In
March 1977
we announced our first international partnership: the new Far East Asian editions of BYTE Magazine. Read on:
BYTE Goes International
by Carl Helmers
Accompanying this editorial is a letter from an Australian reader, Kevin C Barnes of Five Dock, New South Wales. He's writing on the conditions of the small computer person in Australia circa September 1976. We held onto the letter until it was possible to announce an arrangement w
hich should help promote and build an indigenous small computer industry in Australia: the new Far East Asian editions of BYTE magazine.
When BYTE first began circulation, an electronics engineering consultant named John Bannister, a native of Sydney, Australia, subscribed nearly instantaneously when he heard about it from an American friend. But he soon ran into a problem which plagues all individuals on the end of a long international supply chain -- it takes time and patience to await BYTE (or any US goods, for that matter) in Australia, which is perhaps the extreme case for shipment of BYTE magazines to foreign subscribers. Not satisfied with waiting three months or so for the very current information we put out in BYTE each month, he started immediately to search for alternatives.
His first urge was to import BYTEs in sufficient quantity to sell to his neighbors in the Sydney area, thereby assuring (so the theory went) that he got them on a timely basis by way of a bulk shipment. With that in
mind, he figured that he'd send them air freight to his shop, then distribute them. Nice theory, but, in bulk it cost US $1.50 or more to ship each magazine by air -- so his bulk shipments ended up going on the same boats which carry the surface mail. (It costs nearly US $6 to send just one copy by air mail!) So much for that theory. After taking a bulk shipment of BYTE each month for several months, John hit upon another solotion to the problem: Maybe he could talk BYTE into printing locally for distribution in Australia. Shortly after that brainstorm struck, we got our first long distance phone call from John Bannister.
Phone calls from Australia are most interesting. You'd expect that a certain decay in quality would occur as the distance increases. But much to our surprise, the phone conversations with John, whether by cable, radio or satellite, often came through with a quality perhaps half an order of magnitude better than a simple transcontinental conversation with an advertiser in California! O
f course, for such calls, either one party or the other is bound to be half asleep, for the time differential is 11 hours between EST and the time zone which encompasses Sydney. At any rate, the first phone call was to explore the possibility of setting up a new Australian publishing house with John as the principal, whose purpose would be to print an Australian English language version of BYTE. Thus began a series of long distance negotiations, proposals, Telex messages and phone calls concerning the arrangements. Now that all the negotiating and arrangements have been crystalized into a signed contract, we can announce what has transpired.
Beginning with the January 1977 issue of BYTE magazine, two new editions will be published for readers in the more technologically sophisticated areas of Southeast Asia. One edition, in English, will be printed and distributed to subscribers in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines and other countries where readers of English are interested.
A second Asian edition will be translated into Japanese and distributed in Japan. The editorial content of both new editions will be identical (English edition) or identical semantically if different in detail (Japanese edition). For the first issues, the advertising copy will also he identical; but John's office in Sydney and his agent in Tokyo will solicit local advertising for these editions, while preserving the option for our US advertisers to reach these foreign markets.
Technologically, the arrangement is fairly simple. At the time we give the final OK to the negatives from which BYTE is printed each month, our printer, The George Banta Company of Menasha WI, will make duplicate copies of all the negatives, and send them to Sydney where John will modify the book to fit the local edition. Eventually this will include local advertising, local club and newsletter information, and possibly putting in new product information and related items of interest to local readers. The bulk of the material in t
he magazine will, however, remain identical to the US edition.
All our Australian, Japanese and Asian subscribers will be given the option of converting their subscriptions to the local edition which, due to its simultaneous publication, will be up to date as opposed to three months behind due to shipping delay.
Once it became apparent that we would be able to get together on this venture, John made the trip from Sydney to Peterborough NH via Lost Angeles. I call it Lost Angeles because the airline on which he was traveling managed to lose his luggage in the transfer. Arriving at Logan Airport, Boston (after neglecting to tell anybody what flight he was coming on), he was met by Debra "Sherlock" Boudrieau of BYTE, who in a feat of deductive reasoning and investigation, managed to pinpoint the flight and John Bannister, using only his one statement, "I'll be there at 8:30 tomorrow morning." As recounted later, it was a simple deduction: There was only one transcontinental flight out of Los Angeles
which arrived at Logan at 8:30 AM, and an Australian newly arrived is easy to spot: After an elapsed travel time of 22 hours with essentially no sleep, watch for the only person who is walking in a daze.
After initial greetings on arrival in Peterborough, John sacked out for about 15 hours, after which we began an intensive series of conferences on the details of publishing remotely, how to arrange shipment of the negatives, timing the monthly operation, etc. After a busy two days, I picked up John at midnight on December 1 and we spent the wee hours at my home and laboratory
discussing things
and comparing notes on the problems of computer enthusiasts in our respective countries. After I dropped him off back at the motel around 4 AM, we all showed up at the BYTE offices and took
the pictures
accompanying this editorial. Then, with the contract signed, Virginia and Manfred Peschke and John went to New York (by way of Boston) for a visit to
Scientific Ameri
can
(see acknowledgement) and some of the fabled surplus outlets which are reputed to still exist in that city. Manfred and Virginia finally saw John off to Australia from New York and returned to Peterborough that weekend.
One of the details of the Australian arrangement is a surprise and delight to Deborah Luhrs, who has been with BYTE nearly from the beginning. In order to assure a bit of experience, as far as handling subscriber orders and managing an office is concerned, John thought it a good idea to take up a suggestion which Virginia made: that Debbie should travel to Australia for a few months to help set up the office of the new firm, BYTE Publications [Austr/Japan] Pty. Ltd. Although Debbie left today (December 6, 1976) as this editorial is being written, she still doesn't quite believe that it's all really happening!
Who is John Bannister, our new "Affiliate Publisher -- Southeast Asian Editions"? John is a man of considerable experience in the Australian electronics industry, in
the Sydney area. He became interested in small scale data processing systems following Don Lancaster's original TV typewriter articles in Radio Electronics and the later articles by Jonathan Titus and company on the Mark-8 processor in that same publication. His assistant in business operations (bookkeeping and moral support department) is his wife Pamela, and he's well aware of the possibilities for using personal computers in the education of his two preschool age children. He's convinced (as are we) that it is just a matter of time until the revolution of personal computing we've seen in this country finally reaches his own country and Japan -- to say nothing of the other technologically oriented countries of the world.
And now, The Letter: Are Logic States Inverted Down Under?
Here are just a few notes that might be of interest to your readers about conditions in Australia. Interest in computing is just about to happen down here. Both
national electronics magazines,
Electronics Australia
and
Electronics Today International
have just (July 1976 issue) started to talk about microprocessors. They have started by reviewing the different evaluation boards available. But neither magazine has published any construction articles as yet on microprocessor based microcomputers. (EA did design and publish an 8 bit processor back in the end of 1974 and beginning of 1975, but it was a serial processor which did not gain the popularity of the present microprocessor systems. That processor, the EDUC-8, was built using TTL MSI and SSI chips and had a limited memory of 256 locations. In fact EA was beaten to the honor of being the first to publish a computer plan by only a few weeks by Radio Electronics' publication of the Mark 8.)
Commercial interests now have a number of American designed and built systems offered for sale, but unfortunately these people do not yet carry much stock. MITS equipment is offered down here by a company
called WHK of Melbourne, and the proprietor has published a rather impressive catalog with all the MITS hardware and software listed. JOLT is also being advertised as well, although mainly through the trade journals. EPA's Micro 68 also has been offered for sale and the agent has at least one in stock which he is willing to lend to people to look at and play with.
I and three other people have formed a small club and have three systems operating, using the 6800, 8080 and the SC/MP chips. They have been built around evaluation boards. We also have an ASR-33 and ASR-38 Teletype and our big project at the moment is a floppy disk. Our small project of the moment is a PROM programmer to program 1702s. In my conversations with various integrated circuit manufacturing company representatives, I've gained information that a good proportion of the sales here have been to individuals, not companies, and that many boards bought by companies have been for individuals within the companies and not for particular co
mpany projects [
standard practice in the US, too...
CH
).
Also very annoying is the rather high price markup on the hardware by the time it reaches Australia. The Intel 8080 Microprocessor System User's Manual for instance has sold for $20 even though it is marked $5, while the Altair 8800A sells for $619 Australian ($1740 US currently) for the basic kit with no extra boards. Well, I hope this has been of interest.
Kevin C Barnes 71 Barnstaple Rd
Five Dock
New South Wales 2046 AUSTRALIA
Thanks for your comments, Kevin. By the time this letter is in print, it will be part of the third issue of our new Australian English language edition of BYTE, so with any luck you'll soon start to find some increases in personal computing activity in your vicinity. Until there is local manufacture, there is no way you can beat the price penalty, as nearly as I can project: Shipping costs time and money. When a product is dear, whether through
distance or natural scarcity, Adam Smith and Co long ago predicted the price would rise. I understand from John Bannister, however, that at least you don't have to pay an exorbitant import tariff as our Canadian friends do.
A Note of Thanks to Scientific American
We at BYTE wish to thank David Trussell of
Scientific American
for taking time out of a busy schedule to meet with Virginia and Manfred Peschke and John Bannister of BYTE to discuss some of the problems and pitfalls of publishing foreign language editions of magazines. With the Japanese language edition of BYTE we begin our first such version in translation, and it proved quite helpful to us to have a bit of informal and friendly advice from people experienced in that endeavor.
We also learned that
Scientific American
, which is printed on extremely high quality paper, has lately been having trouble procuring supplies. The paper is necessary to
achieve good reproduction of the color images which are so characteristic of their product. Who could possibly be eating up all the good quality paper? It turns out that there is a hot competition between
Scientific American
,
Oui
and
Penthouse
to see who can buy all the special paper. This quality magazine is being skinned alive!
photo_link (113 Kbytes)
photo_link (110 Kbytes)
A BYTE family portrait, circa December 1976. Clockwise from top left are Manfred Peschke, Virginia Peschke, John Bannister and Carl Helmers. (
Note:
the reader probably suspects that all those impressive looking books in the background are the world's greatest collection of computer tomes. While they do indeed look impressive, they'd really only impress a farmer since they contain the genealogical records and trivia of the Guernsey cow breed.)
photo_link (118 Kbytes)
John Bannister (left) and Carl Helmers discussing the problems of translating BYTE into Japanese, while perusing the Japanese edition of Scientific American, December 1976. It turns out that translators do some interesting things. For example, in the translated version of an article by an author with a name of, for example, "Lane," the initials stay in Roman characters, but the surname -- since it has a generic equivalent in Japanese script -- is translated. But if the surname has no immediately identifiable generic root or equivalent, it remains in English spelling as do technical terms with no direct equivalent.
20 Years Ago in BYTE
