abrash).

Best wishes and happy hacking,
      Matt Heck
      Senior Software Engineer, ECast, Inc.
      Former Director of Special Projects, TechShop, LLC

Re:Circuit Cellar

[MagikSlinger]

Holy crap! I had no idea this magazine existed! It's like my beloved Transactor on crack!

I (heart) you, Anonymous Coward!

Re:Circuit Cellar

[rwa2]

Yeah, all, thanks for making me feel lame for having nothing more sophisticated than a page-full of BASIC at the back of the "3-2-1 Contact" kids;' magazine.

I didn't really have a C64 or anything at the time, so I just had to pretend I had a programmable computer, dodging logs or whatever the little game was.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[Voulnet]

This is a great magazine. Thanks for the heads up, Anonymous Hero.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[interval1066]

Don't be ridiculous, of course not.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[IrquiM]

Yes

Re:Circuit Cellar

[Tetsujin]

Am I the only still buying copies of 2600?

Am I the only leaving words out of my sentences?

Oh, I not.

I've never left a word out one of your sentences in my life!

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with 2600 is that they started having a significant lack of articles written by technically competent people. As a result, the articles they did have were on lame things criminals would enjoy like cross site scripting exploits and things script kiddies use today.

And the letters to the editor devolved until most were children asking the editor if it was "cool" for them to do some stupid prank in their computer lab at school, instead of people sharing real discoveries they had made.

I enjoyed the magazine back in the late 90s when they ran articles on phone phreaking, building magstripe readers, analyzing bank and phone cards, and developing x86 virii that were polymorphic or had "stealth" HD access. It was all stuff you could really go out and do, or build, or hack.

Most of those areas of exploration are dead or considerably different now, but there's no reason they couldn't have shifted their focus to hacking of consumer gear like routers, cable boxes, satellite cards, cellphones, etc. They didn't, and I stopped my subscription when I realized the only part of 2600 I still enjoyed were the payphone photos.

Maybe today, things have changed enough that the 2600 of old can't exist. Maybe with all the suing and litigation they couldn't get away with discussing how to read secured microcontrollers in ATMs without getting in trouble. If that's the case, I can see why they shifted away from technical articles that described things in any significant and meaningful detail.

2600 was fun while it lasted. I don't think there will ever be anything like it, which is sad when you consider 2600 is still in print.

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.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[billcopc]

Another 2600 fan here, but their focus is primary on the legal and pseudo-legal entanglements of modern technology. Sure, they print a handful of hopelessly outdated how-tos on wifi sniffing and general BOFH pleasantries, but the bulk of it is now a socio-political journal. Not so much a tech zine anymore...

Re:Circuit Cellar

[billcopc]

One thing I never understood is why they cling to the print edition exclusively. You'd think a hacker journal would embrace the internet with open arms. Hell, I'd gladly pay for an online subscription to 2600 if it meant there would be more timely content, and save me the lone trip to the douchey bookstore.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[vaporland]

i found Jerry Pournelle insufferably pompous...

Re:Circuit Cellar

[camperdave]

Some magazines used to publish the software as a barcode so you wouldn't have to type in all that hex.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[julesh]

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,

?!

When I bought mine, a TI-99/4A was about £300, and a cassette recorder about £15. It seems strange to be able to afford the former but not the latter!

I actively avoided TI programs that consisted of nothing but DATA statements of numbers.

Must admit I don't remember seeing any of those. Saw plenty of them for other machines, but as the TI didn't provide a way of executing user-inputted machine code (unless you'd shelled out for the assembler, which only worked if you had a disk drive) I'm not sure what you'd achieve that way there...

Re:Circuit Cellar

[Balthisar]

Ah, Run magazine, the entire scope of my career as a published writer. What was the column near the beginning where they published reader-submitted hints and tips? I got in there twice when I was 13 or 14.

I stopped typing in programs when I got my free 300 baud modem and subscription to Quantum Link. There wasn't much point then.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[Larryish]

I notice that the "Department" of this story says "must-have-tape-drive". That would have been a good thing to have in the 80's. I burned up several small computers (an Atari 600XL and a Sinclair among them) by leaving them on for weeks at a time due to lack of storage. Pages and pages of handwritten code... seems sort of boring now, but at the time it was a lot of fun. Anyway, in 1989 I picked up an old TI-99/4A from a friend for $20 and ordered a cable to hook it up to a tape drive. The TI was a lot of fun. It was necessary to remap the bits in ASCII characters in order to create graphics. That meant running out of usable characters on a graphically intensive program. Kids these days are so damned spoiled. Now get off my lawn.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[LWATCDR]

I read a couple of them and found it actually pretty uninteresting.
Very little real hacking just a lot of history and politics.
But if you like it great.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[LWATCDR]

Pompous yes insufferably not really.
In many ways he had the first tech blog. It was just on paper. His opinions where interesting at the time. He was all about usability and reliability when most people where all rapped up in the latest shinny new toys.
I often was in total disagreement with him but at the same time I never missed his column. If nothing else he introduced me to both Unix and TurboPascal way back in 1982-83 he kept saying that someday Unix will be the OS. He claimed that somebody just had to put a friendly UI on it.
Thanks to him I spend a lot of money on OS text books all about Unix and VMS.
Also back when you had the first generation flamewars with folks saying Commodore rulz and Atari rulz I could shut down the war with simply saying Unix is the best!
Where the conversation stopped and people would ask "what's Unix?"

Re:Circuit Cellar

[commodore64_love]

In this case I can understand why RUNscript was binary. If it had been a BASIC program, with tons of lines of DATA statements, it would have taken twice as many pages to print in the magazine. The binary/hexadecimal saved both space and money for the publisher.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[inerlogic]

if you pay for a sub, they send it straight to your drop bo... i mean, mailbox....

Re:Circuit Cellar

[inerlogic]

i still have my orig. TI99/4A

and yes it still runs :)

and yes, now and again i still play TI Invaders....

Re:Circuit Cellar

[commodore64_love]

I remember Cassette Drives costing $150 back in my Commodore 64 days (1984). That's why I didn't have one - only the parental units had that much money, and they weren't willing to spend it. So I patiently waited a year for another Christmas to come.

I used to program in BASIC and then copy-off my creations on a notebook. Ugh. I only did that a few times and then the computer more-or-less sat idle for 6 months until I got my disk drive for Christmas. The following Christmas I got a printer. And then the next Christmas I got a monitor (which turned-out to be a waste of money).

Yep. My parents taught me how to be patient.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[Pegasus]

That's interesting. I learned basic on Spectrum when I was 6 but unfortunately I had no one to help me advance to assembly on zx80. Also I was too lazy (even back then) to save my programs to tape, so I focused on shortest programs that would give me interesting result and that I could type from memory in a few minutes. Things like exploring behaviour of x=rx(1-x) function etc. Consequently, now I'm a sysadmin ;)

Re:Circuit Cellar

[hattig]

Usually such program listings were a bazillion lines of DATA statements with a simple DATA reader / memory poker routine:

e.g.,
DATA reader / poker / binary saver routine in Listing 1 (quite a good one, with checksums and a line counter for errors)

http://www.cpcwiki.eu/imgs/9/95/Amstrad_Computer_User8508_038.jpg

(back from the days when magazines would have a three page listing and no screenshot of the results).

Re:Circuit Cellar

[ncc74656]

In this case I can understand why RUNscript was binary. If it had been a BASIC program, with tons of lines of DATA statements, it would have taken twice as many pages to print in the magazine. The binary/hexadecimal saved both space and money for the publisher.

Didn't they at least publish source code along with it? Yes, the output from the assembler (which usually had ) takes more space than a hexdump, but you can't learn anything from a hexdump. I usually punched in the source code for programs published in Nibble and assembled it myself; it took longer, but was usually less error-prone (you're less likely to flub JSR COUT than 20 ED FD, and if you do screw it up, the assembler will usually complain about it) and it was easier to modify if you wanted to make your own improvements.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[LWATCDR]

You should have gotten Transactor. They published them in assembly!
Yes you could have actually learned something from them.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[Kevin Stevens]

Hi,
The idea of programming microcontrollers is interesting to me, can you point me to an introduction or orient me on how to get started and what the possibilites are? Even just a name of a good microcontroller to learn on would do.

Thanks,
K

Re:Circuit Cellar

[soupforare]

They've gotten very political over the last few years. Also, at the same time the paper/binding and quality of articles has gone down, the price has gone up. I still grab it, but I'm not sure why.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[darkwing_bmf]

The BASIC Stamp kit from parralax is pretty nifty. It will let you get started on simple projects right away. I bought one from Radio Shack on a whim and really liked it. It does a good job of explaining the digital portions of the circuit examples it gives. The downside is it doesn't explain much about the analog portions of those circuits so you'll probably want to look into other resources for that info.

http://www.parallax.com/tabid/270/default.aspx#New

Re:Circuit Cellar

[ajlisows]

I also learned some programming early on in this way...keying in some programs that were printed in books/magazines/whatever. This is assuming of course that you are paying attention to what you are typing and thinking about the commands as you key them in. With that in mind, if you were learning that way back in those days and the program did not work when you were finished....it may not have been all that helpful. Depending on what went wrong you may have no idea what lines of code were causing the problems. This meant you learned a bunch of stuff that was right and some stuff that was wrong with no way of differentiating between the two. That is not really an effective way to learn. ;)

Re:Circuit Cellar

[jgrahn]

I really miss Byte :(

I don't. The way it was in the late 1990s, most articles were not very interesting for a Unix/free software kind of guy. Or maybe I had by then already become too lazy to read full articles.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[liquid stereo]

Typing in that code was pure torture. The good thing is that it helped me learn better coding. And you're right - the wait for the next magazine with the correction was too long. Now I do coding (scientific computation) for a living and so much of it is due to the Byte/Compute programming experiences. Cheers!

Re:Circuit Cellar

[chthon]

I bought my ZX Spectrum in 1984, it cost me about (then) $500, I think. I did not buy a cassette recorder with it. In fact, being from Ostend, Belgium, and my father working on the ferries the, I went for free to Canterbury, bought my Spectrum at a much lower price there then where I lived.

Afterwards we went to local stores shopping for a cassette recorder and found one (brand new) for $20.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[LWATCDR]

By the late 90s it was really dieing on the vine.
But the 80s and early 90s where great.

Re:Circuit Cellar

[ushering05401]

Physical distribution is an interesting thing. For starters, you could use 2600 distribution and sales figures to make heat maps both of friendly and hostile regions, you can't down a physical magazine with a bullshit DMCA notice, and every retail outlet is a canary in the coal mine against the rise of some podunk candidate looking to make a platform on the skulls of dead hackers. I believe people have tried to get 2600 out of their local stores before.

Anyhow, have you tried the beverage yet? I'm thinking of ordering a case on faith. Physical distribution seems to be their thing.

Good question!

[snowboardin159]

I even took some classes at a tech college to learn programming and whatnot, but the teacher didnt know these kinds of basics. Jumping into in depth problems with a base code already established was not a good way to learn for me, and im sure others might struggle with this too. Please slashdot, hook it up with some good links!

Re:Good question!

[NekSnappa]

The first class I ever had with computers was in '86 Egr101 after I got out of the Corps. We met twice a week, one night was drafting, the other was Fortran77 programming on Epson Equity computers. Used Edlin to write the source code, and IIRC called the compiler from the command line.
This was my first exposure to computers and didn't know the OS, from the text editor, from the compiler, from my own executables. I soon found back issues of Byte, and books that were compilations of related articles from the mag. I think that I still have one of those books around with "basic math functions for programming."

Make

[WarwickRyan]

From O'Reilly is about the only one which I can think of.

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:Make

[SnarfQuest]

Make started out intresting. Had articles about creating demonstration moters using a battery,paperclips, and wire. When they started putting in articles about randomally adding wires/components to music devices create strange sounds, I began to lose interest. When the articles never got any better, I gave up on it.

Re:Make

[SharpFang]

Unfortunately, yes. They have some awesome news on really cool projects people made, but these are usually shallow news articles - a few photos, some lines, no in-depth, no instruction, no deep how-it-works. That is combined with in-depth instructables on very simple and easy projects - stuff anyone can do (or buy from "Maker Shed"). Don't get me wrong - some of the simple, easy projects are quite interesting (like making plastic from curdled milk), but all are on "low difficulty" and most are quite pathetic.

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

[Hognoxious]

Don't get me wrong - some of the simple, easy projects are quite interesting (like making plastic from curdled milk)

In corporatist China, milk is made from plastic!!!!

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:Make

[flaming error]

Nice loop you exposed there. Who knew that from cottage cheese would come perpetual motion.

Re:Make

[beodd]

I love MAKE. They have projects that a kid can do and start getting intrested in things that light up, explode, move around and play games. I would have loved to have MAKE when I was growing up. I understand what you mean about Byte and others. I grew up on a VIC-20 Model I and they even had code for that old thing. I think it is more that computers no longer belong to the geeks. It's not as interesting messing around with code that is compiled in to something that is compiled in to something and finally compiled in to something that is run in a virtual memory. Most noobs cannot even code for the hardware. How interested would you be in coding for a pock calculator. Back then the computers were simple enough to do some good stuff with a minimal amount of hardware. But as for magazines.. geesh.. other than Make I think there are a few for Pic MicroControllers. Is 2600 still around? :P

Re:Make

[Tomy]

This is really disappointing to me as well. I've been a subscriber since its inception, but I'm about to let it drop. I know which end of a soldering gun to hold. I don't have a desire to add a toggle switch to a toy to impress hipsters.

Where are the articles like:

- Build a high quality mass spectrometer (http://old.4hv.org/index.php?board=4;action=display;threadid=1268)

- Convert a cheap Chinese milling machine to CNC (http://www.hossmachine.info/)

- Build a Tesla Turbine and reap geothermal energy.

It went from being "Make useful stuff" to "Make crap to impress dumb people"

Re:Make

[ottothecow]

yup...I had a quarterly subscription to make started sometime in its first year (so I don't have the first few issues).

Project quality fell off noticably in the 4 issues I recieved...now it is like the popular science/mechanics of DIY

Re:Make

[Zerth]

Or a DIY Scanning Tunneling Microscope http://sxm4.uni-muenster.de/introduction-en.html

Re:Make

[chinakow]

So your examples of crap are knitting(making) seat covers and turning(making) a nerf gun look steampunk? So two examples of making something means that a magazine called Make is crap? I would hate to hear how you evaluate brooms. "It swept up my dust but it didn't show me full HD video so I think it is a crap broom."

Re:Make

[WillDraven]

- Build a high quality mass spectrometer (http://old.4hv.org/index.php?board=4;action=display;threadid=1268)

You really got my hopes up with that link, dreaming that a thorough walk through might be there, and then all I got was some guy on a forum saying "I can haz mass spectrometer?"

Why, oh why?

Re:Make

[treeves]

Just because it has generic-sounding name "Make" does not mean readers expect it to tell them how to make potato soup, or doilies, or make their beds, or make whoopee, or make peanut butter from raw peanuts, etc. I think they were used to it showing them how to build interesting, challenging technical projects.

Re:Make

[xmundt]

There are batteries within batteries? Cool.

No...there are CELLS in BATTERIES (by definition). In this case, a 9V batter consists of six 1.5V, AAAA form factor cells.

Re:Make

[billcopc]

Yep Make went too trendy and vapid.

I'm fond of Hackaday.com . It's not a true how-to site, but they showcase some often fascinating stuff which I often find inspiring for my own projects.

Re:Make

[Anonymous Coward]

I know Make. You call that lots of good info? Anyone with half a brain in this field knows that there is absolutely nothing to off-the-shelf systems electronics. So long as you're a hippie, a lousy coder, and have some half-assed knowledge about which way the battery goes, you can be a "maker." I doubt you'll ever see a single differential equation or an implementation of a quality piece of computer science in that magazine. It's catered to those who want to build some gizmo *now* without *really* caring to learn about what is going on. Instant gratification, minimal brain power.

If you care about really understanding electrical engineering, read something like Circuit Cellar. And even that's a somewhat casual take on the subject.

Re:Make

[Telecommando]

Yes, Make had a lot of promise but it squandered it on flashy-blinky, useless junk projects. Now it's filled with pictures of stuff other people have built with no instructions (or even a hint) on how they did it. They should rename the magazine MADE:, as in "Look what I MADE, but won't tell you how I MADE it."

The Internet is this magazine.

[vesik]

The Internet is this magazine.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[commodore64_love]

Pretty much. In addition to Compute's Gazette I also read RUN (for C64) and AmigaWorld (sister magazine). They were great for learning programming & hardware, but have no place in today's world that is aimed at the simplified "turn key; start engine" mindset.

Similarly the science fiction magazines I used to read also faded away. Asimov's and Analog are still here but rapidly dwindling in circulation. I guess just as you can't go back to the 1920s when you'd read dime-store comics, and eat penny candy, you can't go back to the 1980s either. The past is the past.

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:The Internet is this magazine.

[butlerm]

The last few unfortunate years of its existence aside, BYTE was the best computer magazine then or since. As has been said, something like the Scientific American of the computer world in its time. Unparalleled exposition about the latest trends in computer design, programming languages, etc. Plus in depth reviews actually worth reading. Outstanding columnists, etc. Virtually every issue from the 1980s is a gem.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtually every issue from the 1980s is a gem.

It did exist in the mid to late 1970's too. Every issue from the 70's was just a gem as well. Articles, programs, algorithm discussions, electronics, reviews on things like the late 70's computers from Apple, Commodore, Atari, Cromemco, etc. and the software for them. Great stuff back then.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[87C751]

Virtually every issue from the 1980s is a gem.

Through mid-1985, I'd have to agree. Beyond that, BYTE suffered the same fate as Creative Computing, getting watered down to be more general as both were used to fulfill remaining subscriptions of more narrowly-focused magazines like Compute! Gazette and the like as they failed. I was unfortunate enough to buy a 2-year BYTE subscription in early '85, so I saw its decline first-hand.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[negRo_slim]

Tom's hardware is a shadow of it's former glory.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[obarthelemy]

anandtech ? the tech report ? silentpcreview ?

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Wonderful! I'll take 12!

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[cmiller173]

I think I still have issues of "Hardcore Computist" (mostly Apple ][ & \\e related) on a bookcase at home. A number of hardware hacks and interesting software to bang in line by line. Of course the first program to write was the checksum calculator to verify the what you typed matched what was printed.

Somewhat unrelated but for NUCL-190 at Purdue I wrote some nuclear reactor simulations on the \\e, to calculate energy output for different reactor geometries. That class was my best grade that semester, but I ended up changing majors anyway.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[OakDragon]

Rupert Murdoch will be glad to sell you a subscription.

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:The Internet is this magazine.

[rossdee]

But fortunate for the worlds forests.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[Tetsujin]

Rupert Murdoch will be glad to sell you a subscription.

Face-man's gonna have to bust him out first.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[HermMunster]

I used to read Jerry Pournelle and purchased the magazine just for his articles. When they went paywall web based I ceased. I liked having/holding the magazine. I see he is also paywalled.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[HermMunster]

I guess it is slightly different than a paywall (as in if enough people pay the subscription it is open to all).

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[RJFerret]

...you can't go back to the 1980s either. The past is the past.

I remember when the 80s was the future man...and we were going to party like it's 1999!

Now there's less modding and more "will it blend"?

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[Night Goat]

The nice thing about magazines like Byte is that they had editors. The Internet's nice, but without editors who cut out the crap and point us at the good parts, it's not that great. Slashdot is pretty close, but it all relies on good editing.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[NekSnappa]

I had almost purged the tool named Dvorak from my mind until. You, fiend! Brought that unholy name back to my recollection. I damn thee, and all your spawn!

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[drewhk]

Another one:

http://www.phrack.org/

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[TheRaven64]

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.

As a freelance writer, who was a real geek before he became a writer, it's probably due to the amount that they pay. If I write a decent article, I can sell it elsewhere for 2-3 times what Ars will pay. I was interested when they put out their call for freelancers a few months back - until I read their rates.

Presumably this is the fault of the readership to some degree, because a lot of Ars readers use ad blockers and don't buy subscriptions, so they have little money left to pay for writers. I've noticed that their quality has dropped a lot over the last year. I used to read pretty much every Ars article that appeared in my feeds, now I basically skip anything except the CPU stuff by Jon Stokes. These tend to be very well written and contain information I can't get easily or as well presented elsewhere. When I'm not writing, I spend a lot of time (including paid consulting time) compiler hacking, so I like to stay on top of the latest trends in chip design.

I only scan Siracusa's OS X reviews occasionally to see how many errors I can spot (almost everything he has ever said about LLVM, clang, and OpenCL, for example, has been wrong), but schadenfreude isn't really the feeling that I'm looking for in a news outlet. I have Slashdot for that.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[TheRaven64]

Somewhere I have a box full of back issues of Byte. Last time I found it, I read one of their articles, talking about the new 1 micrometre fab process and wondering how long we would be able to keep the process shrink going before we hit fundamental limits. I think they said we'd start hitting problems in about a decade.

That article was from 1985.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[TheRaven64]

Not just editors, but writers who knew the material and could write intelligently about it. One without the other is not much use. The Internet is full of:

• Writers who know the material.
• Writers who can explain things that they understand well.
• Editors who can tidy up the ramblings of writers into something easy to digest.

Getting all three together is much less common. The advantage that something like Byte had was a paying subscriber base, meaning that they could afford to hire all of these people. I wouldn't mind paying for something the quality of Byte (and I'd be interested in writing for such a thing), but it would have to be delivered without ads in a format suitable for both on-screen reading and copying to an eInk device.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[YourExperiment]

The Internet is this magazine.

Really? Good lord, I don't remember Byte having this much midget porn.

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[Bigjeff5]

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.

Lifehacker isn't a geek site, it's a modern personal improvement site. They offer "life" hacks, generally geared toward productivity or health or finances, not hardware or software hacks. Some of their hacks are actually utilizing a new piece of software (typically free) to get things done better than the old way of doing things. To say it is about being a fan of geek/nerddom is flat out idiotic, and I don't know what kind of moron you must be to come up with such an idea.

Frankly, putting together a computer from scratch is on the extreme technical side of what they do, because that isn't really what that website is about at all.

The fact that the GP put the site in there is a bit odd, but for what it is it is an excellent site, and I think a lot of geeks could get quite a lot out of it (though not for normal geeky reasons, more practical life reasons).

Re:The Internet is this magazine.

[ajlisows]

It is a bummer in a way though. I go on a few camping/fishing type trips every summer. Usually there is limited electricity and even more limited options for internet access. During these trips, there is usually down time (usually in the morning) where people will just kind of sit around, drink some coffee, and read magazines. Time, Cosmo, Sports Illustrated, People....whatever. I usually end up grabbing a copy of Time or something to do with Football, but I'd much rather be reading some kind of decent tech magazine. Books of course, are an option, but there is some banter during "reading time" so I have a harder time getting engrossed in a book.

There are also times when I would like to read magazine type material but want to get away from my computer for awhile (I know, I'll turn in my geek card). I like to take a walk or a bike ride down to the park. It would be nice to have some good magazines to take on the run. Yes, I know. I could take my laptop and get cellular internet or find a Wifi access point....but I'd rather not lug around an expensive piece of technology in case of bad weather/theft. If I lose a $7 magazine...big deal.

Most of the time I prefer the technological approach, but sometimes I really would rather have a low tech option available.

Yes, its called the internet

[spribyl]

That said check Make or google micro-controller projects.

Make Magazine

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

Make magazine is a wonderful DIY with electronics projects etc.

Re:Make Magazine

[SharpFang]

Unfortunately it's rather on the "shallow water" side. It has articles talking about some awesome and hard ideas, and it has DIY instructables on simple, easy things. It doesn't have in-depth instructables on difficult, ambitious, big projects though. News on really interesting projects and instructions/tutorials on simple ones. "Popular audience". Though some of their simple projects are ingenious in their simplicity too.

Re:Make Magazine

[tgd]

Make is to DIY what Wired is to technology ...

Re:Make Magazine

[Bassman59]

Make is to DIY what Wired is to technology ...

Exactly.

Re:Make Magazine

[cexshun]

Make is to DIY what iPod is to MP3 players.

Re:Make Magazine

[mattack2]

So, in other words, entering an already-created industry and blowing away the competition for years and years and years, with tons of so-called "killers" falling by the wayside year after year?

I like this one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try looking at http://www.nutsvolts.com/. It has electronic and some programming at very low level.

Re:I like this one...

[SloWave]

Sadly Nuts and Volts is dumbed down compared to the old Radio-Electronics mags. I let my subscription expire after only a year because it became too repetitive. Too much stuff about how to make LED's blink and the like. I don't think there is a good general electronics hobby mag anymore.

Re:I like this one...

[negRo_slim]

I don't think there is a good general electronics hobby mag anymore.

Perhaps not, but there's still Instructables.

Re:I like this one...

[rclandrum]

Not sure about the "dumbed down" comment. The magazine is designed primarily for the embedded systems hobbyist market, using stuff like PIC and other microcontrollers. Lots of stuff on Basic Stamps, Parallax boards and sensors, and Arduino, etc. Advertisers are mostly dev board makers, short-run PC board service houses, and surplus barns. I've found the articles useful enough to keep my subscription current for over 10 years. Lots of robotics and balloon-sat goodies.

Re:I like this one...

[WasteOfAmmo]

Also take a look at its sister magazine Servo http://www.servomagazine.com/ .

More on the PC side but Linux based is Linux Format http://linuxformat.co.uk/ . It's about the only decent computer magazine that I have found that still has coding articles in it. I wish there was a Windows base magazine similar to Linux Format but unfortunately it seems publishers think only lusers use Windows and not coders.

Maximum PC

[mlauzon]

Maximum PC is a great magazine.

Re:Maximum PC

[chill]

Maximum PC is to 80s Byte/Computer as microwaved Ramen Noodles are to a Home-Cooked, Four Course Meal.

Re:Maximum PC

[Scutter]

Maximum PC is a great magazine.

Maximum PC died when they changed their name from "boot!".

Re:Maximum PC

[Nimey]

If you're a thirteen-year-old gamer boy.

Re:Maximum PC

[mlauzon]

I'm a 34 year old Gamer boy, and a Geek.

Re:Maximum PC

[Nimey]

Age is orthogonal to maturity, or have the magazine's editors gotten over their adolescent fascination with boobies?

Re:Maximum PC

[Nyder]

Maximum PC is a great magazine.

No it's not.

Really sorry you think so.

Re:Maximum PC

[Nyder]

I'm a 34 year old Gamer boy, and a Geek.

And apparently clueless.

Re:Maximum PC

[mattack2]

So, yummy, fast, and cheap... as opposed to a ton of work.

Re:Maximum PC

[slapout]

and a ton of favor.

Re:Maximum PC

[Knoman]

I still miss "Info" ;-(

Re:Maximum PC

[Jedi Alec]

or have the magazine's editors gotten over their adolescent fascination with boobies?

Hah. All heterosexual men are fascinated with boobies...some of us are just more honest about it than others ;-)

Re:Maximum PC

[inerlogic]

"and a ton of fravor."

fixed that for ya...

Re:Maximum PC

[masmullin]

did someone say boobies?

Re:Maximum PC

[thewiz]

I threw one of my old Maximum PC issues into my modified microwave and had a steaming cup of Ramen noodles in just 3 minutes!

Thanks!

Jarlsberg?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to beat the hackers at their own game?

        * Learn how hackers find security vulnerabilities!
        * Learn how hackers exploit web applications!
        * Learn how to stop them!

Jarlsberg - Web Application Exploits and Defenses

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:It's called "The Internet"

[avandesande]

I can't believe that everyone seems to have forgotten to mention that the internet has made this type of tree killing obsolete.
Many orders of magnitude more stuff available online, dealing with any subject imaginable.
The only thing this won't help you with is toilet reading, unless you are hardcore enough to wifi from the bathroom.

Re:It's called "The Internet"

[ffreeloader]

You must be very young. I can remember when even Computer Shopper had some decent technical articles. I learned a lot from it.

I can also remember when there were multiple magazines about anything technical. From computers to hotrodding you could find a lot of very technical how-to projects that took months for the magazine to complete. Every aspect of the project was gone over in great detail, unlike the vast majority of what you find on the internet today that is very, very cursory information. Back in the day a good article on hotrodding would tell you how to cc and modify the cylinder head combustion chambers to provide even power from all cylinders in your engine, or tell you how to completely rebuild and strengthen the transmission or rear differential in your car, or how to build drive train from beginning to end to get the most performance and longevity out of it. The last type of article would teach you to understand cam lobe technology and how it affects the power band of your engine, how to match heads and intake manifold, to the cam. How to match compression ratio to all of that, and then how to match your clutch, transmission, and rear end to the engine. The amount of knowledge those magazines made available was incredible.

The old computer magazines were just as thorough in their approach to computing as the good hotrod magazines were to hotrodding. Even Radio Shack had a decent reputation for technical projects. Now they're nothing interesting at all. Thirty years ago you could buy almost anything you could think of in electronic components from them. They'd even sell you a build-from-scratch computer kit. Not the greatest computer in the world even for that time, but a great learning project. Nothing like it even exists today.

Re:It's called "The Internet"

[mattack2]

The only thing this won't help you with is toilet reading, unless you are hardcore enough to wifi from the bathroom.

That's a strange usage of hardcore. Everyone doesn't read slashdot from the bathroom?

Re:It's called "The Internet"

[Billly Gates]

The problem is today you are learning someone elses methods/functions to do tasks. After mastering the simple syntax the task turns to rote memorization. Java itself has 100,000 methods. In C++ you could have fun learning all the different things (sometimes bad and ugly). Its a great way to figure out what the computer is really doing when you reserve data types and work with objects. This is really how to learn. I guess perl is the modern equivalent to C++ and hacking if you like scripting.

Getting stuff done is important at work but long term its nice to know what these languages are actually doing.

Re:It's called "The Internet"

[Linux_ho]

I remember the ones that start with a BASIC one-liner that loaded the rest of the code into RAM.

10 FOR A = 828 TO 2249 : READ B : POKE A, B : NEXT
20 DATA 32, 155, 220, 165, 100, 133, 252, 165
30 DATA 101, 133, 251, 160, 0, 177, 251, 168

And I remember making a typo at about line 345. And line 502... then after hours of mind-numbing data entry and error hunting, the sweet reward of playing... Snake.

This taught me attention to detail, stubbornness, and being satisfied with low expectations, all of which have served me well in the field of system administration.

Re:It's called "The Internet"

[inerlogic]

OMFG!

that's the one practical use of the ipad....
(laptop was always a bit unwieldy in the bathroom...)

damn... now i have to buy one....

Re:It's called "The Internet"

[mattack2]

I didn't necessarily mean iPad btw. I just meant my phone. It's in my pocket when I leave my desk anyway...

If you are intent on bit banging...

[tlambert]

If you are intent on bit banging... the available options these days are pretty much limited to microcontrollers, unless you want to end up in huge projects or small modifications on huge projects.

Most of what you can do with these tends to be robotics projects, since there aren't a lot of 8-bit general purpose computers available out there any more.

There are a lot of web sites that provide small source code for special purpose robotics projects which you could apply much in the same way as typing in BASIC games from Compute! or Byte magazine, and then playing with them.

If your intent is to provide a project for a kid, you could do a lot worse than going some place like Weird Stuff, buying up a handful of Compute! magazines and a Commodore 64, a 1541 disk drive, and a box of 10 floppies. There are plenty of analog TV's out there still to use a monitors which are otherwise sitting unloved in peoples garages.

-- Terry

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[lowrydr310]

Speaking of that, do you happen to know of any resources (such as tutorials/examples/projects) for basic audio and video?

I'm an ECE, and know processors inside and out, however I don't have a clue as to how you go from circuit board to a screen. I want to know how you display images on a screen (probably best to start with an analog CRT for now). I also want to know how audio works as well. I had a C64 shortly after they first came out; I was old enough to tinker with it a bit, but too young where I couldn't see beyond just using it to play games. I didn't know anything about programming, and nobody in my family had the interest or desire (father was a machinist and mother was a hairdresser).

I've been wanting to build my own replica of a classic video game system using a microcontroller, but realized I don't know basic building blocks of a computer.

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[lowrydr310]

I searched, and found my answer (sort of). At least in the case of the C64, it uses a VIC-II chip to handle everything, controlled by 47 memory mapped registers.

Now to dig into the specific workings of the chip. I think I found a starting point, unless there's something simpler. What I'd really like to know (for my project idea) is what the Atari 2600 used.

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[SendBot]

I read your comment and I suspect you're not entirely aware of what bit banging is. From the wikipedia article:

Bit-banging is a technique for serial communications using software instead of dedicated hardware. Software directly sets and samples the state of pins on the microcontroller, and is responsible for all parameters of the signal: timing, levels, synchronization, etc. In contrast to bit-banging, dedicated hardware (such as a modem, UART, or shift register) handles these parameters and provides a (buffered) data interface in other systems, so software is not required to perform signal demodulation.

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[commodore64_love]

I picked-up a lot of knowledge from here: http://www.avsforum.com/

And here which describes NTSC in great detail: http://www.videointerchange.com/pal_secam_conversions.htm

And: http://nfggames.com/games/ntsc/colourresx.shtm

http://www.videouniversity.com/articles/video-recording-formats

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[Pinky's Brain]

http://www.javiervalcarce.eu/wiki/VHDL_Macro:_VGA80x40

FPGAs are the best suited for this kind of experimentation. Of course if you just want an embedded system with video out you can just get a Beagleboard.

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[tombeard]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TV_Typewriter_Cookbook.jpg

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[commodore64_love]

The Atari VCS/2600 used a very simple chip called TIA. I forget the exact resolution but it's very low - about 50x25 - which is why it has such blocky graphics. It also has 2 sprites that create hi-res players and 2 "balls" which are used during play. It was designed with the intent of doing Pong-type games, but programmers discovered ways to create arcade games like Space Invaders or Missile Command as well. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TIA

Jay Miner then moved from TIA to C-TIA for the Atari 400/800 computers (1979) which can generate 352x240 in 4 colors, or 80x60 in 128 colors, and several modes in between. Next he designed the Commodore Amiga (released in 1985) which did 702x480 - the maximum resolution possible in NTSC-analog television. Number of colors was 64 in that resolution, or 4100 colors in 352x240 mode.

The Amiga was famous for "flicker" which was a side effect of the interlaced nature of television (draw the odd lines first, and then the even lines).

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[Achra]

If your intent is to provide a project for a kid, you could do a lot worse than going some place like Weird Stuff, buying up a handful of Compute! magazines and a Commodore 64, a 1541 disk drive, and a box of 10 floppies.

If your intent is to teach programming to a kid, I recommend Python instead of a Commodore 64. All of that GOTO 10 stuff caused near-permanent bad programming habits to an entire generation of coders. Python is the new BASIC.

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[Achra]

Sorry, meant to attach a link: http://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Computer-Programming-Beginners/dp/1933988495/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276643304&sr=8-1

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[TheRaven64]

I want to know how you display images on a screen (probably best to start with an analog CRT for now).

That depends on your aim. Driving an analogue CRT has almost nothing in common with driving a digital LCD. If you've got some kind of analogue output then you can plug in an oscilloscope and draw lines on it really easily. That's state of the art for computer graphics circa 1950ish. With something like a TV screen, it's relatively easy to generate a composite video signal. The display will handle the strobing, you just need to send the colour signals with the right timing and handle the sync correctly.

If you're driving a TFT, then you will be using a frame buffer and then sending a digital signal to the display. This is much easier, but also less fun and has absolutely nothing in common with driving a CRT.

The controller used for the Atari 2600 was horrible. RAM was too expensive to have a frame buffer, so it just had a buffer for a single line. A bit of hardware looped over this buffer converting each value to an analogue signal. You had to make sure that you wrote into the buffer in front of the reader, but didn't overtake it after looping around.

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[darkwing_bmf]

For higher level programming perhaps. But when I took assembly in college it reminded me more of BASIC than anything else.

Re:If you are intent on bit banging...

[Achra]

I'm sorry to break the bad news, but most of us get blessed few opportunities to program assembly these days. Embedded systems is about the last bastion for assembler code (Especially ARM Assembly, like if you've been tasked with writing a bootloader for that ARM7 device).. But the rest of the unwashed programming masses? Even microcontrollers are programmed in C nowadays.

Pragmatic Programming is another great option

[KhazadDum]

If you're looking for a replacement to the likes of Software Developer, Dr. Dobbs Journal, then please check out Pragmatic programming. As a hobbyist programmer, I enjoy the different articles, from metaprogramming to Facebook app development.

Re:Pragmatic Programming is another great option

[masmullin]

This looks really good. Thanks for pointing it out! :)

Arduino

[BitZtream]

Personally I prefer working with ATmega's directly rather than with Arduino, but ... if you want to futz around and LEARN, Arduino is a good place for it. Lots of tutorials and others willing to help. Lots of neat plugin boards for sensors IO. Lots of choices of example software from FreeRTOS to VGA output on a pin (both of those aren't designed for the arduino framework, but porting them should be rather trivial once you get to the point where you would consider porting them.

If you're using Windows, I'd suggest just using the AVRstudio from Atmel and WinAVR (GCC for AVR chips if you want to use C/C++ instead of just ASM). You can start with the Arduino development environment and move up later. Its free. The Arduino environment is really just a replacement for your main() with a while(1) loop on the standard AVR toolchain anyway

Arduino has lots of examples and information, but from a debugging standpoint, its the worst there is.

AVR Studio from Atmel has a nearly perfect simulator, and if you use something like HAPSIM you can simulate other hardware as well, such as serial ports, buttons, leds and a specific LCD.

If someone would add some decent debugging abilities to Arduino it'd be a useful development environment for me, but debugging through the simulator might be a little overwhelming for a newbie I guess.

I used to roll my own boards for ATmegas, now I just use Arduino boards, price is more than the processor, but cheaper than rolling the whole board yourself unless you do it in numbers, the Arduino hardware is the best way to go if you're talking quanities less than 10 for sure, probably cheaper all the way up to the 100s if you're hand assembling.

Re:Arduino

[Animats]

Personally I prefer working with ATmega's directly rather than with Arduino, but ... if you want to futz around and LEARN, Arduino is a good place for it.

Yes. ATMega boards with small LCD displays are available, and Atmel's free AVR Studio is a reasonable IDE, with C and C++. If you already know how to program and don't want to join the Arduno cult, it's a reasonable way to get things done. There's a wide range of ATMega parts with different combinations of RAM, Flash, and I/O devices. AVR Studio supports all of them; the Arduno support is more limited.

Re:Arduino

[spinkham]

BBB is much cheaper then the official arduino at any quantity if you don't need the USB after programming or shield compatibility. Same for the arduino pro, which is more expensive, but has shield compatibility and requires no assembly.

Seeeduino is slightly cheaper then the official version and has some cool hardware features missing from the original.

Your first one should probably still be the official arduino board, however. If you need a large quantity, you can save a bundle with the BBB or RBBB.

Re:Arduino

[Achra]

Another vote for working with the ATMega (or ATTiny) chips directly rather than via the arduino framework. The arduino boards are neat and everything, but expensive ($20-$30ish) I'd hate to lose one inside of a design. That is to say, when I design and build something, it is for permanent. I want to place a $5 microcontroller in there, not a $35 piece of development prototyping hardware.. and the dealbreaker: Arduino code is not compatible with bare ATMega chips. I recommend ladyada's minipov3 kit for learning Atmel microcontrollers: http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=20 $17.50, built-in programmer, battery-pack, ATTiny2313 microcontroller, LED's on the outputs.. You can't go wrong. The parent's comments about debugging are well-founded as well. Check this out: http://www.nkcelectronics.com/avr-jtag-ice-clone-debugger-programmer-kit.html an $18 JTAG ICE for ATMega16/32/64/128 chips. I never thought that I'd be doing step-in/step-over IDE debugging on target hardware with a $20 piece of debugging equipment at home. The future is here.

Online is the answer

[fprintf]

Tom's Hardware, Anandtech and others used to be really good resources. Maybe worthwhile to check them out?

Re:Online is the answer

[fprintf]

Wish there was a delete key. After re-reading the submission I feel foolish for suggesting these two sites.

Re:Online is the answer

[jpiratefish]

These are great resources, however, magazines often have focus that websites do not have. Kids still need to be taught to eat - not just left off at the buffet and left to fend for themselves. People are no different when it comes to consuming information in all it's forms - it's like picking up a conversation and lifting facts out of their context - they have less meaning, or perhaps no meaning. Just because the dictionary has a great list of words, that doesn't make it a good learning tool. The Internet is the most fantastic research tool ever created, but it's not a learning tool until someone has the syllabus and the time and instruction to follow it.

Re:Online is the answer

[MightyDrunken]

That should teach you! If you hadn't read the submission you would feel a lot better. :)

Re:Let me know when you find it

[captain_dope_pants]

This is low level stuff he's after - first write your internet, then your operating system and network drivers. /Then/ connect to the internet ;)

Make and Some 2600

[jjrff]

As others mentioned Make is a good one and 2600 also has a lot more computer/network oriented material lately.

Re:Make and Some 2600

[Mike Buddha]

2600 you need to be careful with. A lot of the articles are pure BS.

Re:Arduino - Links help

[BitZtream]

http://www.arduino.cc/

Some choices

[fermion]

Steve Ciarcia's who wrote the Circuit Cellar column in byte started a magazine which now simply goes by Circuit Celler. The articles tend to be related to significant embedded devices. I find it holds the spirit of Byte in that it encourages users to build custom computers rather than just settle for commodity parts. This is the closest thing I have seen for understanding a machine to the basics.

Make magazine obviously does the same at a more accesible level.

In the end Byte's value was that it provided reliable reviews and use cases computers, not based on OS, but on need. Be it Unix, MS Dos, CPM, of Mac OS, Byte honestly looked at what could and could not be done on th machine. It did not shy away from technical detail. Most of this has moved on online to sites such as Tom's Hardware.

Nut's and Volt's

[waldozer]

Nut's and Volt's is also a good one. And, I just love the name.

Bytes! Gazette

[glavenoid]

I remember Bytes! Gazette which catered to the Commodore 64 and 128 crowd had this clever input program in Commodore BASIC that would allow the entry of programs by byte-codes. That is, each edition of the magazine had these long list of byte sequences (i think they were 5 chunks to a line, and something like 200 lines for the bigger games) where the first 4 bytes were data and the 5th was a checksum for that line. You would enter these sequences using the BASIC program and it would allow you to proceed to the next line or it would prompt you to re-enter the line if the checksum failed.

The problem was that the BASIC program code was only run every other issue, so if you only bought a few issues from the supermarket you'd probably miss the program and waste several hours entering otherwise meaningless junk into the standard Commodore prompt :-) Then again, I was only 9 at the time, so I didn't really know any better until my brother-in-law pointed out that I needed to use the BASIC entry program...

Sigh, I still kinda miss those days.

Re:Bytes! Gazette

[glavenoid]

Apparently I don't remember very well because I think it was Compute!'s Gazette. I wonder what else I am misremembering from my youth.

Re:Bytes! Gazette

[Dunega]

It was called MLC and it really stunk when you typed part of the MLC code in wrong and ran into a bug after entering a few hundred lines of numbers. :)

2600

[mrbene]

If you don't know of this quarterly magazine, look it up. It emphasizes the value of curiosity, while often providing templates for additional investigation. Some of the content is crap, but most of the time there's at least a few things of value.

Check it out.

Re:2600

[Mike Buddha]

Yeah, I think you'd be better served going through old issues of Phrack than wasting your time with 2600's technical articles. The stuff in Phrack is dated, but at least it's real. And the letters page is way more entertaining than 2600's feeble attempt to copy it.

http://www.phrack.com/

Re:2600

[Jimmy King]

I stopped buying 2600 back in the late 90s... maybe '00 at the latest when they published 100% plagiarised to the word article from a really old Phrack about how to "hack" (more like be an annoying asshole on) irc. It was, of course, all stuff that hadn't worked in at least 4 or 5 years (and was frequently down to luck even then) like stealing channel op status during a netsplit so that you'd be opped and could steal the channel when it came back together. That was when I realized that most of the stuff I was reading and didn't see the value of wasn't due to me not having a good enough understanding yet, it's because it was actually just stupid garbage.

Maxim PC

[OzPeter]

Oh baby .. thats one hot little CPU you have there. Do you like to cluster with other systems, or do you just go down all by yourself?

Dude, you're reading it.

[seanonymous]

What more do you want? Program listings in the back?

Re:Dude, you're reading it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't fool yourself. Slashdot left the realm of a tech site long ago and traded it in for politics, entertainment and legal bickerings.

Linux Journal?

[vinn]

There certainly isn't anything remotely close to those old magazines. I remember devouring issue after issue of Ahoy! (!) Remember having to run your code through the checker to make sure you typed in each line right?

These days, about the only thing I can really think of that has code in it and projects like that is Linux Journal. Sure, Make has some things in it, but it's definitely not focused solely on computers. The one area that remains extremely accessible for a beginner and also has a very high practical value is the web. Some of the coding projects in Linux Journal for PHP and such are extremely useful and even readable for someone young.

Re:Linux Journal?

[Per Wigren]

I agree. I still subscribe to Linux Journal and although too much (IMHO) of it is directed at semi-newbies they still have interesting articles every now and then. In Linux Journal you still occasionally get to see FVWM2 and TWM window borders on the screenshots where they are showing new programs. That gives a lot of confidence. :)

I miss the Sysadmin magazine. RIP.

The short answer

[DaveV1.0]

No, there isn't a comparable magazine these days.

My recomendation

[laing]

Subscribe to "Dr. Dobb's Journal" and "Nuts & Volts"

Elektor

[OzPeter]

Elektor

Re:Elektor

[petes_PoV]

Elektor really just does kits. Whenever I see their projects, they always seem to have some obscure IC bang int he middle of the project. Usually only available in 1000-off quantities from a single national agent, or in one-offs from the magazine's pet supplier. Same goes for surface mount devices. All you're effectively doing with Elektor's projects is assembling a kit of parts. There's little or no scope for customising the project or substituting components that you already have in your junk box.

CNET.com?

[LostCluster]

With the computer magazines still in business converting into websites, why not go to the tech centric websites such as CNET?

Re:CNET.com?

[SharpFang]

Sure except CNET sounds like a rather poor choice. It's more of buyer's catalogue than a news site, and more of news site than a magazine for hobbyists. You won't find tutorials on new programming languages there, no objective (negative) reviews of new technologies, no instructables on tinkering and hacking.

Sure it shouldn't have to be paper, but it should be the kind of content paper had...

Re:CNET.com?

[LostCluster]

You might want to look at the "CNET How-To" and "CNET Hacks" HD video podcasts... Hacks even goes into things the companies don't want known, like iPhone jailbreaks.

Re:Let me Google that for you

[SharpFang]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22reading+comprehension%22

He didn't ask how to write his own assembler.
He asked where to find a good, consistent source of articles about that kind of problems.

Linux magazines

[TINGEA77]

Although limited to one operating system only both "Linux Developer & User" and "Linux Format" magazines have coding sections that address multiple languages, system details, mini-project ideas, although they are both targeting the beginner coder.

Re:Linux magazines

[Darkness404]

Linux Format is nice... but a bit expensive if you live in the US (about $16-17) and also focuses on newbies. It was a great introduction to Linux, but I really don't see an advanced coder really appreciating it as much.

If you are new to Linux I don't think I can recommend another magazine as highly as Linux Format, but if you are an advanced coder it might not be that interesting to you. Though I do like one of the projects from one of the authors of it, its called MikeOS, it is an OS entirely coded in assembly and is really easy to reprogram and is well documented. http://mikeos.berlios.de/

Re:Linux magazines

[dargaud]

Although I prefer my tech reading to be in english, I recently started reading "GNU Linux Magazine / France" and it is highly technical and excellent. I learned plenty of things, even in my own area of expertise. Of course it is in French, but I don't know how much of it is translated from a foreign 'original'. Most of the authors are french.

To give you an idea of what's in it this month: a detailed review of the new kernel additions (2.6.34, 11 pages), intro to /proc kernel programming, a step-by-step of what happens during the boot, a review of open-source project management progs, detailed QoS (some 20 pages), GHDL (the GNU VHDL), a review and code for the open-hardware Ben NanoNote which I had heard about on /. only 2 days before, some perl for PDFs, a long criticism of XML, the Wt server library, a PHP book review, the PIR language...

Creative Computing Mag was just as important!

[jpiratefish]

I loved Byte Mag, but it wasn't the only thing I grew up on. I also cut my teeth on Creative Computing Magazine as well - it was one of the few places where one could get the source code for a game, type it in and run it - and then make changes and learn. I grew up typing in every program from every issue, learning with every keystroke. Now my kids need the same thing, but it needs to be in something more current - like Python. If someone made a modern version of this, with VB, Python or whatever, I'd live by it once again!

Re:Creative Computing Mag was just as important!

[SnarfQuest]

Creative computing was a fun, and interesting magazine until it decided to become a joystick comparison magazine. They lost interest in programming, and became a hardware review magazine. Same thing that happened to Byte later.

Re:Creative Computing Mag was just as important!

[El_Oscuro]

There is one. Go to pygame.org. The games this thing can produce are awesome. Happy coding!

Re:Creative Computing Mag was just as important!

[landoltjp]

Creative Computing Mag had a huge impact on my Software dev career as well. I started out with a hobby computer back in 1978 (SOL-20, and yes, I'm old :) ) having a limited functionality basic along with 3K of workspace. It really taught me how to search for and fix bugs (keying / entry bugs, platform inconsistency bugs, Language Version bugs, etc). I owe a lot to this process, in teaching me "ok, what will it take to make X work _here_"?

Recently, there was a dicussion with my cube-mates regarding the books that had the greatest impact of their development skills. The first book I pulled out was my K&R C book (2nd Ed or something), and then I brought in my copy of Creative Computing's Book of 101 Basic Computer Games (Microcomputer edition).

makezine?

[2obvious4u]

Makezine is the closest thing I've seen to anything like that lately. Lots of Arduino projects. I've also linked some projects you might find interesting:

How to program a person.
How to scavenge a CD drive for parts.
Arduino accelerometer.
Electronics enclosure.

But I'm probably way off, since it sounds like you're looking for software projects, not hardware.

Re:makezine?

[2obvious4u]

Damnit, when I started typing the above post I was thinking I might get a "first post", but since I looked up the cool projects it took to long and about a dozen other people brought up makezine, oh well.

Saying internet is not enough guys

[parallel_prankster]

Yes, he could go to the library and look at papers and figure out how circuits are made. But that is not what he is asking. He wants to know a place where all his info is available in a tutorial manner. So, suggest websites if you are talking about online stuff. Even google can give you more results than needed sometimes. There is a http://electronicsworld.tripod.com/ I used to visit this when I was in undergrad. Now I am mostly into programming :)or :( whatever.

2 good ones

[Tumbleweed]

Make, as already mentioned

Nuts and Volts

That would make a good subscription set. :)

Definitely CIRCUIT CELLAR and ladyada.net

[Invisible Now]

Complete code and hardware for sophisticated projects. The adverts will bring you up to speed on what's available for system on a chip, embedded controllers, etc. Deeper than Make. Hobbyists can try out robotics. Scientists can build useful data loggers, remote telemetry, etc. Newbies can learn the basics of writing and compiling code and downloading it to small devices of all sorts. System boards and compiler environments complete for under $40. Also try ladyada.net for complete hardware kits and Ardino system boards, etc. Learning to solder is fun and gives one an almost mystical reconnection to the roots of our digital age...

Re:Let me Google that for you

[AnonymousClown]

Hmmm. He was using "assembler" and "boot loader" as an example.I wonder what that makes you?

Re:Let me Google that for you

[vlm]

He asked where to find a good, consistent source of articles about that kind of problems.

So lmgtfy is wrong in what manner? Google will do it.

Instructables.com is the only other "search" site you need.

I will concede the point that one thing google is iffy at best is finding the stereotypical electronics manufacturer appnote. Then again, how hard is it to figure out, if you want to do something with PICs, you go to microchip.com, click app notes, and do the obvious searchy searchy thing for what you want to do?

byte archive?

[RedMage]

Slightly OT, but was wondering if there was a good BYTE archive online? I've found various sources for other magazines (gazette, transactor, etc.), but nothing for byte. I've got 5-6 complete years of byte that could be a good starter if someone were doing it.

Anyone know what kind of copyright hassles some of these archives are getting? Are people getting permission, or are they relying on these publications being out-of-print and out-of-mind? I doubt there's much commercial potential left, for example.

Re:byte archive?

[cshay]

Best of Byte - downloadable for $5 a volume:

http://www.amazon.com/Best-BYTE-Vol-Programming-Languages/dp/B000BQJ4U0

Re:byte archive?

[RedMage]

Yeah, I've got that. Not a bad computing history overview, if slightly self congratulatory at times. Also let down a little by the printing quality. But overall I would recommend it.

Re:byte archive?

[cshay]

Click my link.. it is not the same as the book. It's a digital download in many volumes.

Get code from the net, build, run and learn

[bhlowe]

Online: http://www.google.com/codesearch and http://sourceforge.net/

Re:Get code from the net, build, run and learn

[BitZtream]

Thats just horrible advice. Most 'free code' is absolute crap with little to no commenting and even less information on why it does what it does or even WHAT its supposed to do.

Old computer rags actually explained it, which is why you learn.

Reverse engineering takes skill and domain specific knowledge which you don't get when you're starting out.

Re:Get code from the net, build, run and learn

[bhlowe]

Thats just horrible advice.

There is a whole world of code out there and a lot of it is well-commented and reasonably clean.

I personally find it boring to read about programming. Give me a compiler and debugger and let me start setting breakpoints and making changes and see how they affect the code.

Learning by doing works for many. You can find code that interests you to learn on.. But what do I know, I've only been programming for 30 years..

Bona Fide OS Developer

[Java Pimp]

This is a good hobbyist site for banging on the PC hardware. www.osdever.net/

Re:Compute's! Gazette

[xjerky]

I remember Compute's! Gazette! And I remember not realizing that I needed the BASIC assembler at first myself:

AE 3D 10 00 23 11 7E 4D 8A

?SYNTAX ERROR
READY.
_

I feel like this is an "In my day...." post.

Re:Dr. Dobbs

[SnarfQuest]

I gave up on DDJ when they were filling the magazine with articles on "how to wrap xxx in mfc classes". You'd get several of these, and article on getting around Microsoft bugs, how to use some Microsoft functions, a couple of articles on interfacing with Windows through Java, and letters to the editor. Since I wasn't interested in Windows, very little of the magazine was useful to me.
Did they ever get beyond their MicroSoft slant?

Manufacturer websites

[vlm]

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.

They only existed in the 80s because the device manufacturers had no way to distribute large multi page paper documents for free. Sure, if you were a Genuine Degreed BS-EE with the job title to match, salesdroids would pretty much send you anything you ask for as samples. The general public, believe it or not, was expected to actually pay for printed appnotes and even printed datasheets.

Nowadays, if you want to learn how to make sound, or program a LCD, or run a A/D converter, you just download the appnotes from the manufacturers website, typically you get a PDF explaining in great detail how it works, schematics, and example code to get you started out. Some manufacturers go further and sell demoboards for a really modest (probably subsidized) fees.

Either the manufacturer's appnotes are so simple and clear that a "D" student could figure it out, or they go out of business and are replaced by a manufacturer with better tech writers. The quality level is generally excellent.

Re:Manufacturer websites

[superscalar]

I also grew up on Byte magazine... actually had an article published in Byte back in the 80's. I still remember Ciarcia's series of articles on rolling your own PC (8086-based, if memory serves). Great stuff. These days Microchip probably provides the best overall support for the hobbyist through their good app notes, forums and web ticket system (and of course all the free tools and cheap development boards). Sparkfun is both a good supplier and they host very helpful forums.

Re:Manufacturer websites

[KC1P]

Sure, if you were a Genuine Degreed BS-EE with the job title to match, salesdroids would pretty much send you anything you ask for as samples. The general public, believe it or not, was expected to actually pay for printed appnotes and even printed datasheets.

If you were lucky!! Most of the time the data sheets were free, and when someone gives something away for free that means they don't have to if they don't feel like it. So the salesdroids would always sound receptive on the phone, and they'd assure you the stuff was going in the mail, but you were never sure whether you'd actually receive anything.

So as far as I'm concerned, these are what will eventually be the good old days! You can get almost any data sheet (even if the quality varies -- yeah you, RealTek!) instantly (or semi-instantly after NDA) for free, and samples are done online so you don't have to have a good corporate-sounding voice for those either. I totally agree about eval boards -- they're both cheap and well designed, and they have to be because the first one that the engineer has a positive experience with is the one that gets the sale for the parts themselves. So the manufacturers are falling over each other to give you cheap, easy-to-use kits that will have you getting something (simple) working the same day the kit comes in the mail.

Re:Manufacturer websites

[backwardMechanic]

This is so true, even in the early 90's. I remember a summer job, doing fairly braindead work for a government research agency. I discovered a computer in the library, loaded with more datasheets than I had ever seen. I spent the rest of the week quietly printing out the datasheet (well, book) for a 68hc11 - it gave me enough information to build a board, write an assembler, and boot the chip! Oh, happy days. There really is no feeling quite like starting a microcontroller/microprocessor on your own board, bootstrapping your own code, and getting the first response from it. Today, datasheets are easy to get - but you're right, the writing quality is excellent. It's amazing how often the manual for a chip is some much better than the manual for the gadget built around it.

The modern hacker resource

[ch-chuck]

Outsourcing Magazine

hackaday.com

[konmpar]

I like hackaday.com. Has lots of DIY articles as other member's really great projects...

Just f***ing Google it

[Sheik Yerbouti]

Google

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=write+your+own+assembler

Re:Let me Google that for you

[SharpFang]

...and if you look for news what interesting developments are there in microcontrollers? If you want to know what programming languages are "in"? Compare assemblers of PIC, '51, AVR and ARM (not instruction-by-instruction but in a subjective/descriptive way like an article does)? Learn about new algorithmic techniques in reading accelerometer data? Get news about a new manufacturer with microcontrollers of a completely different family?

You are suggesting a source of data. The question is not about data, it's about magazine articles. Not solving specific problems you have at the moment but expanding your scope, learning things you didn't know they are out there to learn in the first place.

Re:Dr. Dobbs

[Doctor Morbius]

Why would they? What business in their right mind would ignore 95% of the market to cater to probably less than 1%; I'm guessing you're a linux user.

Re:Let me Google that for you

[SharpFang]

Okay, so what is the correct query for Google to tell me what is there interesting and worthwhile to learn about embedded currently?

You're not getting the difference between obtaining answer for a question and reaching out for knowledge.

Servo Magazine

[hAckz0r]

Its not a replacement for Byte by any means, but if you are into automation or robotics then Servo Magazine is not a bad choice. http://www.servomagazine.com/ It caters to the robotics competition crowd, but there is still lots to learn both electronically, mechanically, or programatically. Its great if you need to create sensors, control 'things', or just like making things that go whizz and move around the room. ;)

Linux Journal

[mauriceh]

A lot of similarities still exist within Linux Journal.

c't (.de)

[chaered]

c't (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C't ) is pretty good, if you read German.

Blending old and new

[colinmil]

There are still lots of people 'stuck in the 80's' interested in building things from scratch. We have a series of articles on building a bicycle computer using .NET and Visual Studio there you can get as close as you want to the hardware without giving up the tools you are familiar with on the desktop. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/netmfteam/

Re:MOD PARENT UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, 9V battery hack? HACK???
Or mysterious lightbulb hack???

Lol, liberal definition of """hack""" Sheesh.

While not technically a magazine...

[thegarbz]

While not technically a magazine Hackaday provides just that kind of interesting hobbyist resource. Unfortunately it's a bit hit and miss, and not really only geared towards computers as much as microcontroller projects and spud launchers. Some of the articles are stupidly basic, some prohibitively expensive (like a system for creating liquid nitrogen), but some really hit the mark for the hobbyist hacker like using LEDs as light sensors in between pulses.

people would rather use than make computers

[peter303]

I followed Byte since it was a mimeographed Silicon Valley newsletter in the 1970s. Not that many coding magazines have survived.

the Internet

[corbettw]

Has anyone mentioned that, as great as those magazines were, their time is over but you can find the exact same stuff on the Internet?

Maybe you could start with...

[jamie(really)]

How to write a fucking search engine Or maybe you could post a stupid question to /. about "Where has all the print media moved to?" and have idiots here give you the answers. Good job, btw!

Re:Compute's! Gazette

[kge]

Hehe... I did the same on the ZX81 :-)
Bought a book about programming the Z80...
Still, after getting the hang of it, it was great fun.
I still do some hardcore assembly stuff on microcontrollers when sdcc is too slow or elaborate (like interrupt routines optimized for speed)

BTW, 'Elektor' is rather nice for electronics and microcontroller stuff although it is quite commercial.

Don't dismiss microcontrollers

[petes_PoV]

The high-end 40-pin DIPs compare favourably to entire home computers from the Byte era. They are programmed in C, can interface to USB, can be set up with their own bootloaders. The code to interface them to SD cards is well known and if you dan't want that, a 4MBit eeprom has more capacity than a 360kB floppy disk. And that's without even getting to the 32bit controllers.

book recommendation

[mister_dave]

I keep meaning to work through The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a modern computer from first principles.

There's a website that supports the book, and a Google tech-talk video.

Ask Slashdot?

[ducomputergeek]

*looks at filing topic* er, um, nevermind.

not exactly, but a simulation:

[uniquegeek]

I pick up Make at the library, subscribe to LinuxJournal (so cheap there's no need to go to the library), go to local Unix User Group meetings, plus I acquire old equipment to tinker with whenever the opportunity presents itself. A crappy box goes a long way to alleviating any fears of breaking something.

As someone else pointed out, the internet and wikipedia are newer supplements to this idea too. Hardware and the way it's implemented is a fair bit more complex than 20 or 30 years ago (or, at least, there's a lot more to learn if you want to know the different designs).

I've heard good things about the legend of Byte, unfortunately, it's something I haven't grown up with.

Magazines

[Jerrry]

In the U.S. there are three general electronics magazines:

Circuit Cellar
Nuts & Volts
Elektor

Of these, Circuit Cellar is the more advanced and covers topics that are probably over the head of most beginners, but it's still worth a read in any case.

Elektor will be familiar to European readers as it's been published in multiple language versions over there for decades. The U.S. edition dates from the beginning of 2009 and contains the same editorial content as the UK edition. The construction articles in Elektor are quite well done and are look very professional. Elektor recently bought Circuit Cellar, but haven't changed the focus of that magazine (yet). Whether they do in the future remains to be seen.

Nuts & Volts is geared more toward hobbyists and beginners, but it's still good for all levels (at least some of it). It has several long-running columns devoted to the Arduino, the PICAXE, and (starting recently) the Parallax Propeller.

Another good option is Everyday Practical Electronics, which is published in the UK and sold by major U.S. chain bookstores.

Although not strictly devoted to electronics, Servo Magazine (published by the same people who publish Nuts & Volts) does cover the electronics aspects of robotics. There is some overlap with Nuts & Volts, but not a lot.

Re:Dr. Dobbs

[maxwell demon]

Any business aware that 99.9% of their competition already cover those 95%, and therefore it's probably much easier to get a large chunk from the 5% if you are any good, than to get a small chunk of the 95%.

I have a request for the magazine wish fairy

[moxley]

Yes, I would like future copies of Byte as well......When the wish fairy that brings us modern day equivalents of classic awesome magazines comes by, I would like:

1. A modern day equivalent of Mondo 2000 (because it so ISN'T Wired).
2. A modern day equivalent of Omni

It wasn't just the content of those magazine, it was the spirit and openness behind them....

As a couple of posts have mentioned, "Make" is pretty awesome, it has the right some of spirit behind it.

Re:I worked on Byte Magazine

[An dochasac]

By the late 1980s Byte had become too focused on PC hardware instead of the more general concepts of computing. (My favorite example was when they gave the Amiga 1000 a negative review because it didn't have an AUTOEXEC.BAT). Likewise, Compute! became so hyperfocused on specific Commodore and Atari hardware, they would publish three or four nearly identical listings (C64,Vic,Atari400, Atari 800) instead of one program with the hardware specific stuff in separate subroutines. Even their checksum listings eventually got to the point where the reader was nothing but a human barcode reader who wasn't meant to understand what he was typing into his computer.
IMHO "Creative Computing" was a far better magazine than either. It remained a true computer science magazine until the very end, focusing on algorithms rather than the hardware platform-du-jour. For that reason, some Creative Computing articles are timeless. The only thing similar today would be ACM journals, but Creative Computing hit a sweet spot in the understandability vs depth curve that ACM journals rarely reach.

300 baud magazine

[LodCrappo]

Not for current info, but if you want a magazine that really takes you back, check out

http://www.300baudmagazine.com/

its a small volunteer run mag with articles about "retro computing".. the 8 bit machines, mainframes, and the good old days.
has old computer ads from the 80s, etc. its a new project with only 2 issues out, but I enjoyed the first enough to write an article for the second.

Creative Computing archives

[An dochasac]

Okay, maybe Creative Computing wasn't quite as pure as I remembered it (or I had a few particularly good issues), but the Creative Computing archives contain some interesting bits of nostalgia, including:
My five year old knows Basic
Stereo Graphics with hidden line removal.
What does it take to be successful or how to tell the winners from losers? (With articles about successful companies such as DEC,Coleco,Visicorp,Osborn,TI,Atari,Commodore...)
Naked call writing (i.e. I wonder what young kid read this and went on to write the software which created the derivatives panics of 2007?)
Product preview: Microsoft Windows; 23 Manufacturers to support new operating software system -- "Finally, microcomputer users will be able to take their software and plug it into any system, without worrying about compatibility." -- William H. Gates, Chairman of the board of Microsoft

dead trees are.. well.. dead.

[greywire]

Unfortunately the days of getting a magazine every month are probably gone.

Byte, Radio & Electronics, Popular Electronics, etc.. fond memories.

But this is the new millenium. There must be some equivalent by todays standards.

It would be a website, of course. And it would have to have some good writers adding articles, not monthly but as they are completed. And not just "I blogged today about xyz", but actual articles.

Of course it would also have aggregated links like slashdot to other interesting sites found by people who know whats good and whats not.

It would cover programming, hardware, robotics, etc.

I don't know of such a site. I would start one myself but I don't know where to begin. Anybody want to try?

Re:Let me Google that for you

[LostAlaska]

Sweet another lmgtfy.com user. I work in IT, and I have used LMGTFY.com a lot in the last year or so after discovering it. People constantly ask how did you find that out!? Well, now I send them the lmgtfy.com link. It's called google people, ya know the entire world of information at your fingertips? Learn how to do some basic research and be inquisitive.

Dr. Dobbs

[Bitmanhome]

Dr. Dobbs is the Compute Magazine for grown ups. They cover the current cool stuff (3D rendering, parallel computing, video encoding) and provide the source for download.

The wikipedia article also notes video

[tlambert]

The wikipedia article also notes video for bit banging.

I think you could technically make an argument for both sound and video being a form of serial data. We always used it to refer to any time where we externally controlled the timing of dumping stuff into I/O device registers, for example, when doing raster interrupts on a C64 to increase the virtual number of sprites the machine could support, or to reload color registers to "cheat" on the number of colors that could be simultaneously displayed.

My first use of bit-banging was on current loop interfaces, before we had RS-232C terminals available to us. We built bit-slice processors back in the second year of college in a physics of electronics class, we then did both serial and video for keyboard and video out to an oscilloscope, and both approaches were bit-banging. We also bit-banged sound out of the Commodore PET by pounding bits at the VIA (MCS6520) by hacking the output of the CB2 in the NMI handler for the clock to change the shift register contents and bit rate.

One guy got really ambitious and bit-banged a Bell 103C accoustic coupled modem (it could only handle 110 BAUD, though).

-- Terry

It's called linux

[bl8n8r]

The documentation kinda sucks, but all the source code is there for free. As the proprietary markets have strangled anything useful anymore, it's one of the few places you be able to find anything relevant or current.

Silicon Chip

[Freaek]

I used to enjoy reading Silicon Chip years ago

just did a quick search and it appears they're still around. Online version of the magazine now as well!

http://www.siliconchip.com.au/

I take exception to that...

[crazipper]

...as the guy who manages it today and is still every bit as enthusiastic about tech as I was when I was working at SharkyExtreme.com, when Tom was still running *his* site. :-P

Dr. Dobbs

[jasenj1]

What!? No mention of Dr. Dobb's? /. is slipping. - Jasen.

Hobbyist Information

[tgrigsby]

If you're just looking for hobbyist information, try out HackADay.com It's a great jump-off point to sites where people hack all the way down to the metal -- and sometimes even design the metal itself.

Re:MOD PARENT UP!

[treeves]

Well, did they use a *hack* saw to cut open the 9V battery?

Re:Let me Google that for you

[shriphani]

There's this thing called the Meno's Paradox . It interested Socrates. Maybe you and other awesome slashdotters who are wired to every journal and patent db on the planet would do well to learn about our problem - that we really can't inquire about something if we don't have a definite idea of what we are looking for.

For Apples: MacTech

[cmholm]

MacTech is Apple-oriented, obviously, and has been around since 1984 as either MacTech or MacTutor magazine. I believe they still sell a compendium DVD that reaches back into the mists of time, handy if you end up with an old Mac you'd like to hack on.

As someone else pointed out, the classic Circuit Cellar is still around.

So Many Choices

[nicholdraper]

There are some web sites dedicated to just source code: http://www.codeproject.com/ is a great place to find useful small applications with an explanation. http://sourceforge.net/ has excellent code. http://apache.org/ has very good projects. These sites don't require you to retype anything. While the programs in codeproject are small, some of the projects in source forge and apache are huge -- but many have very good small tutorials to get you up and running. For little hardware projects look at http://www.instructables.com/. Even the commercial products now have incredible online resources that in many ways surpass what we got in Byte, if you're not familiar with http://msdn.microsft.com/ check it out. Another approach is to install Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, or any distribution comes with a package manager that allows you to browse applications by the thousands. I set one up in my house and my daughter had Tux Racer installed before I got home from work the next day. Computer magazines didn't go away, they were eclipsed. Oh did I mention http://eclipse.org/ its a full IDE, open source and a development environment as well.

Makezine!!!

[taweili]

http://makezine.com/ would be the modern day Byte.

RDDeveloper Magazine

[they_call_me_quag]

Go get a copy of RBDdeveloper Magazine (google it)... they have plenty of code and cool programming projects in each issue.

PC Plus

[ET3D]

I think it's a reasonable modern day equivalent, though not a perfect match. It covers a lot more in what it teaches, because there's a lot more to cover, but it does provide a good introduction to a lot of stuff in computing. Haven't read it for a couple of years, though (since they stopped shipping single issues; international subscriptions to it are extremely costly).

Re:I maintain something close to that

[TheRaven64]

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but some time in the '90s most of us migrated from Gopher to this new World Wide Web thing. It allows you to do things like cross-referencing and displaying data in something other than a simple (and painful to navigate) hierarchy.

You've got some interesting resources there - lots of things I've had to refer to over the last couple of years - but the organisation is really painful.

Re:I maintain something close to that

[digitalsushi]

http://hackipedia.org/About%20this%20site/Your%20hackipedia%20web%20design%20sucks.txt

just sayin'.

Re:I maintain something close to that

[TheRaven64]

No images and JavaScript can make sense for speed, but the tree layout does not. The way that it's implemented means that you end up with a lot of forward - backwards navigation, but the basic idea is also flawed.

Search the HCI literature and you will find numerous studies demonstrating that most humans do not think in terms of hierarchical organisation. The argument that 'it's what people are used to on their desktop' is complete nonsense. Check some user studies and see how few people actually organise their files properly in a hierarchy. Even most geeks only manage it with judicial use of symlinks / aliases / shortcuts. Programmers tend to think more hierarchically than the general population, because most programming languages have a hierarchical structure, but that's a somewhat misleading correlation because it's based on a positive feedback cycle.

For a trivial example, if you're too lazy to check the literature, compare what people say about GMail's label system to what they say about more traditional folder-based approaches.

On top of that, the data are also not well suited to this kind of layout. Why are the ABI docs at the top level, and not under operating systems? Or under low-level binary types? Or, indeed, under both? Or, more to the point, trivially reachable from either.

The entire point of the web is that it's easy to produce things that contain cross references. This was a big part of the reason why it managed to displace Gopher. Taking a massive usability step backwards in the name of 'accessibility' is not a good idea. Presenting information badly does not make you a hardcore geek or hacker, it just makes you incompetent.

Re:C64 BASIC emulator-Not a magazine, but still...

[Jiro]

1) Since the code is created from the original 6502 code, it's a copyright violation unless you own a Commodore 64.
2) BASIC on the Commodore was pretty much ported from the PET and has minimal access to graphics and sound from BASIC, so just about any useful Commodore 64 BASIC program is going to be full of PEEKs, POKEs, and generally accessing things that aren't part of BASIC itself. There's no way that will work without emulating the entire machine. In other words, no C64 BASIC program that you'd actually want to run, even from a retrocomputing standpoint, will run on this.

Re:I maintain something close to that

[digitalsushi]

I certainly agree with your points on the inherent uselessness of a tree structure being used to map the way a human relates information together, but the issue is that this is the only structure available for the guy with the website to present the data. He's simply using directories. And some arbitrary ordering he uses may make perfect sense and be incorrect to everyone else. But he's sharing it for free, so he doesn't have to consider other people's models, unless he takes it personally.

My website is similarly bad, digitalsushi.com. I've been trying to think of a way to implement a tag cloud without using a database to store them. It's a difficult problem but I am always interested to hear other people's ideas on the concept.

I think it's unfair to suggest someone is too lazy to read up on a topic as broad as HCI, though. That's a serious topic to even casually become familiar with.

cabby

[abbylucy]

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