Bill Machrone, from memory.

Some of the early PC Magazine utilities were cool.

Some of the assembly language columns got me into doing a spin-off DOS file manager utility that I worked on for quite a while.

Oh, cool. I like assembly language.

Early in my career, I read some books about it, including a few about programming for the 6502 processor, and later, Peter Norton's "Assembly Language Programming for the IBM PC". I thought the latter book was very good, just like his Norton Utilities and other software.

I did a fair amount of hobby 6502 assembly language programming on the Commodore 64, and a bit on the BBC Micro. The Beeb had a cool inline assembly feature, using which you could write 6502 assembly code inline in the middle of your BBC BASIC code, just by wrapping the assembly code in square brackets. There was no need of an explicit assembly step. The inline assembly code would just run as part of the running of the BASIC code.

Believe me or not, but I loved the ads in early PC Magazine (that I usually read as a kid a couple months later in my public library in Brazil thanks to some unknown subscriber’s donation).

I used to daydream about the equipment in the ads like other kids did with cars in car magazines

There was a huge magazine called Computer Shopper back in the day. It wasn't 100% ads but it was a very high percentage of ads peppered with mostly pretty formulaic articles.

>Believe me or not, but I loved the ads in early PC Magazine

I believe you, ha ha. I used to do the same, with both PC Magazine and BYTE.

And with DDJ and CUJ too. :) (Dr. Dobbs Journal and C Users Journal. Both of those had high quality articles on software topics, back then, and for many years.)