Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Inside the Box Still Counts

There are many readers who are familiar with the statement, "Inside the box still counts" and understand its history.If you are a new subscriber, I'll give you a hint. Circuit Cellar started 15 years ago with exactly these words on the front cover. Although not as historically significant as Patrick Henry's eighteenth-century "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" speech, it was a declaration of independence nonetheless.

The year was 1987, and as most of you know, I was writing for BYTE at the time. Depending on which floor you were standing on at McGraw-Hill, I was viewed either as the best marketing attraction they had or their worst nightmare. The reason was pretty straightforward and entirely political. Without sounding too egotistical, my project articles were the reason many readers subscribed, and I had a loyal following. McGraw-Hill didn't have to spend a lot of money getting these people to renew their subscriptions. Unfortunately, my hands-on projects such as an in-circuit debugger, a brain-wave analyzer, and a programmable infrared remote control didn't fit their new redirected corporate interest in the PC.

When I say "interest," I say it with a smile. I doubt they had any more understanding of the PC than they had of my projects. What they did see, however, was the IBM PC market expanding and many new magazines jumping on the gravy train. Rather than create a new publication to specifically address PC interests, they decided to refocus BYTE from being a general computer design and technology magazine into a competitive clone of PC Magazine. They essentially told 450,000 readers that, like some U.S. senators, they had switched parties.

When the change happened, it was like flipping a switch. I was still under contract but I could see the writing on the wall, or bits in the ether. Anything non-PC was viewed as "the old discipline," and anything PC was the new religion. They didn't say, "here's some money, now go away," so I just continued doing my thing for the next year. If you look back at the '87 and '88 issues, you'll see that there were some really fantastic projects, even an AT clone and a Mandelbrot generator containing 64 parallel processors. I guess I wanted to leave with a bang!

In all fairness, I have to say that McGraw-Hill did make me an offer to stay. Provided I only covered PC-oriented subjects, wrote hardware reviews for advertiser's products, and did it all for 50% less, I could stay. Needless to say, I'm not one who caves under pressure, and I thought that contributing to the collective insanity was masochistic.

A few other noble BYTE patriots agreed that going down with the ship makes sense for national defense but not corporate ambition, so they joined with me to start Circuit Cellar INK-Microcomputer Applications. This was before the technical world was freely using the term "embedded control" to describe our focus; however, we all knew what we were trying to say. The first issue's simple title "Inside the Box Still Counts," said it all.

BYTE's search for the pot of PC gold at the end of the rainbow is history. Everyone knows they failed, but I take no special pleasure in saying they're gone while I'm still here. They failed not because they refocused on the PC, but because they never succeeded in focusing on it enough. In other words, they never quite got it right and readers lost the feeling that seeking excellence was BYTE's highest priority.

We've been around for 15 years now and I think we've done a good job of making sure you know that the quality of the content is paramount to us. Perhaps it's because I have firsthand experience seeing what losing focus can do to a magazine, I take special care to make sure we maintain ours. We've changed the intensity of presentation over the years, but we've also endeavored to remain an authoritative applications resource. And, unless I've been in a fog for a pile of years, Circuit Cellar is still aimed directly at embedded control. We started a magazine because we felt that our expertise and interests were being abandoned by people in search of a pot of gold. Today, we know that our little corner of the computing world is bigger than all of the PCs put together and worth its own pot of gold. Back then we didn't really know enough to call it embedded control. We just knew that we had to tell people that what's inside the box still counts.

steve.ciarcia@circuitcellar.com

Published: January-2003