I myself got into game programming by moding Quake and StarCraft. I’d guess a ton of people who ended up as programmers did this. So I think you’re right almost

I myself got into game programming by moding Quake and StarCraft. I’d guess a ton of people who ended up as programmers did this. So I think you’re right almost no students did anything with computers, but I’d say easily 50% of people who could code at all tried to make games and often school computers were all we had. Thankfully the computers had unbelievably bad security so it wasn’t super hard to get stuff going :)