I grew up with an Atari 800 XL, and the same magazines as mentioned elsewhere here. When I got the machine, I had a thick booklet with a lot of simple little games (text-based, in the Atari BASIC dialect). I typed in a lot of those, and later from magazines. As most mentioned, the "cool" stuff from magazines mostly came in the form of hex code (i.e. machine code) which obviously did not teach anything.

That said, I cannot recall learning a lot from typing those BASIC listings either. First of all, programming was not like today. Very little resources were used by developers to make the code easy to understand, or didactic, in any way. There were few if not no comments; every precious byte was used as best as possible; variable names were mostly one character (and often even that was re-used); there were no recognizable "patterns" like today, and so on and forth. Sometimes they even went to the trouble to obfuscate the code even more, for reasons I cannot fathom.

Before the time of dial-up BBS'ses, dial-up mail networks, UseNet and eventually (privately accessible) Internet, I got my knowledge from plain old books - I was fortunate enough to live close to a state capital with a very big and relatively current library; they had shelves of books and magazines for exactly the machines I had before the internet came along. Also, those books were usually real gems... often reference manuals straight from the source; or from a very select handful of authors who lived and breathed that stuff. Very little junk - there was no "become a programer in 21 days" nonsense. ;)

Also, the technology was trivially simple back then. A young person could easily grok the complete hardware and software architecture of an 8-bit home computer in the course of a sweet summer holiday if they put their mind to it (much to the chagrin of the parents). BASIC was very accessible (I mean, it was literally the GUI of the computer, after switching it on), and the instruction set of the 6502 fits on a page or two.

I grew up with an Atari 800 XL, and the same magazines as mentioned elsewhere here. When I got the machine, I had a thick booklet with a lot of simple little games (text-based, in the Atari BASIC dialect). I typed in a lot of those, and later from magazines. As most mentioned, the "cool" stuff from magazines mostly came in the form of hex code (i.e. machine code) which obviously did not teach anything.

That said, I cannot recall learning a lot from typing those BASIC listings either. First of all, programming was not like today. Very little resources were used by developers to make the code easy to understand, or didactic, in any way. There were few if not no comments; every precious byte was used as best as possible; variable names were mostly one character (and often even that was re-used); there were no recognizable "patterns" like today, and so on and forth. Sometimes they even went to the trouble to obfuscate the code even more, for reasons I cannot fathom.

Before the time of dial-up BBS'ses, dial-up mail networks, UseNet and eventually (privately accessible) Internet, I got my knowledge from plain old books - I was fortunate enough to live close to a state capital with a very big and relatively current library; they had shelves of books and magazines for exactly the machines I had before the internet came along. Also, those books were usually real gems... often reference manuals straight from the source; or from a very select handful of authors who lived and breathed that stuff. Very little junk - there was no "become a programer in 21 days" nonsense. ;)

Also, the technology was trivially simple back then. A young person could easily grok the complete hardware and software architecture of an 8-bit home computer in the course of a sweet summer holiday if they put their mind to it (much to the chagrin of the parents). BASIC was very accessible (I mean, it was literally the GUI of the computer, after switching it on), and the instruction set of the 6502 fits on a page or two.

Little rant: Being used to work with books (i.e., reference books where you had to learn to find and extract the required info) helps me today still - when I am about to learn a new programming language or other complex sysem, I find it very easy and efficient to pass all the well-meant "tutorials" and go straight to the reference docs. I find it fascinating how often I sit together with a junior developer who has not looked into official docs once in their life, taking all their info from tutorials as a shortcut, when it's often hit&miss whether the context of the problem at hand is even the same as the one in the tutorial/stackoverflow answer/etc. Many of them really light up when they are pointed to, say, the library docs of their programming language - and they are surprised that the info there is often much quicker to apply to the task at hand.