I learned programming before I learned English. I was always confused by PRINT vs INPUT: which one reads and which one writes? So yeah, it could have been grob and bolver or anything.
Now, clearly whoever wrote that text had their own conception of the thing, but my mental model was that the computer is executing the program so it is getting the character from me with `getch` and it is putting the character on the screen with `putchar`. So the actual functionality seemed right.
But when you combined that with the text saying that it was counter-intuitive I was like "Oh okay, got to remember it was counter-intuitive. It's the opposite of what I'd think" and so the text induced me to misunderstand. Fortunately I was a child so I learned pretty rapidly that lots of people write total crap (irrespective of the conception, the author should not have pushed it so hard) and it didn't damage my mental model at all.