I was also lucky that my "informatics" teacher took matters seriously and taught me how to program without a computer. Yep, we had programming class in school,

I was also lucky that my "informatics" teacher took matters seriously and taught me how to program without a computer. Yep, we had programming class in school, but school did not have any computers. So she taught what basics (variables, loops, control strucures, etc.) are on paper, using some pseudo-programming language. Later, when I finaly got access to the computers learning the first programming language (MSX Basic) was just a matter of learning the syntax.