My dad showed me small demonstrations of programming on the Commodore 64 when I was in the third grade. I liked to make up silly rhymes. He showed me how to pri

My dad showed me small demonstrations of programming on the Commodore 64 when I was in the third grade. I liked to make up silly rhymes. He showed me how to print out the rhymes sentence-by-sentence with pauses in between for reading, with a little sound effect flourish as each one was printed. By the standards of the time, it appeared to have sound and motion; it engaged the senses, and that got my attention. The first non-trivial program that I remember writing, in fourth grade, did not have such flourishes. It was a program that implemented a Caesar cipher, so that I and my best friend could exchange encoded messages. Given the cumbersome effort of keying in the text and running the program, it was not much of a convenience over manually encoding/decoding the cipher scheme with pencil and paper :-)