I started early in my childhood days, nobody had cellphone or internet here, my phone number was 3 digits long and my home country started to recover from 44 years of communism.

My first dev project was probably to copy game from newspaper to Atari 1300XE

Article listing was around 10 pages long and if you made mistake program didn’t run.
It took me a while I can’t remember how long but probably whole day and I was finally able to play it.

I don’t remember what was game about but later on I learned some BASIC from book and was able to color the screen and stuff like that.

I was about 6 years old.

I also remember that Atari computer had tape recorder where you put cassette to load game.
Some more complicated games were loading more then hour and you need to walk very carefully around or your walk can cause error and operation would fail.

Besides that there were national radio auditions about Atari where at the end they played code sound wave so you can record it on your cassette and then play software from radio on your Atari.

I never managed to do it cause I was living near military airport and pilots were practicing landing and starting above my home causing radio signal noise and breaking my software recoding.

I can probably say that highly accelerating plane could cause game loading problem and it’s not a joke.