My inspiration

Front cover of Byte Magazine for February 1984, featuring a picture of the new Macintosh computer
Front cover of Byte Magazine for February 1984

I’m not a geek. I missed the boat. When I left school they’d just acquired a computer. It was a mysterious, chattering presence in a room in the maths department – a teletype connected to a mainframe somewhere – and I never met it.

But when I first encountered a computer – in a roomful of brand new Macs at the Polytechnic of Central London in 1985 – and set about learning about them, I beetled off to one of those Soho newsagents that still set my heart racing, with their rows and rows of thrilling imported titles, and looked in the computer section. The magazine I settled on and made my bible was called Byte – the small systems journal.

Byte was recklessly terminated in 1998. I still miss it. It was a quite awesome monthly crash course in IT – a kind of undergraduate degree in magazine form. Long, gripping articles about chip design, network architecture, software and AI. I owe more to Byte than to any other source of knowledge about computers.

Byte, which for most of its life was published by McGraw Hill, was no web pioneer. In fact, for a while, during all the really early frenzy (during which I helped publish a magazine that was all about the web), Byte was almost a holiday from the Internet – a place you could go to read about VLSI chips and ethernet while the rest of the world was going web crazy. When they decided to have a go, they did it in a very Byte way, though.

They put a man called Jon Udell on the case – he was a staff writer and he was given the job of building the magazine’s web presence and documenting the process month-by-month for readers. He brought the whole thing to life with a really forensic attitude to the emerging tools – and invented a bunch of new ones along the way. These days he works at Microsoft and he’s an influential geek with an interest in all sorts of developing areas – and his ‘interviews with innovators’ are published as part of the IT Conversations podcast.

But this one’s a bit different – a rather modest, one-hour conference speech about ‘the architecture of context’, in which he lays out his own, partial history of the net and remembers some of the lessons he learnt in the Byte days. Fascinating and inspiring.

[Sad to say the MP3 mentioned below seems to have gone]

The MP3 is from the IT Conversations podcast. Definitely worth signing up.

Phil Gyford has done a wonderful thing

He’s stretched the weblog model to accommodate a day-at-a-time presentation of an 1893 edition of Pepys’ diary. There’ll be a new beautifully annotated and cross-referenced entry every day and there’s enough background information and context to keep anybody interested in Pepys, London or the period happy. It’s a brilliant application of Movable Type and really does illuminate the text – readers can further annotate the text by adding comments. I hope the historians and biographers are paying attention – this is a twist on conventional historiography that could change the rules completely. Phil writes about the project at his own weblog. “I’m looking forward to reading it myself, and I thought this would be a good way to have lots of people read it with me” he says, disarmingly.

Previewing books

The thing with book reviews is you’re supposed to wait until you’ve finished reading the book before you review it but anyway – the latest big book to land here is Peter Spufford’s Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe – a big, beautiful survey of economics, trade, infrastructure, manufacture and custom in the middle ages – all the stuff that came together to make what we now call capitalism.

Making of the Macintosh

I’ve used and owned Macs since 1985. Although they’re pretty hip again these days (after a miserable decade or so of grim, beige things), the core of the Mac userbase is like me: old gits with hair growing out of their ears. We’re stuck in our ways and we can’t change now so that’s that. The nice people at Stanford University Library are attempting a proper history of the machine’s early days (as part of a larger project documenting Silicon Valley itself). There’s some genuinely fascinating material here – memos, early sketches, engineering drawings, first person recollections. Thanks to LinkMachineGo for linking to The Making of Macintosh. Incidentally, I learn that, over the years, I’ve owned five of the Ten Worst Macs Ever. I’m selling two of them: an ugly all-in-one Performa 5320 and a lamentably underpowered IIvx, in case you’re interested.