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As a sophomore in high school (1971), I had the good fortune to take part in an NSF-sponsored seminar that taught BASIC and the elements of numerical analysis. Afterwards, not having computer access, I started up a notebook that I wrote BASIC programs in. I wish I still had it.

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About the same year, although I was 9 at the time. I discovered that there was no requirement to have an account to submit a job to the High Speed Job Stream in UofT’s Sanford Fleming building. You just typed your program up on punch cards, prepended the deck with a special card that instructed the system whether to use WATFOR, SNOBOL, or LISP (I did not try PL/I), and put it in the hopper behind everyone else’s job. Moments later, the line printer a few feet away would spew your output at high speed.

My math teacher in the 8th grade in 1971 made up a virtual machine with an assembly-like instruction set. He had us write programs and then 'execute' them by thinking about them as though we were the VM. Once we got the hang of that, we learned Fortran and got to send punched card jobs to a computer on the other side of town. Turnaround time was measured in days. It's been a wild ride since then.

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