[shric]

This might be particular to the age of the OP. I just turned 47, so I'm one year older than him.

In 1981 (so when I was 5) my parents bought me a Sinclair ZX81. It came with literally nothing except a BASIC interpreter in ROM and a manual. The manual explained how to program in BASIC and had a bunch of listings that you could type in for rudimentary games etc. So when we got our computers at that era all we could do is "program". Was it hardcore software engineering? No. Did we understand it at that age at any meaningful level? No. But it was programming, of a sort.

In the next few years I experimented more and more until I started to grasp higher level concepts.

My point is there was a particular window in time that met these criteria:

- affordable personal computer.

- no (or very few) games available, you had no choice but to write programs.

This was around 1980-1983. Before 1980 most people didn't have access to personal computers. After 1983 you could get computers that could easily read games from tapes or floppies.

So I guess there were a bunch of 5 year olds in that era who were almost forced to program.

[briHass]

As someone 4 years younger, I'd argue the 'good times' carried on until the early 90s, at least for a kid that didn't have any money to buy new games all the time. The games back then were all simple enough that a devoted kid with lots of free time would get bored/beat the game in a day or two, and then you have to find something else to do. Now, there are millions of free games on the internet, not counting pirate/emulation, and also plenty of other media content distractions.

I'd also say that era (88-92) was great for being able to pick up cheap used computers. Commodore 64s could be found at garage sales, and I was fortunate that my father would bring home old IBM PC XT/AT boxes from work that were destined for the dumpster.

[shric]

Agree, I did program on the Commodore 64 and later Amiga extensively and I too couldn't afford many games. However I'm not sure if I was the typical kid -- in the late eighties and nineties many of my friends had consoles and I had no interest in them because I couldn't program them.