You were lucky!
When I was a lad all we had was a ZX81 with a crappy 'membrain' keyboard where you had to 'carefully' press one key, then another key (watch the screen) then another key to get a function!
Thems was the days
I followed a german magazine instruction on how to make programmable graphics for the ZX81 and I figured out how to put a chip into the ZX81 to do this without the user having to solder anything, most carefully made 3 bits of double-sided circuit board by hand, two of them had the chips on, one of them was just to attach to the chips already on the board, they each had 'legs' which you could push onto the existing chips.
My idea was to sell them.
I painstakingly stayed up all night programming a christmas scene with a tree and 'snow' that would fall because the 'space' graphic was transformed by my magical creation. I had a friend who had a radio repair shop and he'd let me use one of his tellys to show my creation to any unsuspecting passers by.
I was so knackered when I finished it that I thought I'd wait until morning to save it on to my crappy cassette recorder.
white screen
I did finish it and saw with relish the Christmas scene in his shop window with the snow falling and an alien spacecraft of 8x8 pixels take off and fly away.
never sold a single one
gave one away and the kid later told me he couldn't get it to work.
Was I disheartened? NO! to this day I make crappy software that no-one will buy.
Never give up! Never surrender!