Publishing

Byte High, No Limit goes monthly

I’ve retroactively decided to return the Byte High, No Limit blog to a regular cadence. For the first two and a half years of its run, I published a new article every Thursday. But other pressures on my time meant that eventually became unsustainable. Last year, after I ended weekly publishing halfway through the year, I published four more articles for a total of 30. I think one a month is probably doable, not least because that’s the cadence many YouTubers who used to release new videos every week have now moved to. And quality videos are a lot more work than this. So this year, new articles will appear on the last Thursday of the month.

Retro spotlight: Teresa Maughan and videogame magazines

In 1983 Teresa Maughan graduated from the University of Reading with a bachelor of science honors degree in Psychology and Zoology. She wanted to work in television, but she ended up becoming one of the most significant contributors to the UK magazine publishing industry, in particular in computers and video games.

Not the end

Today is the two and a half year anniversary of this blog. That’s one article a week over the last 130 weeks. I always intended to scale back the amount of time I spent on the blog this year. But it’s become apparent that even with the plans I had in place to make life easier for me, this level of output has become unsustainable.

Adobe at 40: impact and alternatives

Adobe is 40 years old this month. Founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke both previously worked at Xerox PARC, where desktop publishing (DTP) was first developed. Adobe’s first product was the PostScript page description language. In March 1985 Apple began selling the first laser printer with PostScript support. In the following July, Aldus released its PageMaker DTP software for the Macintosh. Then in 1986, Eddy Shah launched Today, the UK’s first computer photo-typeset and full-color offset printed newspaper. Every other newspaper in the world rapidly adopted the technology. In 2022, the Saguache Crescent is the last remaining newspaper using the old technology, and its Linotype press is over 100 years old.

A tech industry blog

When I started writing this blog in 2022, I didn’t even have a name for it. It was just called Dev Blog. But it occurred to me that the magazine title that I had parked for future use, “Byte High, No Limit” would be ideal. And in fact, I’m going to combine selected articles into a magazine format (partly to keep my hand in with page layout, and partly to learn how to use Affinity Publisher).