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

[Skip Montanaro]

    >> 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 worked at Lawrence Livermore Lab about that time.  One of my coworkers
(maybe it was my boss) at the time said something like, "If I was smart, I'd
quit and start writing software for PCs.  That's where the money will be."
I believe LLNL considered plans (I don't know if they followed through) to
stock IBM-PCs as commodity items so it wouldn't be much more difficult to by
a PC than an Erlenmeyer flask.

Byte just followed the money.  The available ad dollars were clearly
following the IBM-PC, so Byte had little choice but to point their editorial
content in that direction as well.  They then entered a different market
(the commodity PC magazine market) which they couldn't dominate the way they
had dominated their original market.

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