Those of us who remember when microprocessors were young also recall the magazines of the era. Readers bought the magazine for content but the covers attracted attention on the newsstand. In the late 70s until the early 90s the competition was fierce, so great covers were mandatory. The covers of Byte magazine created by [Robert Tinney] were detailed, colorful, and always interesting.
[Bob Alexander] of Galactic Studios recreated one of those hand drawn covers using photographic techniques. The cover shows a steam engine, tender and caboose rolling along the traces on a PC board amidst a landscape populated by resistors, capacitors, and integrated circuits. The photographic clone recreates that image using all real components, including an HO train. The circuit, unfortunately, isn’t of a working device.
Creating this work followed all the normal hacking steps for a PC board: a mockup of the layout, designing the board, and ordering it from China. Component procurement was sometimes a hassle since some are no longer in production. The components that weren’t found on EBay were hacked.
The only image manipulation involved the HO train. It was much larger than the PC board so could not be put in place for the photo. Images of the PC board and the train were merged using software. Also added were smoke rings puffing out of the locomotive’s smokestack.
The photo is a worthy recreation of [Tinney’s] original.
For more trainy goodness, check out our own Brian Benchoff’s tour of the Siemens Model Train Club. Or for further photo-realistic modelling, have a look at this insanely detailed Ford pickup model.
Very well done!
I remember as a kid looking forward to new issues of BYTE magazine, mostly for the BASIC programs within. I didn’t have money enough for a subscription, so I usually borrowed the magazine from other people. Much of what I learned about programming came from BYTE and other magazines from the early years of home computing.
Thank you, Rud, for this article. Like, DainBramage, I recall those wonderful Byte covers fondly although I was in college when I received my copy with the train on it. Wish I had kept all those magazines. I knew very little about computers at the time, but my new parents-in-law bought me a Byte subscription for my birthday and I read it cover to cover each month. I kept my subscription until they folded the magazine many, many years later. By the end of that first year or reading the magazine, I knew far more about computers than most of my Engineering friends at school.
Your story brought back wonderful memories on this Thanksgiving day. Thank you!
So THATS how electronics works, it’s all tiny trains!
So that’s where the magic smoke comes from when something breaks.
Yup. And when the tiny trains collide, the magic smoke gets out.
Tinney did one or two other covers that showed little people inside the PC (e.g. https://labmaster.com/archives/byte/cover/byte_nov83_150dpi.jpg). So the question of how computers work remains unresolved.
And the tiny trains load up 0’s and 1’s into their cargo and baggage cars to carry through the intertube train tunnels.
Actually, that’s incorrect. They use a bus – not a train.
I still have that issue along with many others of the era when they were doing those great covers.
It is a very cool image, but it would have been slicker to reproduce it with SMD parts now that we are in the 21st century. And maybe replace the train with a drone :)
…in hackaday comic style?
It would be cute if the smoke was 1’s and 0’s.
+1
Dr Dobbs was also right up there on readership, although no where as slick, especially at the start.
That would be TOTALLY awesome if the train were really on the board. I may have to try my hand at hand-making one of my own!
If you’re skilled at making miniatures, that would be a great project. The other possibility I had considered was to build large models of the components.
lol… except that that would be a very large model… a very IMPRESSIVE model, but very large nevertheless. If you ever do an HO scale very, I would LOVE to see that!
With an N scale train it could have been set on the board.
I thought about using N scale. But the train would’ve been much larger than the components, and that wasn’t the effect I was looking for.
Where could you find a 41ohm blue band resistor? Should have been 39ohm, not 56k.
I’ve 3 years of Byte hiding somewhere.
LOL, I was going to say the same thing.
Great Pic !!
My top priority was getting one of those old brown cylindrical resistors. Matching the ohms in Tinney’s painting was very low priority – especially since Tinney appears to have thrown in a couple of extra color bands for artistic reasons.
Nicely done! Great picture :)
Only comment, it’s not HO but H0 (with a 0, from Half 0) ;)
Sigh. Byte magazine really felt like the bleeding edge of “small systems” back in the 70s. Can’t bear to part with these early ones.
I came an archive of old Byte covers that really brought it all back: http://aliensgrin.com/2014/12/31/byte-magazine-cover-archive/
A good post thanks for that, BYTE was a quality magazine I enjoyed reading it her in the UK and latter on bought Steve Ciacia’s Circuit Cellar when he left BYTE..obviously it was going down hill by then ..Good days .Thanks
Brings back memories. I had byte mags going back to first year, built my first computer from scratch using them. But when moving 20+ years ago my wife talked me into dumping them except for a few. Now with the internet and the likes of hackaday byte is not needed but missed.
This reminds me of the old JDR catalogs. I used to love those JUST because of the art work on the covers. I kept a lot of those just because the artwork was so cool!
I’ve done another re-creation of a Robert Tinney Byte magazine cover as a photograph. This time it’s “Chip Building”, which showed a man with a jackhammer chiseling out an integrated circuit. You can see it at http://www.galacticstudios.org/recreating-another-byte-magazine-cover-as-a-photograph/
Some people have asked about buying prints of this photo re-creation of Byte magazine’s Computer Engineering cover. I have now gotten written permission from Robert Tinney to sell prints of this and of another Byte cover I re-created (Chip Building, with a microprocessor being chiseled out by a guy with a jackhammer). You can get them from ByteCovers.com.