That's all there was to home computers at the time. A BASIC REPL. There wasn't much else to do except play around with it and hand-type BASIC programs from computer magazines.
I remember in 1982, or 1983, the family was given a 48k Spectrum, with a bunch of cassette tapes, for Christmas.
Unfortunately the tape-player was broken, and because this was back in the 80s in the UK there was basically zero chance of catching the store open and getting an exchange made until the new-year.
So the new computer enthusiasm was killed in my sisters, and I enjoyed myself reading the manual, and typing in examples from it, then later games from magazines, and similar.
That's what fuelled my programming: Typing in code on a ZX Spectrum, then later writing my own in BASIC and then z80 machine code. From there I graduated to machine-code/assembly on the PC, Java, C, etc.
I assume I'd have been curious how the black-box worked eventually anyway, but I do wonder how things would have turned out if we'd had a working cassette player all those years ago.
