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.
Assuming it worked the same in India, magazine sellers 'returned' unsold copies by sending back just the cover titles to the distributor instead of the whole thing. You were buying the unsold 'returns'.
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...