I can honestly say TI calculator programming was my first foray into programming as well (I'm 25 now). I remember meticulously typing in a BASIC clone of Pac-man and having it not work the first few times I typed it in (I think it would take me nearly an hour each try). I didn't really program much after I stopped using TI calculators a lot until someone showed me tryruby.org and I found it interesting. Now, two years later, I work full-time as a programmer and have decided this will be my career. Funny how those little side diversions when you were but a kid can come back in a big way.

But even you - a smart capable person who likes computers - didn't do so because you already had all the games you needed.

Those home computers? You load a game, or you start programming. Since loading a game often meant fiddling around with a tape cassette and cable, and a few minutes hoping it would load, it's easy to see why people decided to try to code themselves.

I know abstraction is a good thing. I know it's powerful and etc etc.

But there's something nice about being able to squirt data to an address, and know it's coming out the parallel port, and having a hokey resister-ladder DtoA converter hooked up to turn that data into music. Or to have a single instruction to draw a pixel.

23. I started when I got bored of the games on the computer my parents had at the time, and I started opening random programs and eventually ended up in the QB3.0 editor. After early attempts at using it as a word processor failed (it kept complaining about syntax errors when I moved the cursor off the line) I asked my dad, and he showed me how to do

  PRINT "Hello from the Computer"

And I worked my way up from there with the help system, and a lot of trial and error.

It helped that our parents limited us to 30min/day of playing games, but were okay with me spending more computer time programming (or playing my own games, though I rarely did that. Making them better was way more fun than actually playing them).

I don't remember how old I was at the time, but it was definitely I was using Windows 3.11 (it was installed, but you couldn't run any decent apps when all your RAM was used up by win). By the time we got a Win95 computer (which in fairness was probably in '98 or '99) I was pretty decent at BASIC.

I continued to play around with it 'til I started learning C++ in maybe 2003? Luckily prolonged exposure to BASIC doesn't seem to have done any lasting damage :)

This was my main introduction as well. (I'm 21.) I remember looking through the TI-84 manual and reading through the commands to see what I could do.