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.

Yeah, my Commodore 128 came with a 400-page system guide, nearly half of which was a BASIC reference and programming tutorial that explained concepts like looping and arrays. Those computers assumed you might want to program at least a little, and tried to make it easy to get started, so a lot of us did.

> 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.

No, a decade later was at the end of the 1980's. At that time, many middle class families could afford home computers like the Atari ST, which could run many of the GNU compilers/tools.

It was a great learning experience porting Unix apps and games to the ST.