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2025-11-11 16:52:55

Visualize All 23 Years of BYTE Magazine in All Its Glory, All at Once

Fifty years ago—almost two decades before WIRED, seven years ahead of PCMag, just a few years after the first email ever passed through the internet and with the World Wide Web still 14 years away—there was BYTE. Now, you can see the tech magazine's entire run at once. Software engineer Hector Dearman recently released a visualizer to take in all of BYTE’s 287 issues as one giant zoomable map.

The physical BYTE magazine published monthly from September 1975 until July 1998, for $10 a month. Personal computer kits were a nascent market, with the first microcomputers having just launched a few years prior. BYTE was founded on the idea that the budding microcomputing community would be well-served by a publication that could help them through it.

“You need the hardware before you can progress through the first gate of a system. A virgin computer is useless so you add some software to fill it out. And the whole point of the exercise—in many but not all cases—is to come up with some interesting and exotic applications,” editor Carl Helmers wrote in the first issue’s introduction. “The technical content of BYTE is roughly divided into the trilogy of hardware, software and applications. Each component of the trilogy is like a facet of a brilliant gem—the home brew computer applied to personal uses.”

Dearman told me his first attempt at the site was in September of last year, but this version launched in August 2025. “Once I had a workable strategy it took a couple of weekends to put it all together,” he said.

Dearman told me he first became interested in BYTE after his dad Chris, also a software engineer, died in early 2022. Right out of university, Chris Dearman worked at a London computer company called Whitechapel Computer Works.

“There was very little on the internet about the computers he worked on (now mostly famous for being named after a computer in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy),” Hector Dearman said. He came across an article titled “Realizing a Dream” by Dick Pountain in the February 1985 issue of BYTE in the Internet Archive’s scans that covered the Whitechapel Computer Works MG-I, named after the fictional computer called the “Milliard Gargantubrain” in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

“The article was amazing but I was captivated by the adverts,” Dearman said. “I kept coming back to them and the more I did the more I realized what an incredible core sample BYTE was—both of the personal computing revolution and of the changes in graphic design and printing over those decades. That compulsion eventually turned into this project.”

Pages from the February 1985 issue of BYTE

Dearman said he was inspired by the Image Quilts tool that makes collages of images, and Jef Raskin’s “zoomable user interfaces.” To create the BYTE visualizer, Dearman sourced scans from the Vintage Apple archive (the Internet Archive also has a massive searchable repository of BYTE magazine issues) and converted the archive’s PDFs to image tiles. He then put the image tiles into Seadragon—around 500,000 tiles at 1024x1024 pixels each. “I wrote some custom software for this. I tried locally on my computer for a while but ran out of patience pretty quickly. Luckily it's a very parallel problem, I ended up with something that could do every tile for a given layer of the Seadragon image pyramid in parallel,” Dearman told me. “According to my Google Cloud bill I used around 500 hours of CPU time that month. For the final run I think I used 200 instances for ~20 minutes to generate the tiles—the future is pretty cool sometimes.”

On the BYTE visualizer site’s about page, Dearman quotes pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay: "[...] pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]—and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.”

Looking at the massive map of BYTE issues means looking at almost 23 years of computer history, at a time when the technology was exploding from hobby to household essential. When BYTE launched in 1975, it catered to a niche group of hackers, engineers, and people trying to tinker with expensive, chunky kits. By its final issue in 1998, it was publishing a Y2K survival guide and reviews of the hot new operating system Windows 98, and running ads for the world’s first 19 inch CRT computer monitor alongside an editorial about LCD monitors asking “Does Your Future Look Flat?”

“The relationship between Computing and its history is that of a willful amnesiac,” Dearman writes on the site. “We discard the past as fast as possible, convinced it cannot possibly contain anything of value. This is a mistake. The classic homilies are accurate: Failing to remember the past we are condemned to repeat it—as often as tragedy as farce.”
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Zoomable Interfaces

Asa Raskin, the son of the late Jef Raskin, recently gave a presentation at Google on the work his company, Humanized, is doing. It’s largely a continuation of the work of his father.

^{Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror)}