Jerry Pournelle, Byte, Python, and Python in a Nutshell

[Bruce Hoult]

In article <mailman.1052516656.19719.python-list at python.org>,
 Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote:

>     >> Yup. Byte stopped being a good magazine when the schematics and
>     >> circuit board layouts disappeared.
> 
>     gus> Why did that happen?
> 
> My guess is approximately when the IBM-PC was released.  Not because you
> couldn't open them up and fiddle around - many people did - but because the
> market changed so dramatically.  Suddenly, lots of people who didn't know a
> soldering iron from a hole in the wall had personal computers, where
> previously the personal computer market was dominated by hobbyists.  Those
> people were more corporate and less hacker-oriented that the early adopters.

I disagree.

The IBM PC was released in October 1981, but BYTE didn't become sh*t 
until around 1988 or 1990.  In fact much of their best work was well 
after the PC was released e.g. the comparisons of PC vs Mac vs Amiga vs 
Atari ST, or the reviews of programming languages such as Smalltalk.

-- Bruce