When you hear current Apple developers and pundits, of a certain age, talk about "the old days" and being connected to Apple, this is an example of what they mean.
The computer trade magazine Byte was written, edited and compiled at least four weeks before it was printed and mailed out - the so-called lead time. So instant feedback was impossible (hard to believe in the current climate) and no-one really expected instant - but Byte decided to offer a way for Amiga, Atari, IBM, S-100, Mac or Apple // users to ask questions and get answers*.
"Talk" to your east coast, west coast - even European - contacts all in the same day.
Byte created a text-only Bulletin Board System (BBS)-style site called the Byte Information Exchange, or BIX for short, and soon enough there were hundreds of queries, complaints, observations and so on. Each month, the 'best of' BIX' was published in the paper magazine and it was not unusual to see Apple engineers responding as themselves. Not from an anonymous 'support' address.
Having researched the amazing Apple //GS for my book, I still find it amazing when I see the same names of people like Rich Williams, chatting with new or potential buyers. Rich started at Cupertino when the company head-count was 250!, so when he wrote this, eight years after starting at Apple, he was probably pretty busy. There's also Robin Moore, senior h/w engineer who built the Mega II which was a single-chip version of the core components of the Apple IIe computer, and John Worthington, senior ss/w and firmware engineer, who created the MIDI Manager, making one-to-one connections.
At times the questioner on BIX was a developer. Chris Crawford, in this case, knew a thing or two about the Macintosh and gaming. Tap that name into Wikipedia.
To be part of a //GS conversation, all you needed to do was, "...log on to BIX. type join apple. and then join the first topic with 'GS' somewhere in its name."
It's obviously an era that is long gone. I guess one-to-one contact wasn't scaleable? At some point in time, Apple's analytics and data 'knew' what devs and punters wanted? But I wonder. If the non-BIX approach works, how come so many current developers (2025) have lost faith with Apple. Why do they feel unheard and under-appreciated. All the while still adding value to Apple's bottom line.
So.
Imagine, humor me, if BIX came back. You could log in and ask Johnny Srouji what can we do with the M2 that's not in the manual? or quiz John Ternus about on-device processing that he forgot to mention in a keynote. Bix chats weren't for speculation about up-coming models (Mac Pro?) but real life feedback. I can see Dave Nanian and Michael Tsai in there alongside Craig Hockenberry. Making their products and Apple better.
And the BIX-style connection in 1987 also worked in the other -> direction. Apple engineers, product managers and scientists got real people feedback. They discovered what devs were doing with their products, or wanted to do with their products - especially those who did not live in the Bay Area. Or couldn't afford travelling to WWDC.
Granted, this was a time when Apple's fate wasn't assured but it feels like the company was listening and learning. Which reminds me to share a story that another former Apple scientist Wil Oxford Ph.D told me.
The attitude was, we're doing interesting things, and by the way, we also have to make the company money. There was this sense of ‘product’, even though there were people in ATG who were just not going to do that. They were just not interested in shipping product and that was fine. But that was not me. I really wanted to. One of the things that really spoke to my heart is I would go into a store and I would see somebody buying, with their own money, a product that I designed or worked on - money they've earned and saved. That was, and still is now, my motivation. That's what makes me feel validated because in a lot of cases I had really good ideas, that weren't necessarily easy to implement or weren't immediately monetizable.
Bring Back BIX.
More stories in Inventing the Future: Bit by Bit.
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