From 1988-91, I was a volunteer teacher in Africa. I lived in a hut without running water or electricity, and I had a subscription to Byte.

There was also almost nothing to read, so when my monthly issue of Byte appeared (2-3 months later than most people would receive it), I devoured that thing. I would read it literally cover to cover, including all those ads, several times.

I wasn't (then) working in IT, so a lot of the content (like Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar) went way over my head but it didn't matter, I read it anyway, often by the light of my kerosene lantern. I learned a huge amount: object-oriented programming, this new thing called the Internet (capitalized back then, and before the WWW), and how Jerry Pournelle was a self-important jerk (but boy, did I envy the toys he got to play with!).

This was the age of big, fold-out Gateway 2000 ads, 20MB hard drives, and Turbo Pascal kicking other compilers' butts.

I would read the magazine, then write out programs (in BASIC, the only language I had learned at that point). On my monthly trips to the capital city I would go to a local NGO and in exchange for helping with their IT issues they would let me play (i.e type out my programs and try to get them working) on their computers.

My mom was teaching CS in the early 80s, and subscribed to Byte. The ads were of little use for me, as I had zero money, but of course I flipped through them anyway.

I devoured Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar and I think it was one of the main influences on my career, along with Goedel, Escher, Bach.

I discovered Digi-Key in the ads. That's kind of life-changing when all you had access to was Radio Shack. You can tell someone's age from the thickness of their first Digi-Key catalog. It was like only 30 or 40 pages, mostly chips, sockets, and some wiring tools.

At the time, there were two primary alternatives for buying a computer. The first was a computer store. The second was buying an issue of Byte or a competing publication called Computer Shopper that was 100% ads. When I was in grad school, students would share a single copy of Computer Shopper and debate the best choices of parts to assemble for a new machine. Virtually all were MS-DOS based.

Those ads were the only way to actually know what software and hardware was available to buy, including information related to "open source of the day", shareware, PD,...

Access to BBS was super expensive unless you were lucky to afford a modem, and live on local call distance.

European magazine like Computer Shopper were of similar size and ads ratio.

For me, it was basically a catalogue. The ads weren't annoying, they were the whole point, even more so than the articles themselves!

That's how you know what the industry was doing, and if you want to buy new hardware, these magazines were the main source of information.

Maybe ironically, for better independent content, as in actual articles rather than ads, hobbyist and video game magazines did better. There was a time where video game magazines taught you about programming! If anything, by having you copy lines of BASIC because there was no digital support available.

In Finland, we make an independent computer magazine called Skrolli that comes out 4 times per year. Our issues are about 120 pages each, but with hardly any ads.

Although before the Web, ads in specialist magazines weren't just annoyances -- they were half the point of the magazine as there was no other way to find out what was out there to buy. A bit later than BYTE was Computer Shopper (which did have articles to keep it legally a magazine), whose whole purpose was to have ads!

As a kid who was interested in stuff like this in the 90s, the ads were part of the enjoyment for me. You could look at components, have rounds-to-zero idea what they did but let your imagination soar at the possibility of stringing them together into something new.

Looking at it today what I notice is that the ads and the content were disjoint. The ads were heavily for high-end microcomputers often running CP/M and the S-100 bus often in multiprocessor and multiuser configurations often with exotic graphic systems for the time, like you see these guys

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco [1]

prominently. That stuff was barely talked about in the editorial which was much more about ‘home computers’ like Apple and TRS-80 and Atari and TI up to 1983 or so. Up until then there were a few good ‘computer magazines’ like Creative Computing [2] that were platform agnostic but around that time they started to become more specific to platforms like I was subscribing to Rainbow for my color computer and there were a lot of mags for the C-64 [3] and emerging for the IBM PC and clones. Byte got more focused on the PC and low end CP/M machines with a little interest in high-end workstations and also 68k computers like Mac an Amiga… but just a little.

By the late 1980s the cool kids (some of those “kids” were adults) were already online on BBSes and you didn’t need magazines to keep up with free and ‘free’ (pirate) software. I think computer magazines were struggling, the PC kept growing. Computer Shopper became dominant because boy you could find good deals in it. Then the WWW came along and computer magazines were obsolete overnight.

[1] I saw plenty of PDP-11s and other minicomputers but never saw a high end microcomputer of that era outside the pages of Byte…. But somebody bought them.

[2] loved it at the time but it doesn’t have the staying power of Byte, there is a lab in the EE building next door donated by David Ahl who founded Creative Computing, some issues of CC in the 1978-1979 period are wild.

[3] the c-64 was a huge hit in terms of third party software and having friends who had them, but I don’t think it was talked about in Byte like other home computers because Byte was going upmarket then.

I hope people focus on the nature of the ads as much as the impressive quantity of them. The extent to which quality software and hardware was expensive is probably the main thing people should appreciate. The thing that always strikes me is how long the z80 held on as a thing people would pay for.

There came a point for me in the 90's, I think, where BYTE kind of jumped the shark - it became THICK, but not informative - where there was just so much advertising. In those days, even the ads could be informative, but it seemed that as BYTE struggled to be relevant, it became thicker and thicker - pretty much guaranteeing its own demise.

I still value a massive collection when I see it, in atomic form, in the real universe of course - but my personal reading of the .PDF archive is usually focused more on its early years - which just seems so much more pioneering/adventurous.

Ads back then were entertaining. I actually sometimes went to archive just to read those Ads instead of articles.

I didn't realise what you meant until looking at this

https://archive.org/details/PcWorld2010

The difference in amount ads is really insane...

Computer Shopper in the UK was a lot like that back in the 80s and 90s: just a massive wedge of a magazine where the vast majority of pages were ads.

The classified/small ads section alone was enormous. And then you’d have companies that sold computer components include huge swathes of their catalogues and price lists in multi-page adverts. Would have been a real boon for system builders, but I didn’t have the cash back then. I was still in the world of 8-bit micros and 16-bit machines.

I found that the ads in those magazines were also informative. not unbiased, but a good introduction to new products.

Most trade magazines of that era were pretty similar in size and number of ads , eg. PC Magazine. Pre-Internet they were one of the only ways to keep up with industry news, topics and products.

It was also rather eclectic in a way that later magazines like PC Magazine weren't (even if PC Mag did still have features like assembly programming columns).

I certainly can't think of any magazines remotely like the big computer mags today. Taken to the extreme of Computer Shopper, no one is buying a magazine in large part for the ads today.

But those are nice ads. Nowadays you get tons of these low/effort-AI-generated ads in YT. They suck big time.

I missed the heyday of reading Byte in vivo as it came out, but the creativity of the covers always stood out. The artist had to come up with a concept, paint it, and get it all ready within a month. As a non-creative, that’s an impressive achievement.

RE ".... It's a massive book like magazine....."

NO Internet back then.

People still had a massive thirst for information. Even the ads where interesting and read by many to learn more ....

The huge volume of advertisements was common for most magazines in this genre. In the UK this led to an interesting pricing / tax issue.

Value Added Tax is a tax putatively on, as the name suggests the value you've added. For a consumer you don't care whether you paid £15 for this product because it was £10 plus 50% VAT, or it was £15 with zero VAT, that's the same to you, and so the law says the advertiser can't say that's a £10 product even if there is 50% VAT, 'cos consumers can't buy it for £10, so you're lying to them.

However, if you're selling products for businesses, they're going to claim back the VAT on inputs to their business, only the added value gets taxed and that's implemented by charging the tax on their sales and allowing them to claim back the tax they paid for inputs. As a result it is allowed in that context to display the explicitly without VAT prices, your buyers potentially won't pay that tax anyway. So for a business you can say it's a £10 product.

The question in these magazines was: Are the products for businesses, or, are you actually selling to the hobbyists who often buy the magazine. You obviously want to advertise the lower prices with just an asterisk leading to a disclaimer about VAT to be paid, but if in reality most customers are hobbyists they're all paying VAT so maybe you're breaking the law by advertising the lower price?

Actual adverts definitely varied in how plausible the two categories of buyer were. How many businesses need to buy this slightly nicer Joystick for the Commodore 64? On the other hand, what hobbyist needs to buy hundreds or thousands of 10MB hard disks or SIMMs (yes the DIMM's predecessor was named the SIMM) for a discounted volume price ?

Red Herring was like that at the height of the dot com era. There were certain issues that were 600 pages long, although half of them were ads.

Ads that's are directly paid for, curated by properly incentivized humans, and don't have spyware built into them, are actually sought after by consumers. I used to spend hours staring at them, by choice. I probably still would today, if such things existed.

I loved the ads. Some of them were quite risqué too.

I had a friend in college who bought Computer Shopper just for the ads. He built and upgraded his PCs. Back then the price of everything would drop by the month and new processors could double your performance.