I think that should be qualified. Computers weren't as ubiquitous back in the 70's as they are now, nor was learning material. The TRS-80 with monitor was released in 1977 for ~$600 - about $2200 in today's dollars. I only knew of several kids with home systems.

When I took Computer Math (my high school's programming class), we had to learn programming on a piece of cardboard! It was the CARDIAC, Cardboard Illustrative Aid To Computation - http://www.simnia.com/it/cardiac/cardiac.htm.

After we became adept as manually running programs on the cardboard, we transitioned to dialing into a mainframe. Nothing says fun like dialing a rotary phone over and over until you finally made a connection. And of course, mainframe time was limited, so our BASIC and FORTRAN programs had to be written out by hand before hand. The CLI was an unforgiving beast and disconnections were frequent.

Could people teach themselves to program in the 70's? Sure, but there's really no comparison to the learning opportunities available today, and I don't think it's right to disparage anyone who blogs about their learning experiences.