I had the opposite problem. My first machine was a TRS-80 Model III that my dad bought for me at a garage sale. It came with an aftermarket BASIC programming m

I had the opposite problem. My first machine was a TRS-80 Model III that my dad bought for me at a garage sale. It came with an aftermarket BASIC programming manual, but no programmer's manual for the machine. Without a real reference manual to explain what was going on, I wasn't able to get past the "programs as magical incantations" stage until much later. Also, the machine came with no disk drives or any other storage to speak of. 9 year old me was really impressed at how people apparently retyped their programs into the machine every time they turned it on. I also didn't understand what "REM" meant and the author didn't really go into what comments were and what they were for, so I dutifully typed every comment from the program listing into the machine word-for-word, being careful to use the exact same capitalization and punctuation. Then, of course, I wondered why I had to type all that cryptic stuff in below it if I was already telling the computer what to do in English! It's a miracle I persisted long enough to figure this all out and then make a career out of it.