Being from a poor family we didn't had access to any kind of computer while growing up. For some miraculous reason I still managed to secure a good career around system administration but my coding necessities never went beyond simple bash routines. Living on the field you read lots of these stories about how marvelous it was when the author as a child got his first computer and started coding basic. And I thought... "I'm in my 30s so I'll never be able to have the fraction of skill of that guys so why bother".
I was in my mid 30s when I needed something and just started doing it. It was good and it felt good. It wasn't that bad. Why did it took me so long to start? Because everyone who writes stories about coding has started since they were like 10 years old!
Sorry to rain my ramblings on your story. In the end I have no-one to blame but myself. The article was good and interesting.
We were poor as well but my school was rich enough to have picked up Apple II's just as I was in the middle of moving though high school. So I at least got a taste of BASIC when I was sixteen or so. I took a gap-decade though and would be in my mid-twenties before I started coding for real (and then it was Pascal).
Perhaps we do need more stories like that though.
Aside: famously, that John Carmack guy also went to my high school — he was a few years younger than me. I'm not sure if he used the same machines I had learned BASIC on. I read though that he got in trouble trying to break in and steal computers from some school or another, perhaps when he was in junior high (middle school) though? Maybe he was hanging with the wrong crowd then.
Spending time to learn things usually pays off. In recent years, I've seen students try to solve problems by searching the web for "solutions". The result is often a cobbled-together mess, with unused variables and and the inclusion of a wide range of libraries to tackle problems that can be handled in the base language. I fear that very little is gained by this. Stackexchange and similar sites can be good tools for those with experience, but they are ruinous for students who are just starting out.
When in doubt, read the documentation.
It stored data in CSV file and when someone entered "," in the message, it was broken and I needed to fix datafile manually. :-D
So it was Enterprise Software then :)