[digitalsankhara]

I was going to say the same thing. I feel so lucky to have started programming in the era of 8-bit home computers. Looking back, this was a Zen like experience. Switch the machine on and, literally, within a few seconds you were faced with a blank screen and a blinking cursor. It is as if the machine was saying "Go on then...do something wonderful".

And one's own wonderful was within reach because of the things you point out. Of course context matters here with having nothing to compare too, but every learning point seemed like magic to me.

Out of necessity, learning how the hardware worked and relating that to software was such a big part of the culture. Books and magazines wrote about CPU architecture, address and data busses, video programming etc.

Being into electronics at the time I constructed external address decoders and data line drivers (7400 series) to make lights and relays turn on as well as being able to sample and store an external voltage in memory via homemade R2R ADCs.

Years later, I was writing control and logging software in Topspeed Module-2 running on DOS as part of my postgrad work. I'd arrive, somewhat stressed, in the lab after a fairly lengthy two train commute then relax to the sound of the hard disk as the PC booted up. Then it was me, the machine, a single language and a couple of RS232 serial ports for I/O. Bliss!