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Byte (magazine)

lastmod 2025-08-28created 2025-08-282 edits

Byte (or BYTE) was a microcomputer magazine, influential in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage.

Byte was started in 1975, shortly after the first personal computers appeared as kits advertised in the back of electronics magazines. Byte was published monthly, with an initial annual subscription price of $10. Whereas many magazines covered a specific system or the perspective of home or business users, Byte covered developments in the entire field of "small computers and software," and sometimes other computing fields such as supercomputers and high-reliability computing. Its coverage was in-depth, including technical details rather than being user-oriented.

The company was acquired by McGraw-Hill in 1979, a watershed that led to most of the early computer magazines quickly being bought up by large publishers. Around this time the magazine took on the air of a more serious journal and began calling itself "the small systems journal." It became an influential publication. In 1981, Byte was chosen as the medium Xerox PARC used to promote Smalltalk.

Like many general-interest magazines, Byte struggled with declining advertising revenue in the 1990s. McGraw-Hill's publishing division was sold to CMP Media in May 1998, and the new owner immediately laid off almost everyone in the magazine division and ended publication with the already completed July issue. The associated website continued to draw 600,000 page views a month, and the owner relaunched the magazine in a purely online format in 1999. The magazine continued as an online publication until it was shut down in 2009, but was revived again in 2011. It was then shut down for good in 2013.

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