I understand the point the author is trying to make: computers were simpler in 1983 than today, so you could actually understand how they worked, if you studied

I understand the point the author is trying to make: computers were simpler in 1983 than today, so you could actually understand how they worked, if you studied the technical specs. There was not some big operating system in the way. Operating systems were literally referred to as "disk operating systems," because that's pretty much what they did: mediate loading and saving data to disks. And that's all a good story, except that it mostly didn't happen. Not everybody was typing in BASIC listings, then spending hours debugging where the typo was. There was more than enough premade software, including games, out there for the major computers on the market (C64, Apple II, TI-99) that you could have a lot of fun without ever seeing a BASIC prompt. And, while the manuals were much lower level then than they would be just a few short years later, and you could certainly learn a lot about how to control the machine by PEEKing and POKEing memory locations, the fact that if you POKE some address and the screen changes color doesn't tell you anything about how it all happened. It's just as mysterious as how moving the mouse on a modern computer moves a pointer on the screen. BASIC is too high level to teach you anything meaningful about what's going on under the hood. But, fortunately, the machine languages of the home computers of this era were generally pretty well documented. However, even then, while you'd know there's this thing called a CPU and that it has things called registers and that you can give it instructions to read and write memory locations, those things are still pretty big abstractions if you want to claim to understand "how it all works."