If you want to feel happier about that time in my life a bit in the pre-Tony-has-Internet era, I basically learned to program using a Vic-20 and books available from the public library that was just down the block from my house. Once we had a slightly better computer (a Compaq XT-clone) and I was getting bored of BASIC, a guy at a local computer shop sold me a copy of Power C with the absolutely fabulous book that came with it for $20:
http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm. From there, we had an amazing upgrade from the XT to a Pentium 133 and dial-up Internet, which got me into Slackware Linux, downloaded one 1.44MB chunk at a time until I had enough of the A- and N-series packages to bootstrap PPP and download the X-series of packages to get a GUI and a browser.
Hardware-wise I feel like there's a lot more very affordable kit that kids like me could use to get their feet wet, but software- and learning-material-wise, I'm not sure if there's anything quite as good as some of that old stuff. These books, for instance, were abundant at the public library and really got me going: https://usborne.com/ca_en/books/computer-and-coding-books