[dimal]

Sorry, you would be wrong. There was no internet. You were lucky if there was one other person around you who knew BASIC and could answer questions. Everything you needed to learn came in books that cost $30 each (at a time when $30 was a lot of money), and most of the books at the computer store were for using spreadsheets and word processors, not actually coding. Great, you had a DOS shell right in front of you, but learning what to do with it was a struggle. And writing .bat files isn’t very exciting. Maybe if you were in a place like SV, there would be tons of resources to learn, but in most other places you would be in an information desert. I was interested in computers but gave up because I hit the limit of what I could learn pretty quickly and couldn’t get any further. Kids have it MUCH better today.