Computers of that era were very simple to use. I never had a Vic 20 , but in Britain "BBC" computers made by Acorn were popular, especially in schools.

If you wanted to start the computer up you pressed the button on the keyboard and it was booted and ready in under a second, ditto for switching it off (no hibernate/shutdown/suspend etc).

If you wanted to run a program , you put the floppy disk in the drive and typed "RUN" then pressed enter.

I literally learnt to use one at age 6 without much trouble, so did my school peers. Even our aged school teachers could operate them.

They were pretty much impossible to screw up since the entire OS was loaded onto a ROM chip so no viruses ,config files etc.

Even BASIC was very easy to use, the shell and the basic interpreter were the same thing. I don't think there were many people who didn't know how to do:

10 PRINT "SCHOOL SUXXX"

20 GOTO 10

They were also very extensible machines, you could add joysticks, mice, modems and it even had an analog output board you could plug into the back and control robots arduino style (we were doing this at age 8!)

The idea of being "computer literate" didn't really spring up until Windows 95 (or maybe 3.1) and people suddenly had to worry about C drives and "programs" etc.

I remember moving from programming text games in basic on my BBC into trying to understand OOP and Visual Basic for Windows and thinking "why does everything have to be so complicated?". To be honest I think if I hadn't had that taste of magic from the BBC I wouldn't have had the will to carry on learning to program.

Yup. I remember back when I was a kid, and I wanted to make the jump from writing console/text based games to using the full graphical power of the Mac. The transition was brutal, going from Basic with no pointers to MPW pascal, which used handles(1), not even pointers, was just impossible. It requires a deep understanding of how computers work which the Basic interpreter available with most 8-bit home computers carefully hid from the budding programmer.

1. Handles for those that don't know, were, to use the C idiom, double pointers eg char, or Window. The entire MacOS API was based around them, because it allowed the memory manager to compact memory without having to tell you - it would change the value of the pointer to the memory, but as you only had a pointer to the first pointer, you wouldn't even notice the change.

I remember studying Fortran in college in 1993 and deciding to write a program (using no dynamically allocated memory, because I think we were still studying Fortran 77) that would solve simultaneous linear equations with arbitrary numbers of variables.

The Microsoft Fortran compilers we were using on, I think, 386's, would allocate all memory at compile time and therefore the more memory requested, the larger the executable. I discovered that this lead to serious issues on the 5.25in disks and I was better off writing Basic on my C64 for that task.......

People are perfectly capable of learning all sorts of fancy computer stuff if they want to. Generally they don't want to. My mom taught me all sorts of stuff about DOS (if you have autoexec.bat, it will get run automatically on boot). She knew that because she had to know it. But now, she doesn't have to know it, she just wants to do something and has my dad fix it. So she barely knows how to use it.