I grew up in the 70’s & 80’s. My first computer experience was the Atari Pong console, but my first real love was the Commodore 64. I would buy up all of the C64 magazines I could, especially if they had the game code article where you could type in the machine code to make a game. Machine code. I don’t think I ever saw a BASIC game article; it was always machine code. I would spend days trying to get that code typed in correctly to play the game, and I’d usually be disappointed in it.
The first real game I became obsessed with was Telengard, a BASIC game I bought on C64 cassette that was a basic dungeon crawler kind of like the old mini computer game DND. I spent months figuring out how the game worked … and then I spent months figuring out how the BASIC code worked and how to tweak it to give me a ton more treasure. I had tapes and tapes of modifications for that game, no DRM back then, and ended up with a modified game that I could waltz into and blast any bad guy away without even trying, then loot it for the most powerful items in the game.
The fun aspect of older computers is that they had interesting ways to carry out certain tasks. There wasn’t “the best way” to do a thing figured out yet and there were many companies trying all sorts of things for one reason or another.
The Commodore is the only computer I know of that put “another whole computer” into their disk drive in order to make the disk drive work (meaning it was pretty much the same computer as your main computer). So your main computer and the disk drive are pretty similar and your main computer talks to the drive computer to figure everything out. It just seems like such a heavy handed way to handle things but it clearly worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_DOS – This explains the OS that is on the drive
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC – This explains what you work with on the computer