It didn't matter. That machine was all mine. It came with a couple
of games cartridges and a BASIC cartridge. I wrote little programs
like a Dungeons & Dragons character generator and die-roller saving
them on my little cassette recorder. That thing was so slow. You
used regular audio cassettes and it would make all kinds of bonking
and booping noises as it LOADed or SAVEd your
creations.
The machine had 16K of memory and a very difficult to use membrane keyboard. It didn't take too long to replace that machine with the sleeker 64K 1200XL and eventually the top-of-the-line 128K 130XE. Getting a diskette drive was a revelation; it was so much faster than that clunky old cassette.
Compute! magazine was a critical resource with published source code for the machines of the day. There was also the Atari-only Antic magazine. Code was usually in Basic, but sometimes in assembly. For speed and size, you had to use assembly. I punched in thousands of lines of code, checking it with a little checksum program in the magazine. You learn a lot about computer programming just plucking in source code. A lot of the best programs were obtained this way - freeware from fellow enthusiasts. Games, enhancements to Atari DOS, the wonderful Speedscript word processor (which I would use and update today if I could find it!) and more could be had with only a little effort.
I immersed myself in computing. I bought a heat-transfer color printer, a dot-matrix later down the road. I bought a koala pad, trackball, games galore, and book after book filled with technical breakdowns of each and every register in my machines. I bought a cartridge with an Atari-only compiled language called Action! that was loosely based on C and Pascal. I wrote a couple of small games. I even wrote a fairly advanced drawing program from scratch. You drew with the joystick. I borrowed code from my books to save and load the proper picture formats. I mastered that machine.
But it was a little grey box with one red LED that connected to my phone line that would truly set my future course.