I am from that era, so I might add something that perhaps is not obvious at all nowadays.
The microcomputer explosion gave birth to an large number of actual paper magazines and at least 50% of their content were... actual source listing you had to manually retype.
Basic was already fragmented in a billion different flavors and dialects (especially if your program had any kind of graphics) so the more ambitious user could also try their hand at translating a listing from - say - TSR-80 to Apple Basic.
In any case you were directly exposed to the actual source code, and tweaking or experimenting with it felt very natural.
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I am from that era, so I might add something that perhaps is not obvious at all nowadays.
The microcomputer explosion gave birth to an large number of actual paper magazines and at least 50% of their content were... actual source listing you had to manually retype. Basic was already fragmented in a billion different flavors and dialects (especially if your program had any kind of graphics) so the more ambitious user could also try their hand at translating a listing from - say - TSR-80 to Apple Basic.
In any case you were directly exposed to the actual source code, and tweaking or experimenting with it felt very natural.