It's pretty cool because factories can be very complex, giving it real utility. And you can communicate over the wire with fair sophistication using items as signal symbols. The clock speed of the devices was limited to a few instructions per game tick.
You'll be writing scripts to scan the net for open ports, automatically "hack" into them, then globally balance allocate memory between all of them according to certain parameters to make the hack the most "profitable". You'll be writing elementary socket communications, building scripts to feed analytics back to your home PC, even alogirthmic trading in a fake stock market. I had fun with it.