Wood-working magazines. I subscribed _because_ of the advertising.

I can't afford Fesstools, but that doesn't mean I don't love seeing / reading their ads.

I dropped my very long time subscription to Maximum Computing when they went digital. The end of an era...

To be fair, those were fun, but extremely information sparse. You'd have a main story or two, some mail inbox stuff, a listing of a selection of cars you probably could never afford, and 35 pages of advertisements.

The car magazine has been replaced by forums and other online tools that are likely free and vastly superior. I do miss physical magazines though.

I knew where to get the upgraded speed parts I wanted from the advertisements. The advertisements were the main attraction.

Some magazines in the olden days were literally nothing but ads - like Computer Shopper.

I used to wait for dad to come home each Thursday because that was the edition of the paper with quarter-page ads that were just price lists of refurbished computer equipment. I'd sit there with a highlighter and go through them, trying to figure out a way to afford my own Pentium 3 on $10/week of pocket money, or get my Pentium 1 to run a little faster.

It was also the edition of the paper with a new TV guide, which I'm sure made my habit very annoying when the rest of the family wanted to see what was on.

I can still sort of remember that in the 90s, but was mainly reading magazines in the late 90s and early 2000s, so I probably missed out on some of that. I did go back and read a lot of old magazines on microfiche at the library a few years ago (I think Byte magazine) and yeah...a lot of ads, but I guess they would have been super useful pre-internet. Did you use the BBS as well? I was too young when that was common.

I ran a BBS for a while. Still have it on a hard disk, but no way to read it.

I'll add it to the Dlang roadmap;)

It's not hard copy, but you might like The Autopian (ex-Jalopniks David Tracy and Jason Torchinsky are among the editors/writers/founders).