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.
It became just another MS-DOS rag. In the early days it covered EVERYTHING, all ISAs, all programming languages (very famous Lips and Forth and Smalltalk issues, for example).
Yes, its fascinating that it went where the market was driven - by the markets hooks in its own advertising pages - and in that capacity, BYTE became a driving force for the early computing revolution not just (but also because of) the readership, but also their advertisers - inasmuch as that revolution could be defined as "wide adoption of new and emerging technologies to form a standard" - BYTE started as a user manual and ended its existence as a catalog of things with user manuals.
Probably, if one thinks about it, one of the more eloquent data structures in human existence, BYTE.
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.