It definitely democratized programming. There were a lot of us buying home computers and writing little programs that nobody ever saw. Nothing commercial ever came of the little utilities or games we made.

Before we got our home computer, the closest I ever got to a computer was reading about them in the encyclopedia.

What Stallman did a decade later was great if you happened to have access to the type of computer that could run Emacs. Even then, you probably didn't own the machine and maybe even had to pay for time on it by the hour. The small machines that ran Microsoft Basic were in people's homes.