[mrandish]

> The best thing that happened to me at that time was not being able to afford a floppy drive.

Well, you were lucky in more ways than one, since the Commodore 1541 floppy drive is legendary for being both more expensive and slower than other 8-bit floppy hardware. So much so there was quite a market in software and hardware hacks to improve performance (the reasons why it was so bad have been written about extensively (including by its designers) and are a fun read).

> My friends who had one just played games.

Initially I didn't even have a tape cassette recorder and just had to type my programs in again. At least that made only having 4K of memory in my 8-bit micro not a problem :-). I guess it's a good thing you didn't know there were commercial games available on cassette tape or the world might have one less programmer!