I think it depends on where you were. I was in Minnesota and we had these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC We had Lo

I think it depends on where you were. I was in Minnesota and we had these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC We had LogoWriter in elementary school. We were programming at a very young age without really knowing that's what we were doing. (We also had this typing software with monsters or something that was easily gamed; it didn't check for errors. So you could type quickly, erase everything you typed, then type it correctly and you'd get something like 350 wpm.) (I moved to a new district between elementary and middle school.) In middle school I vaguely recall doing some kind of programming on commodore 64s. In high school we had a BASIC programming class and also an AP Computer Science class in which we learned a little bit about programming Pascal. Some students did an independent study to learn C, but failed miserably - probably had no real support. But honestly, I learned the most when I would stay overnight at my cousin's house and hack away at my uncle's computer (PC w/ I think MS-DOS) unsupervised. I broke it a few times, but was always terrified enough to figure out how to fix it. He had a few manuals, and I went through trying all kinds of commands. Figuring out why UNDELETE never worked taught me a bit about how hard disks were used by the OS, stuff like that.