Kilobaud Computing had died out.

Byte and Dr Drobbs had the odd technical article but gone mostly mainstream by the 80s.

But one of my classmates showed me an issue of Hardcore Computist (renamed Computist) and I was hooked.

Technical knowledge about circumventing copy-protected software interspersed with cracks for various software programs.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computist

back issues on archive.org at https://archive.org/search?query=Hardcore+Computist