[JKCalhoun]

That's too bad. I am old enough that as a toddler I would have had to learn ALGOL to be coding from that age.

We were poor as well but my school was rich enough to have picked up Apple II's just as I was in the middle of moving though high school. So I at least got a taste of BASIC when I was sixteen or so. I took a gap-decade though and would be in my mid-twenties before I started coding for real (and then it was Pascal).

Perhaps we do need more stories like that though.

Aside: famously, that John Carmack guy also went to my high school — he was a few years younger than me. I'm not sure if he used the same machines I had learned BASIC on. I read though that he got in trouble trying to break in and steal computers from some school or another, perhaps when he was in junior high (middle school) though? Maybe he was hanging with the wrong crowd then.

[t-3]

I'm young enough that even in elementary school we had computers, but they only taught us typing and Microsoft Office. Even in high school the most advanced courses were using Dreamweaver to fill out templates and calling it web design. If I hadn't gone looking for "free software" because I wanted to play games, I probably wouldn't know anything at all about computers.

[bcrl]

I was lucky enough to get exposed to QuickBASIC and AmigaBASIC in the latter part of the 1980s which introduced me to much more structured programming than the old style line numbered based BASIC implementations. That was quite the step forward, and really helped when I started programming in C.