Byte Magazine: The Forth Language (1980)
I love Steve Ciarcia's "Build a Modem" project.  Steve published plans for a project every month: usually at time it was a demo project for some new integrated circuit with a few 74xx or 54xx glue chips to interface it to a computer...  But it always was reliable and really worked.  A few years later he was using various kinds of CPLD instead of the x4xx chips and had also discovered microcontrollers so one month the project was a microcontroller board and then in later months the project would be something you did by the board.By 1988 or so Byte was really struggling and sometimes he seemed to be the only person keeping the lights on.  He'd be answering letters to the editor,  bailing people out of their WordStar problems,  etc.