It’s truly remarkable to me that in the late 70s/early 80s it was considered that programming your own computer in basic was not something that required special skills or technical ability. It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped, with basic human ingenuity and capability for expression having been crippled by reliance on increasingly advanced automation with increasingly simple interfaces. Humanit…
One of my sons was interested in learning programming, but the goal he envisioned was to write an AAA game. It was rather discouraging to have to tell him that it would take a minimum of 5 years (realistically more) to get to the level where he could consider getting hired into a team of hundreds to work on such a game.
In contrast, the first computer I had access to had a whopping 7167 bytes of RAM to work with, and a 25x40 character screen. Correspondingly, our ambitions were much more limited.
I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's magazine (the internet archive has issues until about 1990: https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal?and%5B%5D=creat...>), and many articles seem to fall into the categories of either being fairly simple (mostly games), or visions of overly ambitious projects that likely never came to fruition (a multi user UNIX system implemented on an 8080 system with 32K RAM and a floppy drive, to be written by somebody who encountered his first computer two years earlier…).
To be sure, there were also quite sophisticated programs, such as a 6502 floating point package co-developed by Steve Wozniak.