[adamsb6]

Computer science wasn't ubiquitous in grade schools back in the aughts, and it still isn't. According to this "foundational computer science" is offered in only 53% of public high schools in the US: https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs

[tsumnia]

Yup, my high school's "CS" courses were: typing, Microsoft Office, and HTML. The only programming lesson I got was from doing one chapter of "Learn Visual Basic in 24 hours" that I bought. I didn't know what programming even meant until I went to college and CS was the degree for "computer people". Even then, I thought it was going to be about becoming a sysadmin, not a programmer.

[Izkata]

Even the ones that did have one may not have had a teacher who really knew the material. My highschool would recruit a math teacher and have them take the computer programming course the summer before our classes would begin. They were always happy to discover a couple students already knew enough material to help the other students.