It's not to say you couldn't get paid to do it in 1955. But if in 1955 you told someone at the hair salon or the bar that you were a "programmer", you would get funny looks ≈ 100% of the time.
Heck, the web was almost brand new when I was in elementary school, and there was only one teacher who decided to take the initiative and teach kids HTML. He wasn't even my normal teacher, and I think I kind of just got pulled into it for some reason. In any case, I carried those skills he taught me all the way into adulthood, and I'm a web developer today! If he didn't host that class, I might not have ever bothered learning about Web technology. Otherwise, it wasn't like computer skills were part of the curriculum beyond learning to type.