I have a similar story but not as harsh as his. I started programming basic(not sure which variant) on a small hand held system CASIO PB700. One this system I've created a Paranoid clone and a 4 frame ascii animation. My father saw my aptitude on programming he introduced me to his more advanced systems. He was a computer engineer and had an habit of buying new systems in 1980s. On the newer systems(I don't recall the name) I learned Turbo Pascel. Back then those systems didn't have any storage. MSDOS had to be booted from one 5 inch floppy drive and a new disk had to be inserted to get the different programs.
Every time you compile and run a program, it would take a couple of minutes to read the compiler from the 5inch floppy disk. Those floppy disks were fragile and they had a tendency to developed bad sectors after a frequent read-write session. To circumvent this, my father deployed a ramdrive on the system. A drive would be created inside the ram every time the system boots up, and it would copy the Turbo Pascel compilers and all relevant libraries to that ram drive. So next time you hit 'run', it would take seconds instead of minutes. This solutions still blows away my mind.
Another thing about these old machines, they all came with monochrome monitors. It was all green and had a very low refresh rate. Every time there was a large change on the display, you could still see the previous characters being faded away. Like matrix.
Later I had access to better machines(Pentium 1 133Mhz), but haven't forgot those days. I wish I had more information about those systems to post here, but I am long way from home. Back at home those systems are still all packed up and stacked on top on one another. The funny thing - all them work as if they are 'brand new'.