> Typing in a program from a magazine or book was always a crapshoot unless you really understood and could change the program simply because of the large number of different dialects of BASIC.

The books I remember from my childhood largely countered this by putting asterisks next to certain lines of a listing:

* For ZX Spectrum change to ...

* For C64 change to ..

I still, vividly, remember the covers of the books I borrowed from my local library. Now available for free here (scroll down to "Usborne 1980s computer books"):

https://usborne.com/browse-books/features/computer-and-codin...