Also topic drift, but very similar to yours: i'm 2 or 3 years older, had an Atari 800 at home courtesy of my mom, but couldn't save enough to buy a cassette dr

Also topic drift, but very similar to yours: i'm 2 or 3 years older, had an Atari 800 at home courtesy of my mom, but couldn't save enough to buy a cassette drive via lawn mowing, so would write down or re-enter whatever between parent turning on the light switch in the room so i could see, not realizing they turned off the computer instead. The IBM PC came out; I got my dad to sell a fancy shotgun bought for me at birth, in the newspaper classifieds, and used the money to get a PC. On that PC i had an early version of Word...and it was super useful.