The article title reminded me of when I was young and used to read Byte Magazine. Byte used to cover a wide range of topics, and could get quite technical, but

The article title reminded me of when I was young and used to read Byte Magazine. Byte used to cover a wide range of topics, and could get quite technical, but the big thing that is vastly different to today is that you would get a monthly digest of articles that were selected by the editors, not by yourself. And I used to read it cover to cover. There was a lot I didn't understand, but also I feel like I gained a wider knowledge than if I only read what I was interested in, and many times the ideas that I was exposed to turned out to be useful much later in life. Some of them ended up being distractions too, like playing with hardware, or writing a compiler, but it was all very interesting.