My mom subscribed to Byte magazine, and Ciarcia's articles were inspiring to me too. That, and Goedel, Escher, Bach. Oddly enough I ended up at a college with n

My mom subscribed to Byte magazine, and Ciarcia's articles were inspiring to me too. That, and Goedel, Escher, Bach. Oddly enough I ended up at a college with no engineering program, but my physics professor was an electronics expert, and I majored in math and physics. Since then, virtually everything I've done with physics has involved electronics and computers, often working together. Radio Shack had a book on the Z80, that I think was the same as the Howard Sams book, but with a different cover. It was so clearly written, that even to this day, my ability to conceptualize the innards of computers is strongly biased by the Z80 architecture.