[ithkuil]

There were magazines, and manuals were not too hard to find. (These things had real technical manuals, with lots of internals described)

My personal experience as a kid is more oriented towards the Amiga, but I suspect it was quite similar.

One fun fact, the place I grew up was a minority language region, so specialized magazines/books were only available in the dominant language of the country which was not yet part of my of my school curriculum.

I ended up reading most of that stuff in German having absolutely no idea what that meant; a double puzzle to solve.

[przemub]

Oh, I'm very curious, what language is that? Sorbian? Romansh?

[ithkuil]

Italian in southern Switzerland. Big enough so you can grow up listening and speaking it 100% of the time with little and no exposure to german/french, not big enough for newspaper/magazine distribution network to care about it (I'm pretty sure some fashon and general culture magazines were imported from italy, but not the Amazing Computing magazine...)

(Yes, I could have gone a few dozen kilometers cross the border to Italy to buy some, but I was a kid and my parents didn't indulge me further with this "toy")