There was a book on computers I found in my childhood that inspired me to get into programming, and I'm really interested in finding it again. I'm convinced it was either an Usborne book or was somehow related to the Usborne books, and there's a lot of fans of those books around here, so I figure this thread is probably a good place to ask around to see if anyone recognizes it.
The book had qualities in common with the books "The Usborne Young Scientist: Computers (1992)"/"Usborne Guide to Computers (1981)" (near-identical span and even order of topics, but this book was much less cartoony and was more technically in-depth) and "The Usborne Book of the Future" (it contained some pages like https://miro.medium.com/max/1920/1*M9yzYC6k154ODT0k0SiYMg.jp... with same style of illustration and lots of descriptions about the items in the illustration) but the book was none of those. The book wasn't dedicated to showing off program code, but it did have a bit of BASIC on one page, it contained descriptions of logic gates, and it even had a half-adder circuit, which I remember copying each of into my notebook and simulating on paper. I think the book was either based on or was a precursor to "Usborne Guide to Computers (1981)", but I haven't been able to get any further than that. I've written a lot more of a description from what I remember at https://tildes.net/~talk/is4/whats_one_thing_you_havent_been....
The book had qualities in common with the books "The Usborne Young Scientist: Computers (1992)"/"Usborne Guide to Computers (1981)" (near-identical span and even order of topics, but this book was much less cartoony and was more technically in-depth) and "The Usborne Book of the Future" (it contained some pages like https://miro.medium.com/max/1920/1*M9yzYC6k154ODT0k0SiYMg.jp... with same style of illustration and lots of descriptions about the items in the illustration) but the book was none of those. The book wasn't dedicated to showing off program code, but it did have a bit of BASIC on one page, it contained descriptions of logic gates, and it even had a half-adder circuit, which I remember copying each of into my notebook and simulating on paper. I think the book was either based on or was a precursor to "Usborne Guide to Computers (1981)", but I haven't been able to get any further than that. I've written a lot more of a description from what I remember at https://tildes.net/~talk/is4/whats_one_thing_you_havent_been....