I’ve thought about this a lot because I grew up with an Apple IIc in my house, but didn’t learn to program C until 2001. My parents didn’t know how to program. We learned to use the computer for typing and desktop publishing. Programming books were expensive. Even the commercially used compilers and IDEs were expensive. Mac developers paid for CodeWarrior [1]. I don’t remember source code being available easily. Aside from “hackers” who have a knack for figuring out code, there wasn’t really a path for “read the docs” people to learn unless they lived near a place with lots of physically printed docs (a company, a university, a parent who programmed). Disk space was a constraint. Programs were split across multiple floppy disks. Computers would run out of space. The length of variable names & things like that mattered because shortening them let more code fit on a disk. I’m not old enough to know how much that affected full computers, but it made a huge difference on a TI-82 graphing calculator. That was the first thing I learned to program & cutting lines of code left room for games. I assume a lot of bad habits that make code hard to read came from that time. Oh… there was no source control. Revisions were just named differently or in a different directory, if they existed at all. And… grand finale… project plans included days or weeks to print disks and paper user manuals so apps could be sold in stores :-)