I was probably 13 or 14 years old and had no idea what I was doing, but I could resize the windows, add items to lists, change the color of Strings and place buttons and stuff like this.
So, _obviously_ I needed the Delphi 6 Enterprise edition which a friend had (pirated of course) and gave it to me on one of those really cheap CD-R with that distinctive plastic smell.
One of the first "real programs" we wrote was something to read sensor data via the parallel port. It was for a school project where a belt had to move and then stop, once the light barrier would sense something. We killed lots of parallel ports in doing that, because we just didn't knew how to do it.
Didn't really write anything more useful at that time, but it showed me that there's a world behind what we see and know as "programs". Maybe it laid some fundations in my brain, who knows.
Every time I see Delphi pop up I think I should probably have a look at it. But I'm a web monkey now. Lost for everything good, but I like to think back of the 14 year old me. Better times.