Similar life experience.

My first set of magazines were the Input series, a British monthly magazine about coding for 8-bit systems.

I invested the majority of my allowance in such magazines, "The C User's Journal" (later C/C++ User's Journal), Dr. Dobbs, PC Techniques, GDC Mag and lots of books.

Luckily my university being highly focused in systems programming, had a huge collection of books and SIGPLAN papers, which opened my eyes for the world of safe systems programming. Thanks to it I was able to delve into the work from Xerox PARC and ETHZ, as well as, the research that was happening with ML (Caml Light was rather new back then) and Prolog.