When I was growing up, my parents wanted me to be a normal kid. This means I was made to play outside a lot. A couple of my friends' parents were programmers,

When I was growing up, my parents wanted me to be a normal kid. This means I was made to play outside a lot. A couple of my friends' parents were programmers, so they had computers at home. They could write programs in BASIC and Pascal and make them do cool things. I wanted to do that too. I had a notebook where I would secretly write BASIC (it was terrible code, by the way). My school had computers, a whole 10 of them. They were 286s running DOS. When I would get a chance, I would plead with a teacher at my school to let me stay in the computer lab after hours and try out my code. I got my first computer at 14. Now, it wasn't my computer. I could have at most an hour a week on it. This was a rule that was strictly enforced. So I was still writing a lot of code on paper (usually hidden under my math notebook). So I was never encouraged to become a programmer, I was actively discouraged from doing that. But somehow even without access to a computer I wanted to code. At a certain point my parents just gave up trying to make me a lawyer or doctor. So there's a happy ending. Also, I'm sure I'm not the only one with this kind of story.