Twenty-three years ago today, the premier small computer magazine came to an end. There were other Stateside monthly journals, like Interface Age, but Byte was the most substantial and attracted the best writers and artwork. The covers alone are collectors' items. In the early days at least it had an unrivalled breadth of coverage, including the mini-computer end of the existing technology, although it came to be dominated by the personal computer from the early days of single circuit boards. When in 1978, as a senior programmer at DVL, I investigated the possibility of microcomputers (as they were then called) aiding systems development, Byte was among a bargain bundle of magazines I picked up either at, or just after, the first personal computer show at Olympia. Along with the UK's Personal Computer World which had just started, I took out a subscription to Byte and gave it up only many years later when its quality started to decline under McGraw-Hill.
New York Times journalist Lisa Napoli wrote an obituary.
When the computer magazine Byte was started in 1975, there was no such thing as
the personal computer, and virtually no competition in the computer publishing
market. For 23 years, as the computer revolution changed society, the magazine
held on, despite the emergence of a number of rival publications.
But those changes finally caught up with Byte last week. The monthly magazine
and three other computer publications were sold by McGraw-Hill Inc. to CMP
Media Inc. last month, and its editors and writers expected its new owner to
revitalize Byte. Instead, CMP suspended publication of the magazine, and 74 of
Byte's 85 employees were laid off.
"This is a publication that has strong brand resonance, but it's staggering in
its decline in readership," said Tony Uphoff, a vice president at CMP. "We were
very interested in the brand, but we decided to suspend publishing." Byte's
circulation has fallen to a recent average of 442,553 from 522,795 in 1996.
Advertising has also fallen. In January, for example, Byte published only 61.5
ad pages, less than half the number of pages the magazine had in 1996.
Uphoff said CMP would "resuscitate" Byte under a new business model and
revamped editorial focus, most likely in the fall. The magazine's site on the
World Wide Web will remain intact, however, for archival purposes. But the July
issue will be the last for Byte in its current incarnation.
Byte was a personal computing magazine aimed at technical professionals and
others who wanted very serious, in-depth reporting on technology. It was known
for its influence on the computer industry and for its crisp writing style.
Unlike some later computing magazines, which were perceived to be influenced by
advertisers, Byte was considered editorially independent. "If you read it in
Byte, you could absolutely believe it," said Dan Rosenbaum, a publishing
consultant in New York who has worked closely with the computer publishing
industry. "It was the gold standard."
For those who were involved in computer publishing long before computers were
as ubiquitous as they are today, Byte's suspension was treated as the end of an
era. "It's unfortunate," said Carl Helmers, one of the founders of the
magazine, who now runs his own publishing group in Peterborough, N.H. "The
mission was to become the Scientific American of computer science. We did that
well." Rosenbaum had a similar view. "It's a very sad thing," he said. "If you
wanted to know about an advance in the art of personal computing, you would
find it first in Byte. The thing that made it so important was that it was the
only magazine that wasn't about a single platform."
That editorial independence was particularly important, others said, in the
sticky world of computer publishing, where magazines cover the same companies
that they depend on for advertising. In discussing the announcement, CMP
officials preferred to concentrate on the "new audiences" the acquisition of
McGraw-Hill's technology group gives them. For $28.6 million, the company
acquired, along with Byte, three other technology publications -- Data
Communications, LAN Times and tele.com -- as well as a product testing lab,
giving CMP a subscriber base of 1.26 million.
John Dvorak, a columnist with PC Magazine, which competes with another CMP
publication, Windows magazine, said he was "baffled" by CMP's decision to
suspend Byte. "Did they see it as an enemy of Windows Magazine?" he asked. "I'm
sure that the people running Byte would have preferred pooling their resources
and buying the magazine themselves as a leveraged buyout. The sad thing is that
Byte is a symbolic and historic publication that should not have met with such
an ignominious finale. It's a crime."
Lisa Napoli at napoli@nytimes.com
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