Its hard to express what it was like in the early/mid-80s (before I had my drivers licence) to bike a few miles to the bookstore at the start of every month and see all the new computer magazine covers for that month. It was so exciting.
I didn't have much money so I stuck with Micro Cornucopia as it had the biggest signal to noise ratio (and before that Rainbow Magazine). I did pickup Computer Shopper later when I started building/rebuilding my mini-tower every few months.
While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.
I think you're right. A lot of people have written about this, but one of my favourites who has stuck with me in recent years is Byung-Chul Han with "The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present"
It covers other topics as well, but describes the value of physical experiences and serendipitous encounters that occurred before the digital era as we know it today. Having everything at hand is an incredible trade-off, and it isn't entirely clear what the downsides are because you can literally never know beyond "I'm missing out on countless experiences". What could they have been?
We gain a sort of efficiency, which at one point almost seemed imperative... But here we are, wishing we could ride our bikes to the bookstore again, just to look at printed copies of weeks or months-old data in inconvenient paper bindings.
It seems to be more than nostalgia to me; it's the desire to be out in the world, engaged, excited, and exploring. Maybe even with friends! We had to do that once, but now, not so much. And the journey to what we're seeking follows the same track, roughly the same distance, and a similar result, every single time. Efficiency isn't always very fun.
Of course, inefficiency is sometimes not fun at all too. I suppose we need to find the right blend, for the right reasons, and be cognizant of these trade offs as we go about our days and our lives.
Definitely agree! I spent so many hours reading BYTE and Computer World and OMNI - and learned so much along the way. If y'all are interested in visualizing and exploring older computer magazines: https://thestacks.dev :)
One sad thing is that at some point these digital archives are all we'll have left. I have an almost-complete set of Byte magazine as molecules, as well as 80 Micro and a few others, and a large collection of ACM and IEEE journals going back to the early 1960s, passed on from people who were getting rid of them due to storage constraints. When I was at Uni I would carry 10kg loads of them home on the bus over an extended period of time. I don't know how many of these collections still exist, and I'm pretty sure my one will get pulped once I'm no longer here.
I had a similar experience in the early 90s (im and 1981 kid). I loved going to the magazine stand and get whatever local programming magazine they had at the time.
Also, I loved Linux Journal (later years) and Linux Magazine. I got a subscription sent to a cousin who lived in the US (In Alaska!!). She came to Mexico every six months and would bring the stacks of those magazines, which i would read back to back.
One thing I miss from thise type of magazines was the high SNR ratio and most importantly the information "push" character of it. You would learn stuff that was related but adjacent to your interests. But it will make you expand your knowledge horizon.
Nowadays sure, everything is a search away... but, you dont know what you dont know. So what would you search for?
Additionally, most content on the internet is VERY low effort. High quality content got heavily devalued.
> One thing I miss from this type of magazines was the high SNR ratio and most importantly the information "push" character of it.
This was so important - you'd get your monthly copy, and you'd read all the parts you were interested in, but after a few days, it'd still be a month until the next issue and all that was left to read were the ads and the parts you weren't really into. But there wasn't anything else, so you'd read them, too.
> You would learn stuff that was related but adjacent to your interests. But it will make you expand your knowledge horizon.
One of the things I like about Hacker News is that it provides some exposure of this kind. The SNR in any given post might not always be high, but the tangential discussions often lead to topics just as interesting, expanding my awareness of what I don't know. There are lots of rabbit holes to explore here.
> While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.
I've got a few great memories from the mid-80s...
Being on school-vacation trip with my teacher and classmates at about 11 years old and sending a letter to my mom with a BASIC program I asked her to type on my computer at home and then calling her to ask her the result of the program.
Then pedaling on my BMX clone bicycle to go meet strangers I'd meet through classified ads in a local newspaper where ads read like this (in french but I'll translate):
"Have 120 games for the C64, listing on demand. Send your listing."
At 13 years old or so, we'd buy an ad in the local newspaper and run ads like that, with our phone number and (snail) mail address.
Many games we didn't care about but we load them again and again to see and re-see the "cracktro" before the game (except they weren't yet called cracktro: the term hadn't been coined yet).
Salivating in front of shops displaying computers: but those looking too "serious", as kids we didn't dare to enter those so we'd watch through the window.
Fast-forward 10 years to the mid-nineties and I find myself working with a person whose books (in french) about computing I used to buy and read to learn about computers and programming.
I’m discovering a renewed appreciation for libraries — never lost in theory but in practice. I’m lucky my community has a good municipal public library nearby, a good university library not too much farther. Book collection at MPL is mixed but plenty of good to great material in the mix. Periodical collection has journalism superior to most freely available web. Periodical archives at university library are incredible (including stuff like Byte).
The environment encourages a better balance between exploration and focus. There are people to greet or not as you wish. There is no algorithm trying to anger for engagement or crumb out just enough other rewards just often enough that you pull the lever for another hit for as long as possible. Search is a whole different game, both higher effort but also passing through a more scholarly tradition and less of the commercial incentive war.
Online advantages still remain (and evolve). I’m not about to give up the web. But I might want more of myself focused through environments and institutions like libraries.
Haven’t seen the bookstore newsstand for a while though, maybe I should see what that’s like these days too.
Yes, I have been telling kids to make library use as part of their search for knowlege. First when you get to your material you face either a shelf of related books or bound journals covering a range of related topics. And there is the serendipity of random encounters focused by the subconcious. Also reference librarians can help direct one to unkown resourses.
First when you get to your material you face either a shelf of related books or bound journals covering a range of related topics.
Unfortunately many novel library buildings are transitioning to electronic stacks which fetch specific resources quickly and are well suited to large collections but deny the experience of browsing.
Yeah, I've got a complete collection from October 1978 to December 1991 (by which time they had became just another x86 PC rag). I bought a fair few individual copies myself from 78 or 79 until the late 80s, but the bulk of my collection I got for free from an elderly engineer in I think the late 2000s.
Here's a tweet I made packing them up when I was moving overseas in April 2015:
I recall the same thing with each new edition of Rainbow magazine. I would read it cover to cover several times. Eventually I would hand type in some of the BASIC programs. I remember reading about people connecting to various BBS's and be jealous of them. Now it's all at our finger tips for better or worse. I guess today there needs to be a conscious effort to filter out distracting noise, our attention has become monetized.
Printed stuff really shaped my life. From PC Magazine and Winworld (is that the name of it? it was a business like weekly or something) and MSDN magazine and PC Accelerator and 2600. Odd duck out in my life was Farmshow magazine but it's basically farm hacking and fascinated me as well. MIT Technology review came later and was good for a few years, I'm still waiting for the huge amount of breakthroughs they showcased in the 2000s to come to market but whatever I'd read about it years before it hit digg.
Yeah, there was a lot of variety too .. I particularly enjoyed the differences between the UK/Euro and UK magazines - it was quite some context, all things considered, to see the markets of both realms go in slightly different directions, at times ..
My Dad regularly gave me Omni magazine subscriptions, it was kind of how I realized there were really great things to read out there, as a young 'un ..
1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore.
2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after every page. It's interesting to look back at those ads from today but it's also a jarring experience to some extent.
Also make sure to read the letters to editor part! Always fun
Byte was great. For years it was the highlight of my month. And I thought the cover art was amazing. The Smalltalk hot air balloon logo came from the cover of the August 1981 issue, which was devoted entirely to Smalltalk.
Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February:
I remember Wayne well, W2NSD = never say die... He did well in ham radio magazines, and entered computer magazines running full speed with byte and others. His accountant advised him to put Byte in his wife's name for tax reasons. This later came back to 'byte' him when they divorced and she was adjudicated as the owner, but he never said die and went on to other things but never overtook Byte.
I recall him at the Atlantic city hamfest, where the Apple launched. Woz and Jobs were there, at set-up and they had a problem, no solder or iron and a 74366 had failed when the card involved was pulled under power = failed. This was before there were low cost, low power 74LS366 were available cheaply. This part had to be desoldered and replaced. They had no chip, solder, iron or wick. John Ramsey had a booth there, so he lent them the solder iron etc and he was also selling a wide range of TTL parts = the rest is history. I also had a table selling diverse ham radio bits/pieces.
Wayne was operating his magazine booth, more Wayne details here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green
I've downloaded the entire thing a while back for nostalgia sake.
And I am (of course) the proud owner of a physical copy of the "Smalltalk" issue :-)
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
Because I'm an old man, my sister made me a birthday card using an image from the front cover of their fourth issue (Christmas 1975) - corresponding to when I was born. It's a harbinger of a future that was by then inevitable but hadn't yet quite happened, the "personal computer" is very much still a nerd toy, expensive kits that can be assembled by the enthusiast to achieve little of immediate value - but you can more or less feel what's about to happen.
For those in the Seattle area, the Seattle Public Library has an excellent periodicals collection, including what appears to be a complete collection of BYTE, bound into volumes (apparently in house?) They also have a complete collection of Compute!
One thing you can see really clearly, is how the price of specific computing items fluctuated.
The Lisp issue is what got me into said language. Later I was using music software (Cakewalk) and noticed the language was nearly the same, so I started making non-music stuff in Cakewalk as well. CAL was all about programming music logic, but it was a fully fledged language that did whatever text-oriented duties you could think of. It was also super easy to write viruses, although they would only run within Cakewalk of course. Fun times!
Chaos Manor always seemed like this mystical place to me as a kid. Limitless budget and always messing with hardware and software, whether necessary or not :-)
The first computer mag I encountered was Creative Computing. I've always had a soft spot for that friendly, easy going magazine. I corresponded with David Ahl (founder of the magazine) and he sent me a mint box of the first year run.
The two characterizations of people in the introduction are timeless?
> A person with a primary interest in software will oftentimes be the person who purchases a kit computer because the kit minimizes the amount of hardware knowledge the person is required to have.
That’s how I came into my first computer - built from a kit in 7th grade.
And, yeah, I understand more about hardware than I did back then, but it’s all about the software to me still… okay, maybe some electronics and mechanics, too.
There's a great display wall of Byte mag at the Computer Museum of America in Atlanta, they've got original cover artworks and possibly every issue. Loved it. Also more Crays than you've ever seen in one place.
I got into computers in 1978 when I started high school and they had two Wang 2200 computers, each with a whopping 8KB of RAM.
Although I was 14 I asked my parents for a subscription to Byte. Every so often I'd get an offer in the mail to join a "wine of the month" service, or life insurance, etc. Clearly they had sold their mailing list and they just assumed anyone with a subscription must be an adult.
Anyway, I loved Steve Ciarcia's column and hated Jerry Pournelle's column that got too much space. His schtick was that he was a power user using the hardware/software for doing real work. But he was far from normal -- he'd write florid articles about having a software or hardware malfunction and then calling up the owner of the company and they next morning the guy who wrote the malfunctioning app would be at Jerry's house debugging it. "XYZ Corp produces quality software that they really stand behind and you should buy it too." Yeah, Jerry, you didn't buy it, and the average Joe doesn't get personal attention like that. I found him to be an insufferable, self-important twat. 45 years later I still feel the same about him.
BYTE mag and Creative Computing were the first computing magazines I read, and really kick-started my excitement with computers, even though everything was out of my reach (either too expensive as a kid, or running on computers that were too expensive for me to contemplate). I remember there was a library catalogue system written for the Apple II that I tried to "cargo cult" rewrite for my MicroBee (an Australian Z80-based computer). I had no idea what all the "CHR $4" calls were for, but loved the process of typing in the listings.
I saved every issue. Boxed them up when I moved out of my childhood home. Moved them 13 times and they ended up in a shed in field on my farm (some success in Silicon Valley) where they mouldered into rot over 20 years.
Hard to express what that monthly compendium of electronic and computer hobbyist articles meant, to a farm boy thousands of miles from anywhere.
I started reading Byte when I had no way to understand what it was talking about. There were technical terms that I simply had no reference for. What the heck is an assembler?
I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.
As a young hacker in the 70's and 80's, magazines were my primary source of docs. I lived in a remote community where such technology was really, really foreign at first. My relatives lived in other parts of the state, some very remote, some in the city. I had a HAM-/CB-enthusiastic hacker uncle I'd regularly visit in one end of the state (outback) and plenty of relatives in the major city and countryside where I lived, so my docs-collecting mission during a routine adventuring between these family areas went something like this:
1. If in the city/small town: go to the library, read latest BYTE magazine, Radio Electronics, a few other electronics (then computer-) magazines, and so on[1]. Then, browse back issues - my library had them all in the first few years - find code that I might adapt to my machine, copy notes or - remember it - for when I got home later. I usually didn't check anything out because I never, ever gave back BYTE magazines I loaned from the library, just because I never knew when I'd be back (or that was my excuse). So, the library was just for reference/note-taking. This actually made going on those boring family visits quite palatable.
2. If in the city: Go to every newsagent/magazine dealer in my route, read every single tech magazine - BYTE, Dr. Dobbs Journal, ZAP, etc. as quickly as possible, before being asked to leave. Buy something if possible, but only if a review finds something interesting. Usually, leave with a BYTE, at least. If I could afford it, always with a DDJ too. Repeat at every newsagent in the city.
3. If I am in the country, at Uncle Hacker-Shacks: In between hacking on his radios and amplifiers, burning my fingers on some new Fun Way Into Electronics Dick Smith kits, and with those toasty digits browsing his extensive magazine collection, including every BYTE issue since the beginning (it's the 70's/80's, I'm a teen) .. do chores (lawns/wood-chopping/fishing/cleaning/reading-to-little-kids) and save coins for photocopying .. take uncles magazines to get photocopies of interesting things, create my own ring-binder full of such things to take back home with me. Somehow, my uncle always had really great magazines and books and things, way, way out there beyond the dusty horizon... and I'd go home after the holidays, with copies of the best of it.
Usually BYTE magazine articles for systems (Apple/C64/etc.) similar enough to mine (Oric-1) to have some use for me, later, when I got back home to my computer. During those long bus, car, train, plane rides, I'd often spend more time reading and re-reading the listings, than I did typing it in when I finally got home.
BYTE was huge to me, it was my first real foray into cross-platform/multi-discipline software development, I literally had no choice but to port things to the Oric-1, if I wanted to do anything with it. I really wish I still had those old ring-binders, it'd be a blast to see my old notes and printouts (had the Oric printer for such things, it was my long-term archive, which I've long-since lost..)
The skills I gained, basically from 8 years old to 18 years old, by reading these magazines - truly informed an important part of my professional toolbox, which have stuck with me for years of course, since this was an era where a significant part of computing technology was being worked out.
I really wonder how kids these days get access to the evolutionary, real-time nature of the fields they're interested in. I guess MAKE filled that hole for a while.
EDIT: Just wanted to say, Issue #1 of BYTE is really worth a read .. "Assembling your own Assembler", and "Recycling used IC's" is so resonant with my Sunday-afternoon musings about the perils of AI and ML on my teenagers' mindset .. seems like someone else is gonna get some burned fingers, soon enough ..
[1] - (I think I read my first 2600 this way also...)
153 comments
I didn't have much money so I stuck with Micro Cornucopia as it had the biggest signal to noise ratio (and before that Rainbow Magazine). I did pickup Computer Shopper later when I started building/rebuilding my mini-tower every few months.
While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.
> I feel like something has been lost.
I think you're right. A lot of people have written about this, but one of my favourites who has stuck with me in recent years is Byung-Chul Han with "The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present"
It covers other topics as well, but describes the value of physical experiences and serendipitous encounters that occurred before the digital era as we know it today. Having everything at hand is an incredible trade-off, and it isn't entirely clear what the downsides are because you can literally never know beyond "I'm missing out on countless experiences". What could they have been?
We gain a sort of efficiency, which at one point almost seemed imperative... But here we are, wishing we could ride our bikes to the bookstore again, just to look at printed copies of weeks or months-old data in inconvenient paper bindings.
It seems to be more than nostalgia to me; it's the desire to be out in the world, engaged, excited, and exploring. Maybe even with friends! We had to do that once, but now, not so much. And the journey to what we're seeking follows the same track, roughly the same distance, and a similar result, every single time. Efficiency isn't always very fun.
Of course, inefficiency is sometimes not fun at all too. I suppose we need to find the right blend, for the right reasons, and be cognizant of these trade offs as we go about our days and our lives.
Also, I loved Linux Journal (later years) and Linux Magazine. I got a subscription sent to a cousin who lived in the US (In Alaska!!). She came to Mexico every six months and would bring the stacks of those magazines, which i would read back to back.
One thing I miss from thise type of magazines was the high SNR ratio and most importantly the information "push" character of it. You would learn stuff that was related but adjacent to your interests. But it will make you expand your knowledge horizon.
Nowadays sure, everything is a search away... but, you dont know what you dont know. So what would you search for?
Additionally, most content on the internet is VERY low effort. High quality content got heavily devalued.
> One thing I miss from this type of magazines was the high SNR ratio and most importantly the information "push" character of it.
This was so important - you'd get your monthly copy, and you'd read all the parts you were interested in, but after a few days, it'd still be a month until the next issue and all that was left to read were the ads and the parts you weren't really into. But there wasn't anything else, so you'd read them, too.
> You would learn stuff that was related but adjacent to your interests. But it will make you expand your knowledge horizon.
One of the things I like about Hacker News is that it provides some exposure of this kind. The SNR in any given post might not always be high, but the tangential discussions often lead to topics just as interesting, expanding my awareness of what I don't know. There are lots of rabbit holes to explore here.
> While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.
I've got a few great memories from the mid-80s...
Being on school-vacation trip with my teacher and classmates at about 11 years old and sending a letter to my mom with a BASIC program I asked her to type on my computer at home and then calling her to ask her the result of the program.
Then pedaling on my BMX clone bicycle to go meet strangers I'd meet through classified ads in a local newspaper where ads read like this (in french but I'll translate):
"Have 120 games for the C64, listing on demand. Send your listing."
At 13 years old or so, we'd buy an ad in the local newspaper and run ads like that, with our phone number and (snail) mail address.
Many games we didn't care about but we load them again and again to see and re-see the "cracktro" before the game (except they weren't yet called cracktro: the term hadn't been coined yet).
Salivating in front of shops displaying computers: but those looking too "serious", as kids we didn't dare to enter those so we'd watch through the window.
Fast-forward 10 years to the mid-nineties and I find myself working with a person whose books (in french) about computing I used to buy and read to learn about computers and programming.
These were the days.
I’m discovering a renewed appreciation for libraries — never lost in theory but in practice. I’m lucky my community has a good municipal public library nearby, a good university library not too much farther. Book collection at MPL is mixed but plenty of good to great material in the mix. Periodical collection has journalism superior to most freely available web. Periodical archives at university library are incredible (including stuff like Byte).
The environment encourages a better balance between exploration and focus. There are people to greet or not as you wish. There is no algorithm trying to anger for engagement or crumb out just enough other rewards just often enough that you pull the lever for another hit for as long as possible. Search is a whole different game, both higher effort but also passing through a more scholarly tradition and less of the commercial incentive war.
Online advantages still remain (and evolve). I’m not about to give up the web. But I might want more of myself focused through environments and institutions like libraries.
Haven’t seen the bookstore newsstand for a while though, maybe I should see what that’s like these days too.
Unfortunately many novel library buildings are transitioning to electronic stacks which fetch specific resources quickly and are well suited to large collections but deny the experience of browsing.
Here's a tweet I made packing them up when I was moving overseas in April 2015:
https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/586675607087419394/photo/1
I also have a 1984 Encyclopædia Britannica, all 30 volumes.
Will anyone want them when I can't house them?
What do I mean? If you posted them for free you might get a taker, but probably not.
But it's possible you might identify the right child at the right time who could appreciate them.
1991 Byte might be too old, but a 1984 Britannica has something even an offline copy of Wikipedia doesn't.
It was transformative to go, each week, and see new stuff or review things this way.
My Dad regularly gave me Omni magazine subscriptions, it was kind of how I realized there were really great things to read out there, as a young 'un ..
1, It's a massive book like magazine if you ever hold one in your hand. Usually more than 300 pages sometimes up to 500, it's not like today's print media at all. I'm not even sure huge magazines like this exist anymore.
2, The amount of ads are insane. Like 1:3 ratio of article:ads if not more. Most of the times the lead articles are interrupted by 3 pages of ads after every page. It's interesting to look back at those ads from today but it's also a jarring experience to some extent.
Also make sure to read the letters to editor part! Always fun
Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982354
https://byte.tsundoku.io/
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45028002)
All lost during a move from one city to another - except for one Byte book: Threaded Interpreted Languages.
https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...
I also have lots of the actual machines and parts, especially Apple, Commodore. Ship them too?
https://absurd.wtf/byte/
Now, I’ll need to check what is on archive for each issue and make sure I have the highest quality for each one…
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-11/page/n57/m...
The Lisp issue is what got me into said language. Later I was using music software (Cakewalk) and noticed the language was nearly the same, so I started making non-music stuff in Cakewalk as well. CAL was all about programming music logic, but it was a fully fledged language that did whatever text-oriented duties you could think of. It was also super easy to write viruses, although they would only run within Cakewalk of course. Fun times!
I learned a tremendous deal from it and I will forever be grateful.
https://archive.org/details/2600magazine/2600_1-1/
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08
But it does call into question my decision to haul 100's of kg of these things around every time I moved residence over the last 40+ years.
> A person with a primary interest in software will oftentimes be the person who purchases a kit computer because the kit minimizes the amount of hardware knowledge the person is required to have.
That’s how I came into my first computer - built from a kit in 7th grade.
And, yeah, I understand more about hardware than I did back then, but it’s all about the software to me still… okay, maybe some electronics and mechanics, too.
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11/page/n129/...
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?sort=date
https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench
FWIW, the German magazine ct from Heise is a good modern replacement.
Although I was 14 I asked my parents for a subscription to Byte. Every so often I'd get an offer in the mail to join a "wine of the month" service, or life insurance, etc. Clearly they had sold their mailing list and they just assumed anyone with a subscription must be an adult.
Anyway, I loved Steve Ciarcia's column and hated Jerry Pournelle's column that got too much space. His schtick was that he was a power user using the hardware/software for doing real work. But he was far from normal -- he'd write florid articles about having a software or hardware malfunction and then calling up the owner of the company and they next morning the guy who wrote the malfunctioning app would be at Jerry's house debugging it. "XYZ Corp produces quality software that they really stand behind and you should buy it too." Yeah, Jerry, you didn't buy it, and the average Joe doesn't get personal attention like that. I found him to be an insufferable, self-important twat. 45 years later I still feel the same about him.
Hard to express what that monthly compendium of electronic and computer hobbyist articles meant, to a farm boy thousands of miles from anywhere.
I suppose it was an example of immersion language learning because after devouring the magazine for months it started making sense. I knew it was about something I wanted to know.
1. If in the city/small town: go to the library, read latest BYTE magazine, Radio Electronics, a few other electronics (then computer-) magazines, and so on[1]. Then, browse back issues - my library had them all in the first few years - find code that I might adapt to my machine, copy notes or - remember it - for when I got home later. I usually didn't check anything out because I never, ever gave back BYTE magazines I loaned from the library, just because I never knew when I'd be back (or that was my excuse). So, the library was just for reference/note-taking. This actually made going on those boring family visits quite palatable.
2. If in the city: Go to every newsagent/magazine dealer in my route, read every single tech magazine - BYTE, Dr. Dobbs Journal, ZAP, etc. as quickly as possible, before being asked to leave. Buy something if possible, but only if a review finds something interesting. Usually, leave with a BYTE, at least. If I could afford it, always with a DDJ too. Repeat at every newsagent in the city.
3. If I am in the country, at Uncle Hacker-Shacks: In between hacking on his radios and amplifiers, burning my fingers on some new Fun Way Into Electronics Dick Smith kits, and with those toasty digits browsing his extensive magazine collection, including every BYTE issue since the beginning (it's the 70's/80's, I'm a teen) .. do chores (lawns/wood-chopping/fishing/cleaning/reading-to-little-kids) and save coins for photocopying .. take uncles magazines to get photocopies of interesting things, create my own ring-binder full of such things to take back home with me. Somehow, my uncle always had really great magazines and books and things, way, way out there beyond the dusty horizon... and I'd go home after the holidays, with copies of the best of it.
Usually BYTE magazine articles for systems (Apple/C64/etc.) similar enough to mine (Oric-1) to have some use for me, later, when I got back home to my computer. During those long bus, car, train, plane rides, I'd often spend more time reading and re-reading the listings, than I did typing it in when I finally got home.
BYTE was huge to me, it was my first real foray into cross-platform/multi-discipline software development, I literally had no choice but to port things to the Oric-1, if I wanted to do anything with it. I really wish I still had those old ring-binders, it'd be a blast to see my old notes and printouts (had the Oric printer for such things, it was my long-term archive, which I've long-since lost..)
The skills I gained, basically from 8 years old to 18 years old, by reading these magazines - truly informed an important part of my professional toolbox, which have stuck with me for years of course, since this was an era where a significant part of computing technology was being worked out.
I really wonder how kids these days get access to the evolutionary, real-time nature of the fields they're interested in. I guess MAKE filled that hole for a while.
EDIT: Just wanted to say, Issue #1 of BYTE is really worth a read .. "Assembling your own Assembler", and "Recycling used IC's" is so resonant with my Sunday-afternoon musings about the perils of AI and ML on my teenagers' mindset .. seems like someone else is gonna get some burned fingers, soon enough ..
[1] - (I think I read my first 2600 this way also...)