Steve Ciarcia was incredibly influential to young me. His projects were wild. I only built one of his designs: an 8052AH-BASIC microcontroller board that I still have in the basement. He did more "mainstream" stuff like the series of articles on building your very own 8088-based PC compatible (a huge effort back in the day). But then he'd do crazy stuff like an 8051-based board that calculated the Mandelbrot set networked to a PC, and the more of the boards that you built and connected to the network, the faster the computation of the result.
Radio Electronics was gold for articles on cable & satellite TV descramblers. The only problem was that too often, the parts list would have one inductor that was basically made of Pure Unobtainium where I lived :-(
It was also where I first started learning about synthesizers, which is another subject my uncle and I would get burned fingers about - him building the oscillator and me doing the filter and so on .. but there were other magazines of that ilk, I thing Radio Electronics transitioned to "Electronics Magazine" in my market in those days (Australia), or so it seems through the fog of time ..
I can come clean and say that I have all of these magazines safely .PDF'ed for the sailboat somewhere, I do know that for sure anyway, lol ..