My first computer was a Commodore 64, basically the same as a VIC 20, except it has a whopping 64 KB of RAM instead of the VIC's 5 KB. Like Steve, I also took a stab at writing my own D&D game. At some point I started running out of RAM and found that seperating my text and dictionary on an external disk file was a better solution than coding it inside the program file. Without having access to any books or classes on programming, I learned the benefits of seperating data from code experientially through trial and error.