Byte and Dr Drobbs had the odd technical article but gone mostly mainstream by the 80s.

But one of my classmates showed me an issue of Hardcore Computist (renamed Computist) and I was hooked.

Technical knowledge about circumventing copy-protected software interspersed with cracks for various software programs.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computist

back issues on archive.org at https://archive.org/search?query=Hardcore+Computist

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-C

* https://github.com/trcwm/smallc_v1

I would describe both Playboy and Penthouse as primarily pornography. As such, they were both wildly popular in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Omni was not that. I had a subscription to Omni from the first issue in 1978 until about 1983. Pop science, science fiction, fantasy art, interviews and features on space exploration policy... and junk science, UFOs, psychic powers, cults. News of the wierd.