For me it really was. I think it was Mondo 2000 that first pointed me to James Gleick's excellent Chaos book. After reading that I was looking for anything else like it. Eventually I found books on artificial life and genetic programming and these talked about neural nets and other machine learning systems.

Those were exciting times. I was just thinking about Mondo 2000 and recurring stories about smart drugs (nootropics?). I always wanted to try some of it but never had the guts. I'd be curious to know if there were any long term consequences for those who used them.

Edit: I just did some searching and found that R.U. Sirius did a followup article:

https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/03/09/smart-drugs-nutrients-1...