I used to write small games in BASIC on paper and then go over to my friend's house and type them into his VIC-20 to play them (these things had an optional tape drive for saving programs but his parents were too cheap to pay for that). It really taught me to code carefully and get everything right the first time around. In the early '90s I visited India and saw software companies that had ten programmers and one PC and they were also coding with pencil and paper. I assumed that this meant Indian programmers were going to be fantastic once they each got their own computers, but I was wrong about this -- they're just as shitty as everybody else.