In the old days of tape drives (at best) hooked up to our TRS80s, Commodores, and the like. The only way to run programs in popular magazines at the time was to type them in. If you didn't have storage and wanted to try the program again, you typed it in again.
It was a pain, but certainly learned things (like how poor / slow a typist you might be).
This slow process allowed you time to see and think about what was going on.
I also did that but learned a great deal less than I could have. The already hard-to-read code of the machine's BASIC implementations (two-letter variable names, tops) was further mangled by being compressed to fit into the magazine, to say nothing of the programs that were basically just machine code written in hex.
I picked up a few ideas, but you didn't really get the sense of what the program was doing in most cases.
My school library used to have books full of games, text art, and programs written in BASIC that I used to type in line by line to our C64. I wish I could say I learned a lot about computer programming (I didn't) but the biggest thing I do remember was being thrilled at being able to make typed instructions turn into things happening on the screen.
These programs would get run only a handful of times, since I had no way (or it never occured to me) to save them for later use.
It was a pain, but certainly learned things (like how poor / slow a typist you might be).
This slow process allowed you time to see and think about what was going on.