I took a one-year course in computer science before going to University. My first “for-next loop” went like this: for x=1 to 10; print “Helllllo!”; next x, and I learned two things. First, it’s very easy to copy digital stuff: just add an extra zero and you get 100 iterations, not 10. Second, be careful with typos, because they multiply too.
With that learnt, I went to University, where teachers would give lectures and we’d take notes. The poorer students, or those eager to work cooperatively, would painfully read their own hand-written notes, type them using a typewriter, photocopy them, and sell the photocopies to most other students. (There was no competition, just a shared load. You paid nothing for your photocopies if you were a co-scribler, and not a lot if you weren’t.) Thing is, the lesson notes were of very varied quality (a compound of the teachers’ misunderstandings with that of the student), and for some reason they were repeated a-fresh every single year! There had to be a better way! In the second half of my studies, in came an Apple II+, but to the other students it was either a luxury or something unimaginable. So, third lesson: you need both physical resources and some (personal or absorbed) imagination.
We bought a modem (300 bps, then 1200 bps, wow), and entered the world of Fidonet. (Believe me, it feels really weird to type “Fidonet” in google.) Meetings with others meant fun and learning, and at IRC (chat) I met my Linux friends, where I had a revelation: I had spent several hours trying to configure our printer, and I wrote a full paragraph explaining what the problem was and what I had done to try and solve it, unsuccessfully. Not 5 seconds had passed when a single word appeared in the chat window. It was someone from another island, and typing that comand solved my problem!