I got my first computer in 1978. The manufacturer went out of business 6 months later.
So, I had to learn how to program it and repair it. I even figured out how to make modifications to the motherboard.
It had 64k of memory which was an astounding amount at the time. A lot of people had 4k to 16k.
I worked in languages like Basic, Fortran, and Pascal. I even did a little work with assembly language when speed was important.
This is when I learned about hexadecimal numbers.