Love it. I grew up reading these. Somehow, they made their way to Hyderabad, India, and were sold on the roadside [1] for mere rupees, but had the top 20% of the front cover torn off. I never got that...Maybe a way to prevent re-sale in the US? Anyway, 13-year old me absolutely loved BYTE and PC Magazine from the US and a bunch of Sinclair ZX Spectrum assembler and BASIC books from the UK ("Shiva's friendly micro series"). I used to wait for Sunday to go a-book hunting: a couple of MAD magazines and a BYTE magazine made for a perfect weekend in 1988 :-)

I remember my grandfather's chagrin when he heard that I wanted to spend money on an IBM PC-XT clone rather than a Panasonic VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) [2]. What IS a computer, anyway?? A foolish, expensive toy, pah! He wasn't entirely wrong, of course :-)

I went nuts authoring an Editor in raw machine code, writing TSRs, and trying to hack the higher levels of Montezuma's revenge's by fiddling with it's machine code for a couple of years.

1. https://www.whatshot.in/hyderabad/forgotten-book-bazaars-of-...

2. "The price of Christmas past: £599 for a VHS recorder": https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/19/price-c...