As presaged in March 1993

In March of 1993 I was weeks away from graduating high school. At the time my primary computer was an aged Commodore 64C with a 2400 baud modem¹ that I used to connect to Baltimore-area BBSes. While it was another year or so before I had direct access to the internet, I did have an email address and Usenet access through a local TriBBS instance² in 1993. With this context in mind, I’ll look back at the Byte Magazine issue from March 1993 and see if an older, wiser me has anything interesting to say about it.

Byte Magazine, March 1993

The cover story for the March 1993 issue of Byte was about “Smarter Email” and how it was going to change the way that I worked. At the time I worked at Sam Goody, so almost certainly it would not have changed the way that I worked. Regardless, the article was written for a majority audience that almost certainly didn’t have access to email at the time,³ so much of the article is setting context. Email was viewed as an exciting way to super-power a company’s workflows and it’s interesting as a curiosity to read the thoughts around these possibilities in 2026. That said, there are a few more interesting tidbits in the magazine that are more compelling from the future.

First, there is a very brief blurb about some promising experiments occurring around “rechargeable lithium ion batteries”. At the time “portable” computers were chonky boyz and so any tech advances that could alleviate shoulder strain was welcome. As it turns out, lithium-ion batteries power nearly every piece of tech moving around with us today.

Continuing with the news that warranted a mere blurb, the magazine briefly talks about how Intel might feel some pressure from an upstart named AMD in the “coming years.” At the time AMD was merely a manufacturer of clones, and to think that any company could supplant Intel was foolish thinking. In the intervening years Intel has been driven to the brink and has stabilized as one of the players in the CPU market along with AMD, ARM, Apple, etc.

A much larger article (one whole page!) addressing the potential for the growth of the computing industry in India is fascinating given the powerhouse that it has become. It’s hard to get an appreciation for how the industry at large would have viewed India based solely on this single page, but I can remember a time not long after 1993 that the country was viewed as a hub for outsourcing, help-desk, Y2K cleanup, and maybe maintenance. The “cost-effectiveness” view of India in the 1990s was so narrow as to be glaucomatous.

There’s a positive short review of a CD-ROM called “The Compleat AI” that contained source code for an early LLM called “ELIZA”,⁴ alife programs, and expert systems. I’ve searched around for an archive of this CD, but have not been able to find it. This must’ve been among the earliest CD-ROM reviews since a complete “Under the Hood” article about CD-ROMs was published in the same issue. The year 1993 was deep in the “AI winter” that hit after the first AI hype-cycle of my lifetime. Although I was fortunate enough to work in AI shops during the early 2000s, the second hype-cycle wouldn’t hit until the deep learning “revolution” of the 2010s.

With the help of hindsight, the March 1993 Byte was quite prescient, although at the time nothing in it would have had any direct impact on my life at the time. Looking back, there’s a lot of the “lost future” in the issue, but not quite to the degree that I would have expected. Most of the articles seem so mundane in hindsight, but in reality we’ve basically been iterating on batteries and communication channels ever since. We’ve spent thirty years optimizing the plumbing of 1993, proving that “cutting edge” is often just a very long, very quiet refinement of the mundane.

:F

note: The 1995 edition of the aforementioned AI CD-ROM is online at https://github.com/fortikeco/AI-cdrom-r3. Thanks to my Discord friend PileOfJunkMail for pointing me to this.