Well, amazing job of capturing the early experience in one magazine. It felt like an old Dragon or even a Byte magazine because I looked at every ad. It still amazes me how the ads in some magazines with amazing articles are welcome and the web still hasn't gotten it right.
You just named two of my favorite magazines growing up. I used to send in those "reply cards" that Byte magazine had, and I'd actually go through and circle all the numbers for ads on the card that I was interested in.
I think ads work in magazines like that because they're for audiences with specialized interests, and because a magazine ad isn't as intrusive, and hopefully doesn't get in the way of reading.
We do a PDF version of the magazine as well, but I'm trying to think about what else we can do to keep it relevant for people that don't read those formats.
In those days, the ads were an integral part of the experience and actually _added_ to the value of the magazines. I was also an avid reader of "Byte" and "Dragon". I have several years' worth of Dragons from the 1980s, and was lucky enough to score a copy of the CD compendium during the short window it was available... and of course old issue of "Byte" magazine can be found on archive.org.
And of course, both magazines featured wonderful cover art. "Dragon" had a huge variety of artists and featured some really unforgettable pieces and Byte often featured Robert Tinney who perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the computer revolution with his simple, clean, but imaginative artwork.
Since I decided to visit the site based on your comment, I figure you might want to look at optimizing the image on the front page - it's a ~670k PNG that took 12 seconds to download...
